The New Moral Language
Dr. Elliott Malamet
Jerusalem on a hot July day. I am lying flat on a training table and my physiotherapist—let’s call her K.-- is trying to coax life into my protesting right knee weakened as it is by old injuries: torn menisci, sprained ligaments and arthritic deterioration. She generally does a wonderful job, but believes she needs to distract me from my pain as she works. So she will breezily mention events of the day, and on this occasion, she refers to the current US president--who is on a two day visit to Israel--as an object of ire for many Israelis.
When I ask K. why she believes that to be true, she alludes to the traffic snarls that Mr. Biden’s visit is causing. I sigh, and say, well yes, but that is the case whenever a US president visits, and I mention the traffic situation was identical when Mr. Trump came to Jerusalem in 2017.
K. leans over slightly and says, confidently, “but we liked Trump, right?” When I indicated that perhaps I was not as enamoured of the former president as she seemed to be, K. said, “oh, because you think he’s uncouth?”
Afterwards, I found myself mulling over the description of Mr. Trump, at his worst, as merely “uncouth”, and it got me to thinking about the language of the ethical universe, both on the right and the left, that we now inhabit.
My feeling is, that with the possible exception of dogs, what is truly a person’s best friend is the dictionary, that beacon of clarity and arbiter of words. When I got home that day, I researched “uncouth,” and found this, courtesy of Professor Merriam-Webster:
“Uncouth comes from Old English cūth, meaning `familiar’ or `known,’ prefixed by un-, giving the meaning `unfamiliar.’ How did a word that meant `unfamiliar’ come to mean `outlandish, rugged, or rude’? Some examples from literature illustrate that the transition happened quite naturally.
In Captain Singleton, Daniel Defoe refers to `a strange noise more uncouth than any they had ever heard.’ In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Orlando tells Adam, `If this uncouth forest yield anything savage, I will either be food for it or bring it for food to thee.’ And in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane `fears to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him!’ So, that which is unfamiliar is often perceived as strange, wild, or unpleasant. Meanings such as outlandish," "rugged," or "rude" naturally follow.”
And in strange way, I think that perfectly represented K.’s mindset, that objections to the former president lay in simply not being used to someone speaking his mind with such “refreshing honesty” and yes, occasionally veering off into the updated definition of “uncouth.”
It feels like there is a new moral language, or lack of one, that has emerged in the past few decades, in which the art of the euphemism is in high demand. Prior to being sentenced to a 23 year prison term for rape and sexual assault, the former film producer Harvey Weinstein issued this “apology” for his decades of predation: "I appreciate the way I've behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain and I sincerely apologize for it…I so respect all women and regret what happened."
This penchant towards absurd understatement and mendacity, reveals at its core just how certain actions are now reinterpreted, especially if one is wealthy or powerful or can hire PR firms. And so we refuse to call out crimes for what they are, instead reaching for coded language such as 'inappropriate behavior' and 'regrettable incident”, in place of “that person committed acts of unspeakable evil.” It’s as though violent racism is just a social faux pas, and rape a bit of horseplay gone overboard, a mere breach of etiquette.
The online site “the grammarist” reminds us that “the term to call a spade a spade has its roots in Ancient Greece, in a phrase found in Plutarch’s Apophthegmata Laconic: `to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.’ Later, in the mid-1500s, the Dutch scholar Erasmus collected various Greek works and translated them into Latin, at which time he interpreted the aphorism as `to call a spade a spade.’, meaning to speak the unvarnished truth, to speak plainly and without embellishment and without softening the hard realities of that truth. To complicate matters, the word spade came into use in the United States during the 1920s as a pejorative term for African-Americans. [Thus] ` to call a spade a spade’ has sometimes been perceived as a racist phrase, even though its roots reach back to antiquity.”
No one living in an age of terrorism can fail to perceive that identical acts receive different moral approbations depending on the situation. The difficulty in defining and accurately employing charged words that carry moral connotations can be seen in journalists’ own struggles to delineate why they use certain words and in what context, and the criteria used in making such decisions is not entirely clear, even after studious explanation.
Clark Hoyt of The New York Times gave lucid expression to this linguistic minefield shortly after the horrific carnage in Mumbai, India in November 2008: “When 10 young men in an inflatable lifeboat came ashore in Mumbai last month and went on a rampage with machine guns and grenades, taking hostages, setting fires and murdering men, women and children, they were initially described in The Times by many labels. They were `militants,’ `gunmen,’ `attackers’ and `assailants’. Their actions, which left bodies strewn in the city’s largest train station, five-star hotels, a Jewish center, a cafe and a hospital—were described as `co-ordinated terrorist attacks.’ But the men themselves were not called terrorists.” As Hoyt wisely concludes: “What you call someone matters. If he is a terrorist, he is an enemy of all civilized people, and his cause is less worthy of consideration.”
Language tells us who we are and what we really think; it illuminates our finest moments and betrays our darkest impulses. In Hebrew, the word dvarim means both “words” and also “things”. This attests to a core principle of Jewish ethics; words are not simply pieces of sound, but they have real heft and substance. Every time a word is understood differently, its impact is far reaching for those people who take words seriously. As the great short story writer Raymond Carver noted about the craft of writing, though it is often true about life itself: “That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”