In the days when the threat from China seemed imminent, military service was viewed by Taiwanese as an honourable duty.
Having babies became, according to the new leader Joseph Stalin, "a great and honourable duty... not a private affair but one of great social importance".
The greater part of Lithuanian donors sees this act as help for the ill (50%); a small part looks upon it as a honourable duty (20%).
This time, in drama, it was Happy Valley, Line of Duty, The Honourable Woman and Marvellous.
But The Honourable Woman, Line of Duty, The Fall, Happy Valley,The Missing and more show a BBC close to the top of drama's premier league.
On these shores, the nation was gripped by a succession of scintillating, abandon-all-hope thrillers (Happy Valley, Line of Duty, The Honourable Woman and The Missing), while the most hyped debut show in the US, HBO's True Detective, was almost self-parodic in its baroque grisliness.
If film is a director's medium, TV these days is a producer-writer-director's medium, the American concept of the "showrunner" – Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men – spreading here through British double-hyphenates such as Jed Mercurio and Hugo Blick, who fill all three roles on Line of Duty and The Honourable Woman respectively.
My own feeling, remembering how charming Pakistani officers, like their Indian equivalents, can be, is that she may have been a bit too ready to accept the honourable, just-trying-to-do-our-duty image that those officers naturally prefer to convey, and that she may also be too convinced that the received wisdom needs to be entirely overturned.
Stephenson has been credited with overseeing a revival of drama on BBC2 with hits including The Fall, Line of Duty, Peaky Blinders and The Honourable Woman.
Honour systems only work with honourable people.
I can't think of many popular TV dramas this year, with the honourable exception of Jed Mercurio's gratifyingly lively Line of Duty, that weren't focused on the Key Stage 3 set.
