Then my wife stopped to think that, to the contrary, this was a genuine compliment from someone who’s experienced the same dispiriting ordeal. This wasn’t some busybody in the check-out line. This was honest testimony from a fair witness. And it gave my wife a good feeling.
The original derivation of hero in ancient Greece means protector or defender, like Hercules or Achilles. But English is a rubbery language, so we’ve stretched it to mean damn near anything you want, not unlike “awesome,” “amazing,” and “cool.” “Boy, that was an awesome ham sandwich!” That doesn’t mean these words are devoid of meaning. The bombing of the Twin Towers was clearly amazing. The kid who subdued the mass killer at the Chinese dance hall in Los Angeles was clearly heroic. But most uses are not so clear-cut. You have to consider both the context and the effect.
To bend a really inane movie cliché, heroic is what heroic does. In a sincere comment, as opposed to a word as glibly thrown off as “thank you for your service,” the word is a slight overstatement of “I admire your spirit,” or “You have a great attitude,” or “You’re tough.” If you are a paralytic out there, has anyone ever called you “tough”? How did it make you feel? If your level of self-regard is low, you probably think that is absolute BS, even coming from a person you like and respect. You don’t imagine yourself as tough. But if you have gone through all the hoops that your average paralytic has gone through -- and I, and probably you, know people who’ve been at it for fifty-plus years -- you’re tougher than you think.