The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (32 page)

Bennett defined the phrase to a pro-Israel crowd in Washington as “seeing things for what they truly are. It requires the understanding of distinctions … between a democracy fighting for its survival and its opponents fighting to push that democracy into the sea…. It means the time for
moral equivocation
and
moral equivalence
should be over.”

Just as Krauthammer used
moral obtuseness
as the direct opposite of today’s phrase under study, Bennett used
moral equivalence
scornfully, dismissing the term as an obfuscator of clarity. This phrase originated in William James’s 1906 speech about the need to find what he titled “The
Moral Equivalent
of War.” His point was that mankind needed a new outlet for combat, and he suggested an “equivalent discipline”—conscription of men into universal nonmilitary service to “coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing”—to “get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier and soberer ideas.” James’s purpose, as he wrote to H. G. Wells that year, was to cure “the
moral flabbiness
born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word
success
—is our national disease.”

Since then, James’s idealistic phrase has pejorated to mean “with no distinction between right and wrong, between the unpleasant and the horrific or between aggressor and victim,” and as such has become a favorite whipping-phrase of the political right.

I checked with William F. Buckley, who helped popularize the current sense of the phrase, and the inventor of modern conservatism reports: “
Moral equivalence
is a handy imposture by which behavior and misbehavior are equated. Some years ago I made the point after an ‘antiwar’ demonstration by the American left. The demonstrators were arguing that Ronald Reagan’s defense budget was the equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s. I said that that was like saying that the man who pushed old ladies out of the way of an oncoming bus is like the man who pushes old ladies into the way of an oncoming bus. Both push old ladies around.”

Then there is
moral relativism
. Its advocates describe it as a view that moral standards are grounded in social custom, varying from culture to culture, while its critics call it loosey-goosey moralism incapable of deciding that such institutions as slavery are wrong.

A
moral certainty
has nothing to do with morality; it means “high probability.” To use it in a sentence: The continued clash between
moral clarity
and its antonyms
—moral relativity
and
moral equivalency
—is a
moral certainty
.

We certainly enjoyed your piece on equivalence and relativeness. The subject can certainly stand more clarity and you did it proud with all the references to the clarity and mud of Lieberman, Kagan, Bush, Krauthammer,
Clinton and William James.

But we do wonder whether you clarified or muddied the waters with your
use of an unknown form of “pejorative”—
pejorated.
Since Merriam Webster does not provide any verbal form of
pejorative
—or are you now manufacturing for us a new verbal form to demoralize the right/wrong distinction we conservatives demand? Maybe you have to get Bill Buckley’s acquiescence before we start pejorating?
^*

Ben and Doris Haskel

Chevy Chase, Maryland

McCain the Antonymist.
Who wins the language maven’s award for the most effective use of semi-antonymy in the primary campaign to date? Push the envelope, please.

The winner is Senator John McCain, for an apparently offhand statement made aboard his campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, rolling through South Carolina. According to Edward Walsh of the
Washington Post,
McCain said that among Republicans, he is “not trying to appeal to the
disaffected
. I’m trying to appeal to the
disenchanted
.”

What’s the difference? Plenty.

Disaffected
means “ill disposed, unfriendly, inimical.” The core of the word is
affect,
same as in
affection;
the usual sense is “to lose affection for.”

A more extreme sense, used more in law and politics, is “estranged; alienated; resentful; disloyal.” Judge Learned Hand, speaking to educators in 1952, deplored an atmosphere “where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of
disaffection
.” At a time when charges of Communism were being made, that word was carefully chosen to denote a state just one step short of “disloyalty.”

Disenchanted,
though not the opposite, is markedly different. It evokes the ancient breaking of a magical spell, and is a calibration stronger than “disillusioned.” In its verb form, to
disenchant
means “to free from an often false belief.”

Thus, McCain rejected any characterization of those Republicans to whom he was appealing as “unfriendly” or “disloyal” to the GOP; on the contrary, he saw these potential supporters as people disillusioned with the current leadership—let down by political dealing—but whom he could bring back into the fold, their faith restored. A key meaning of
disenchant
is “to restore to reality.”

This careful contradistinction of
disaffected
and
disenchanted
could not have been conceived by McCain off the cuff. I suspect a skillful speech-writer at work and hereby put my dibs on the first interview if he or she makes it to the White House.

There’s a related word for that mystery ghost to think about:
disenthrall
. That poetic verb has a more active and positive connotation than
disenchant
and has historic resonance; it was last used in politics with great effect by Abraham Lincoln: “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must
disenthrall
ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

What you say about the meaning of
enchanted
is etymologically true, but the element of magic spell and illusion that you stress has pretty well sunk out of sight in common use of the term. When one is enchanted one is not deceived. An enchanting person, landscape, work of art radiates true delight. On being introduced to someone in France, one says “Enchanté,” which implies no witchcraft on the other’s part; it means “delighted.”

The question is whether
disenchanted
does imply having been fooled. In some cases it probably does, but it also suggests mere weariness or boredom
with the once pleasurable object—or more mature tastes. Besides, the object itself may have changed: a friend behaves badly and one is disenchanted. But that does not mean that the previous enchantment was not based on genuine qualities of mind and heart.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

The words
enthrall
and
disenthrall
have metamorphosed since Lincoln’s time. When one now says, “I am enthralled,” upon first look at the Acropolis or during a new performance by Alvin Ailey, the meaning is what? Awestruck? Overcome with admiration? The first entry in my dictionary is “captivated; charmed.” To be enthralled these days is a good thing.

In antebellum,
enthralled
meant “enslaved.” Indeed, a thrall was a person in bondage to another. Lincoln’s use of
disenthrall
was dual. Here is a more complete look at the quote:

Not only did the president refer to abolition of slavery, but also to the liberation of American social and political thought.
Disenthrall
was a perfect choice of words.

A word with similar changes is
captivate.
If you are willing to have a new department for anachronisms, why not one for metamorphisms?
Fabulous
and
fantastic
and
terrific
are all expressions now of satisfaction. Nothing like their original meanings. And my favorite,
hysterical
, used so loosely today as the harmless equivalent of
hilarious.

T. J. Harvey

Huntington Station, New York

Movable Modifier.
Word mavens get a linguistic thrill when a skillful politician manipulates the language with great deftness and an alert reporter catches him at it.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, maneuvering his way through the sticky wicket of the Middle East, wanted to stress the need to maintain an international coalition, including Arab states, when talking to Israel’s Ariel Sharon—while getting an antiterrorism message across to the Palestinians’ Yasir Arafat.

Accordingly, he spoke in Jerusalem to Sharon of an “international coalition against terrorism in all its forms” and later the same day, with Arafat in Gaza, spoke of “a coalition against international terrorism.” He switched the placement of the adjective
international
from modifying
coalition
(acceptable to the Israelis) to modifying
terrorism
(acceptable to the Palestinians).

“It is a distinction with a difference here,” wrote the
New York Times’
Jerusalem bureau chief, James Bennet. “Mr. Sharon and other Israeli officials like to identify their efforts against Palestinians with the American attack on the Taliban,” he noted, “and they reject as hair-splitting any distinctions between ‘international’ terrorism and Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Palestinian officials, of course, prefer not to be lumped in with the Taliban.”

Thus, merely by moving his modifier, Blair pleased both camps. To Israelis, his
international
modifying
coalition
included them in, while to Palestinians, his
international
modifying
terrorism
was taken as differentiating their local warfare from the global terrorism of Al Qaeda. Subtle move by the politician, intended not to be noticed; good catch by the reporter.

Mujahedeen
. An Arabic noun that has been bandied about on the front pages in recent years has a meaning and a spelling that often wanders. Who are the
mujahedeen
?

First use I can find in English: “When the question of disbanding the
mujahidin
or ‘warriors of the Holy War’ arose,” noted the
Encyclopædia Britannica
in 1922 in an article about Persia (now Iran), “these soldiers of fortune, for the most part, assumed a menacing attitude and threatened to mutiny unless their exorbitant demands for pay were granted.” Fifty years later, greeting President Nixon on a visit to Tehran, the shah of Iran dismissed the noise of demonstrators as “just the shouting of the
mujahadin
”; guided by Muslim clerics, they deposed the shah in 1979.

A
mujahid
is a fundamentalist Muslim fighting what he considers to be a
jihad,
or “holy war,” literally “struggle.” Why is a
jahid
fighting a
jihad?
The reason the vowels are transposed is based upon what is called, in Semitic languages, the tri-consonantal root. According to Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “You take three consonants”—like the
j, h
and
d
—“and play with them. It’s like a Latin declension, but with a vengeance.”

By the 1950s, the word was used mainly as a collective plural,
mujahedeen,
applied to guerrilla fighters and later to terrorists throughout the Middle East. “To the east of Kabul,” wrote the
Observer
in 1979, “the rebel
mujahideen,
or ‘holy warriors,’ effectively control all but the provincial capital and the major towns.”

Nationality is not part of the definition. There were Iraqi
mujahids
fighting in Syria against the Damascus regime, and Iranians who call themselves by that name who shouldered aside the secular Marxist fedayeen; later ejected by Tehran’s ayatollahs, some of these Iranian
mujahadin
are now under the protection of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 1980, Sad-dam, not then assuming a religious pose, said: “Those are the ones whom Khomeini calls
mujahadin
. Those so-called
mujahadin
are traitors.”