All 3 Uses of
expedient
in
War and Peace
- And so, as they had the power and wish to inculpate him, this expedient of an inquiry and trial seemed unnecessary.†
Chpt 12expedient = convenient, speedy, or practical; or an action that is speedy or practical
- If it were an example taken from the history of China, we might say that it was not an historic phenomenon (which is the historians' usual expedient when anything does not fit their standards); if the matter concerned some brief conflict in which only a small number of troops took part, we might treat it as an exception; but this event occurred before our fathers' eyes, and for them it was a question of the life or death of their fatherland, and it happened in the greatest of all known wars.†
Chpt 14
- it is easy to see that there are other ways of diffusing civilization more expedient than by the destruction of wealth and of human lives.
Chpt 15 *expedient = speedy or practical; or an action that is speedy or practical
Definitions:
-
(1)
(expedient) convenient and practical, but sometimes not the best or most moral choice
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Much more rarely, expedient can also imply that an action was taken for reasons of self-interest rather than for moral reasons.
In the sense of speedy, the word is less commonly used today than in the past; though it may still be used as in "an expedient end" or "an expedient amount of time," or "We are depending upon your expediency."