Question Is it still an assassination if it fails?

I thought murder is for us common blokes and assassinate is for those more important blokes... still deader than the duck's toenail.

Either way, it is still considered assassination if failed, just that it is now a attempted/ failed assassination, just because you fail does not mean you did not 1. Have the mentality to do 2. Have done the deed.

 

Assassins are murderers, murderers aren't Assassins. Assassins are murderers who surprise attack/kill an important person for religious or political reasons.

 

Looking at the job tree of murderer... so branching downwards for assassin... any name for the other job that offs "non-essential personnels"? Sweepers?

 

Wow this was the perfect answer, the fact that it used to be used that way somehow gives me peace of mind when reading it used that way, and the fact that it isn't used that way now makes me feel like I wasn't an idiot for thinking they were wrong.

Best of both worlds

 

That's not quite right. On the face of things, the word "assassin" looks like the words "killer" or "murderer" in that you'd have to succeed in the actual task of killing in order to qualify. If a team of people planned together to kill a regular person, only the one who did the deed is the murderer; all the rest are just accomplices to the killing. But what do we call the rest of the team if the target was important enough to count as an assassination? We don't call them accomplices to an assassination; we just call them all assassins.

For example, when we talk about a famous event like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Princip was the one who killed him, but the rest of his team are also considered assassins. From this we can conclude that "assassin" is more akin to "burglar" in that a person would qualify as long as they participated in an assassination with the intent of killing the victim.

 

I doubt an assassin could successfully take out the following person: an SJW and nagging Flat-Earth mother-in-law who lives in a van down by the river with Seymour, a silent film-watching and Chris Walken-sounding vegan cannibal zombie moose.

 

English itself is quite fuzzy, no point overthinking it unless people totally don't get what you mean.

For example, is the maid an assassin? Yes. Was that an assassination? Yes even if it failed. Was it a successful assassination? No, it was an "attempted assassination". lol. Yes, it's a mess, especially since there is a clash between intent and results. "Is it an assassination?" is a yes because the intention was there to kill. And no because the results were bad so it was an "attempted assassination". So you can see that just by looking at it from a different standpoint (intent vs results), the language becomes a mess with yes and no both being "correct" answers.