vindictive protectiveness
vindictive protectiveness noun: a tendency to protect people from perceived injury (such as criticism) by responding with hostility to whoever is held responsible for causing said injury.
Noun
vindictive protectiveness (uncountable)
- A tendency to protect people from perceived injury (such as criticism) by responding with hostility to whoever is held responsible for causing said injury.
- Ready for another term? Try vindictive protectiveness. In essence, in the name of emotional wellbeing, students can eliminate anything they do not want to think about, read about, or be challenged about. And penalize those who would expose them to it. How? In the name of "offense".2017, James Emery White, Meet Generation Z
- “Vindictive protectiveness,” they write, “prepares [students] poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. […]2017, Erwin Chemerinsky, Howard Gillman, Free Speech on Campus
Origin of vindictive protectiveness
Coined by researchers Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Questions about vindictive protectiveness
- What does vindictive protectiveness mean?
- Vindictive protectiveness means a tendency to protect people from perceived injury (such as criticism) by responding with hostility to whoever is held responsible for causing said injury.
- What part of speech is vindictive protectiveness?
- Vindictive protectiveness is a noun.
Words near vindictive protectiveness in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: vindictive protectiveness (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “vindictive protectiveness.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/vindictive_protectiveness. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.