Merit is a quality that we seek to achieve and have acknowledged. But what is it? To be meritorious is to be deserving of praise. It has been defined as the opinion one man entertains of another. Demerit on the other hand, most of us, seek to avoid. It being a path to infamy. The famous, in a classic and worthy context, are those with merit, or, more accurately, they deserve their fame. That is, that which made them famous has merit and is deserving of praise. A blog entry by Lincoln Caylor on the Huffington Post's The Blog.