The Oxford Dictionary defines to abdicate as “fail to fulfill or undertake (a responsibility or duty)”, which renders me wondering what does fulfill a responsibility mean.
I understand it (abdicate) this way: for instance, you have finished a course “How to repair TV sets” and every time your TV set breaks, you hire somebody else to repair it. In other words, there is a situation when you are supposed to do something, but you don’t do it, for some reason — you abdicate your responsibility.
Answer
As @oerkelens discusses, “abdicate” when used literally means to give up an office. And again as @oerkelens said, it is generally used only for lifetime offices like king or pope.
When people say “abdicate his responsibilities” they mean that a person has failed to perform some duty that he should have performed. Repairing TVs would probably not be an example of this, as whether someone took a class in TV repair or not, he is probably not seen has having any duty or responsibility to repair TVs.
A more likely use would be, for example, to say that a man who abandoned his family to run off with a younger woman had “abdicated his responsibilities as a husband and father”. Or that the owner of a company who treated his employees badly to make a fast buck for himself “abdicated his responsibilities to his employees”. That sort of thing.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Graduate , Answer Author : Jay
