ABSTRACT
The word compassion was, perhaps inevitably, picked up and bandied about in the wake of the court's decision. Compassion is a feeling that confers upon the person feeling it a duty to do whatever is necessary to ameliorate distress. The work of compassionate courts never ends, the chapter concluded with heavy irony. Rodriguez notes that 'The tour is played for charity'. It is supposed to be a compassionate tour, but when it came to compassion everyone went against him. The 'compassion fatigue' a term coined, presumably, on the model of 'metal fatigue' or, more likely, 'combat fatigue'. It entered modern dictionaries, like 'Chambers', and became an example of late-twentieth-century language innovation, with its typical compression from headline practice. The problem with compassion begins with its etymology and history. The phrase 'the Compassionate One', indeed, invokes one of the most familiar uses of this notion, the idea that compassion is one of the attributes of God.
