Word of the Day: “Sycophant”

Today, I learned a new word and that is “sycophant“. Unfortunately, someone at Entrecard’s forum labeled me as such for having a positive view on the current “drop not showing” issue.

You know, Entrecard’s system was again having some difficulties displaying drop counts in real-time. Some members feared that they might not get credits for the drops they already did and since I was dropping cards when the issue surfaced I tried to appease them by informing them that all their drops were recorded. I based my information on my own personal observation while dropping when the problem started.

You see, I also noticed that my drops weren’t being counted but I didn’t panicked and kept on dropping anyway. I did stop for a few minutes (even more) to let the system catch up and when I refreshed my Dashboard, my drop count jumped from 0 to 157. I continued dropping and refreshing my dashboard from time to time to see if my drop count gets updated. Again, it wasn’t updating but this time I did not stop, I continued what I was doing and after a few minutes of dropping, my drop count jumped again from 157 to 213. In the end, my final drop count was 297 which is just short of 3 drops to make it 300.

After that, I logged in to my other account for my other blog and repeated the dropping process and again the drop count was not updating in real-time but in the end I finished with 288 drops. Based on what I’ve observed, drop counts still get recorded even if the dashboard drop count does not update in real-time and that it will reflect the correct drop count a few minutes later (even more) and this was the point I was trying to convey. But unfortunately, some people don’t seem to like it and viewed it as just kissing ass.

Anyway, the word “sycophant” was new to me so I did some search for its definition. The definitions I got were from searching Google using the keywords define:sycophant where:

• a servile flatterer
• person who tries to please someone in order to gain a personal advantage
• Sycophant (Gr. συκοφάντης), in ancient Greece was the counterpart of the Roman delator, a public informer.

I’m not so sure I understand the third definition but looking at the first two it kinda doesn’t mean good at all. For one, I wasn’t flattering anyone and two, what personal advantage would I gain from it anyway.

Is it wrong to share your own observations regarding a particular situation so that other people won’t panic? It is sad that there are people who tries really hard to find dirt or anything negative from what other people are doing.

I guess the phrase, “if you wish to keep being a sycophant, I won’t stop you, either” is the correct response to “if you wish to stop dropping in fear of losing credits then I won’t stop you”. Hmmm, I don’t see any labeling words in it though… Oh well, I did learn a new word and I guess I should be thankful for that.