the.com/impunity
The art of doing wrong and watching nothing happen to you.
means Freedom from punishment, consequence, or accountability for an action, even a wrongful one.
from From Latin impunitas, built from in- ('not') plus poena ('punishment, penalty') — the same poena that gives us 'pain' and 'penalty.' So literally, 'without-paining.' The word walked into English in the 1500s already carrying that bare, clerical sense: the absence of the pain that should have come.
- root meaning
- Latin for without punishment, literally
- legal cousin
- related to immunity, but morally worse
- common company
- almost always follows the word acts with
- power's favorite word
- describes what the powerful assume they have