The Meaning of Entertainment?

The etymology of the word entertainment comes from Latin and means to hold the attention or interest. I hope these short blogposts hold your attention and enable me to teach some helpful truths. And I hope that you personally benefit from them. All entertainment aims to hold your attention, but not all entertainment has the same end goal with your attention. Facebook and other social media platforms want to hold your attention so that they can sell your time to advertisers.

The Saturday morning cartoons I watched as a kid were intended to amuse children and therefore make their parents happy to own a television and tune into their station to sell advertising and stay in business. The words entertain and amuse are often used interchangeably but are very different.

The word amuse comes from the root word muse which means to think deeply about something. When you put the letter a in front of the word muse it makes it a negative and literally means “to not think.”

I recommend Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death if you have never read it before. It was first published in 1985 but its relevance has stood the test of time.