"In their own right"

My memory of the phrase's meaning is fuzzy.
'If he was the man running around murdering slightly skilled killers in their own right, Stone could not underestimate him."

I can to a certain extent make out the meaning from this particular context, but I'm rather hoping for a broader definition.

Um, that's funny.

I believe I can make up countless example-sentences to illustrate how "in one's own right" is used.

For instance:

_Lauren Bacall was not just the wife of Humphrey Bogart. She was a noted actress in her own right._

But coming up with a dictionary-style definition, damn, I can't. At least not effortlessly.

Here's an attempt:

If you are *something* in your own right, you are such thanks to your own talent or by virtue of important results you achieved on your own, by yourself.

With happy Yuletide wishes,

Achab

By the way, I was thinking about what I can infer at how easy it was for me to create a sentence off the top of my head while finding it hard to provide the definition of a phrase contained in that sentence.

A few years ago maybe I would have worried. Not today. No, I don't care much about this now.

Think about the word cat. Here's a definition of "cat" taken from a dictionary (I actually combined two dictionaries' entries with some retouch of mine):

_a small carnivorous feline mammal taxonomically known as Felis catus or Felis domesticus, usually having thick soft fur and being unable to roar, domesticated since early times as a catcher of rats and mice and as a pet and existing in several distinctive breeds and varieties_

Now, how many people can come up with that? Very few, I believe. But how many people know what cats are? Just about everybody, I think. You don't have to provide a dictionary-like definition to know what a cat is. You've seen cat since you were a child. You probably played with them sometimes. Maybe you even owned one.

Same goes with grammar. It's not important to know grammar rules. Having a firm intuitive grasp of what is grammatically correct and what is not, now, *that* is what counts!

As a follower of the Antimoon Method, I don't worry anymore about being unable to put into words the definition of a term as long as I have a strong feeling that I have grasped its meaning. In the same vein, I don't worry anymore about finding it hard to explain why in a certain sentence the present continuous sounds better than the present simple, or vice versa, as long as I'm certain that my "grammar intuition" is pointing out to me with accuracy the tense I should use.

In fact, the Antimoon Method does not prescribe Supermemo users to put definitions in the "Answer" field when they create electronic flashcards for words they want to remember. You can leave that field empty. The answer is simply your degree of understanding of those words.

Think about the concept of meaning contrasted with that of (dictionary-style) definition.

The dictionary's definition of a word is a sort of "after-the-fact explanation", while the meaning is "the real thing".

It's like the difference between hearing the account of an incident and having witnessed that incident. If I want to be sure of what really happened, I go and ask the people that were there rather than the people that picked up second-hand accounts.

I go for the real thing.

With iterated happy Yuletide wishes,

Achab

In this case, I think that part of the reason why it is so hard to come up with a definition is that it's really one of those phrases that doesn't really convey any new information; it simply emphasizes and drwas attention to information conveyed elsewhere.

For instance, in the first example: "'If he was the man running around murdering slightly skilled killers in their own right, Stone could not underestimate him."

What this is saying is that killers, in general, tend to be dangerous. So if someone regularly murders killers, they are dealing with dangerous people, so they have to be even more dangerous. So if Stone is dealing with someone who murders killers, Stone has to be extra careful. So the phrase "in their own right" basically means "this is important information, and there are clear implications that can be drawn from this information, but rather than go over what they are, I'm simply doing to draw your attention to this fact and trust that you'll be able to figure this out yourself."

And if I may correct you, Achab:

<In fact, the Antimoon Method does not prescribe Supermemo users to put definitions in the "Answer" field when they create electronic flashcards for words they want to remember.>

I believe that it should be

<In fact, the Antimoon Method does not prescribe that Supermemo users put definitions in the "Answer" field when they create electronic flashcards for words they want to remember. >

or, depending on what meaning you want to convey,

<In fact, the Antimoon Method prescribes that Supermemo users not put definitions in the "Answer" field when they create electronic flashcards for words they want to remember. >

Another Guest,

I don't really mind being corrected by you, and by the way, I think there's a further bit in my rant above that should be straighten out.

The "what I can infer at how..." fragment would certainly be better off as "what I can infer from how...", I believe.

With happy Yuletide wishes,

Achab

Originally, and in some contexts still, "in his/her own right" was used to distinguish a title acquired by inheritance rather than marriage. In England, a woman who inherited the title of baroness from her father would be "a baroness in her own right", as opposed to the much more common case of a woman called "Baroness" because her husband was a baron, called "a baroness in right of her husband". (More common, because a woman could inherit a baronial title only if she were the only child; nowadays, lots of women get life peerages and are baronesses in their own right.)

By extension, "in his/her own right" is now simply a form of emphasis, and even extends to a title like "killer", even though no one has the right to be a killer (in context, a murderer).