By committee?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

By committee?

Reader question:

Please explain “by committee” in this sentence: His temperament, he thinks, is better suited to theatre, where you don’t have to do everything by committee.

My comments:

Theatre belongs to the realm of arts, where individual talent is more important than one’s ability to work within a team, i.e. be agreeable and cooperative.

Or sometimes so. Or it should be thus to a great degree, or at least to some degree.

At any rate, that’s how “he” thinks, believing his temperament is more suited to theatre, where he has a better opportunity to allow his individual talent to shine.

A better opportunity than, say, if he has to work on a committee or council in government.

A committee, you see, is a group of experts or so called ones formed specifically to look into a matter and make a decision upon it. Usually, the said decision is made collectively rather than by any individual, say, by the committee chairman him or herself.

The Olympic Committee, for example, is entrusted with the job, among others, to name the venue of the next Olympic Games. They do so by committee, after asking committee members to go to competing cities for inspection and have their say and, finally, cast their vote.

In other words, the decision is not made by the chairman of the committee and him (or her, hopefully a her some day in future) alone. In other words and in contrast, a committee is not a dictatorship, whereby all decisions are made by one person and by him (or her, for there’ve been female dictators throughout history for sure) alone.