200. "Self-appointed"

"Self-appointed" is a put-down shot that wounds a lot of people, though it misses about 80% of the time.  Here's how to tell if you've actually been hit.

Say you're Mark Twain, saying some bad things about a beloved poem.  One of the poet's admirers calls you "a self-appointed literary critic."  You ask him, "Are literary critics appointed by somebody else?"  He has to answer, "No."  There is no official roster of those entitled to criticize poems.  Everybody's a literary critic.

So, for anybody who's not expected to be other-appointed, from Twitter scolds to serenity gurus, "self-appointed" is a clear miss.

On the other hand if you're an NGO busybody making unapproved peace gestures to a foreign government and the Secretary of State calls you "self-appointed" you've been hit dead center.  Only the SOS appoints government emissaries.

There are, of course, intermediate cases, where you lose some cloth, or get knicked, or even take one in a limb.  If you are Fidel Castro and get called by Henry Kissinger the "self-appointed leader of the [world] revolutionary struggle" (Memoirs III, 785) you'll probably have to bleed some.  Other third-world Marxists might be prompted to ask who appointed you.  But still, there's no official list. 

Requiring a list over-tightens the concept, which, loosened, is still useful.  Kissinger was uncomfortable with the word, as he showed in his next sentence, justifying it ("[Castro] was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power") but he nevertheless used it.  Castro's self-appointment might well have been just a recognition of a fact — but still, Haile Mengistu over there in Ethiopia, and Josip Tito over there in Jugoslavia, nobody elected him, nobody put him ahead of you.  It's a bullet that will get some attention.