Obloquy

Obloquy (pronounced ob-luh-kwee)

(1) Censure, blame or abusive language aimed at a person or thing, used especially of that made by multiple people or as an expression of public opinion.

(2) Discredit, disgrace, or bad repute resulting from public blame, abuse or denunciation.

(3) A false accusation; malevolent rumors (archaic).

1425-1475: From the late Middle English obloquie (evil speaking, slander, calumny, derogatory remarks), from the Medieval Latin obloquium (speaking against; contradiction), from obloquī (to speak against; to contradict), the construct being ob- (against) + loquī (to speak) (from the primitive Indo-European tolkw- & tolk- (to speak)) + -ium.  The –ium suffix (used most often to form adjectives) was applied as (1) a nominal suffix (2) a substantivisation of its neuter forms and (3) as an adjectival suffix.  It was associated with the formation of abstract nouns, sometimes denoting offices and groups, a linguistic practice which has long fallen from fashion.  In the New Latin, as the neuter singular morphological suffix, it was the standard suffix to append when forming names for chemical elements.  The noun oblocutor (plural oblocutors) was from the Latin and was from the agent noun counterpart (by virtue of appending the suffix –tor) of the verb obloquor.  It was used in the sense of “a gainsayer; a critic).  The Latin loquor (say; speak; talk) appears as an element in many English words including loquacious, colloquialism, soliloquy, circumlocution, colloquy, elocution, grandiloquence, loquacity and ventriloquist.  The usually cited synonyms are reproach, calumny; aspersion and revilement; the obviously useful comparative is “more obloquious” and the superlative “most obloquious”.  Obloguy & oblocutor are nouns and obloquial & obloquious are adjectives; the noun plural is obloquies.

In the same vein, although hardly in everyday use, the noun opprobrium (the plural opprobriums or (directly from the Latin) opprobria) is in more frequent use than obloquy; the synonym opprobry now obsolete.  Dating from the late seventeenth century, the original sense was “disgrace or bad reputation arising from exceedingly shameful behaviour; ignominy but it’s now used to mean (1) the disgrace or the reproach incurred by conduct considered outrageously shameful; infamy and (2) a cause or object of such disgrace or reproach.  Opprobrium was a learned borrowing from the Latin opprobrium (and obprobrium) (a reproach, a taunt; disgrace, shame; dishonor; scandal) the construct being opprobrō (to reproach, upbraid; to taunt) + -ium (the suffix used to form abstract nouns). The construct of opprobrō was ob- (against) + probrum (“disgrace, shame; abuse, insult), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European pro- (forward; toward) + bher (to bear, carry (in the sense of something brought up to reproach a person)).

Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Presidential debate 2024 #1: Sleazy old Donald v Senile old Joe, CNN, Georgia, June 2024.

The decision of host broadcaster CNN to (1) conduct the debate without a studio audience and (2) not fact-check the participant’s statements meant the event assumed an unusual dynamic and what will be remembered is (1) Joe Biden’s (b 1942; US president since 2021) lapses into mumbling incoherence, (2) Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) answering just about any question by referring to border-control & irregular immigration and (3) their mutual obloquy.  The lack of an audience may have worked to Trump’s advantage because, without a crowd to play to, he stuck to the script (borders, criminal migrants & inflation), resisting the temptation even to use his latest invention: “The Biden crime family”.  However, what he actually said was of less significance than it being linguistically coherent (if often blatantly untruthful although it was the Trump administration which brought the world “alternative facts” so maybe that’s OK), something which couldn’t always be said of Mr Biden who looked a decade beyond his 81 years and had shuffled onto the stage, waving to the non-existent audience.  Maybe he saw them there.  Mr Biden’s best piece of obloquy came when he said his opponent had “…the morals of an alley cat”, an observation likely not much to have troubled Mr Trump (and privately he might not disagree) and, doubtlessly tuned to CNN, Stormy Daniels (the stage name of Stephanie Gregory, b 1979) would have enjoyed the moment.  For all the wrong reasons, debate #1 will be remembered also for the brief, spiteful exchange about their respective golf handicaps, something about which plenty of men can’t be trusted to be entirely truthful, including this pair.

More than anything, the sight of Biden on stage resembled a once champion golfer who could still address the tee and sometimes make a drive like the great shots of old but could no longer chip or putt well enough to make par, the days of “making the cut” long gone.  It’s something well documented of politicians who stayed one election too many, Winston Churchill’s (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) private secretary Jock Colville (1915–1987) recalling the eighty-year old prime-minister less than a year after his severe stroke:

“He could still make a great speech but… he was aging month by month and was reluctant to read any papers except the newspapers or give his mind to anything that he did not find diverting.  More and more time was given to bezique [a card game of French origin] and less to public business.  The preparation of a parliamentary question might consume a whole morning; facts would be demanded from government departments and not arouse any interest when they arrived… it was becoming an effort even to sign letters and a positive condescension to read Foreign Office telegrams.  And yet, on some days, the old gleam would be there, with and good humor would bubble and sparkle, wisdom would roll out in telling sentences and still, occasionally, the sparkle of genius could be seen in a decision, a letter or phrase.  But was he the man to negotiate with the Russians and moderate the Americans?  The Foreign Office thought not… and I, who have been as intimate with him as anybody during these last years, simply do not know.”

The candidates as seen on TV screens.

Mr Biden’s performance was the worst ever seen in a US presidential debate; he was unable effectively to refute even Mr Trump’s most obvious untruths.  The reaction in the Democrat Party machine will have been to take from the filing cabinets the various contingency plans prepared for the eventuality of needing to find (for whatever reason) a replacement candidate for November’s election.  That list of names won’t be inspiring (perhaps not even encouraging) but as the polls detailing the public reaction to the debate appear in the next couple of days, it’s something the DNC (Democratic National Committee) will be discussing.  The mechanism the DNC will likely turn to is the “tap on the shoulder” to tell old Joe: “thank you, God bless you, goodbye” and it’s just a question of the vector.  The Tories in 1990 choose Margaret Thatcher’s (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990) husband while in 1974, old Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) assembled a group of Republican congressional grandees to tell Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974) he no longer had the numbers to avoid impeachment and conviction.  Technically, there are other possibilities including a contested convention in August but that’s messy compared with a nice hatchet job.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

Presumably, all that’s thus far been discarded by the DNC is the idea of exhuming from the grave the political corpse of crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) to be given a quick réchauffé for November.  As in recent years it became increasingly obvious, the matter of Mr Biden’s cognitive decline would been discussed more and more within the Democrat Party machine but what the debate has done is suddenly to illustrate to the country just how serious things appear and men in his state tend not to improve; they go downhill.  Whereas in 1967-1968, his handling of the war in Vietnam meant for Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president 1963-1969) things unravelled gradually, for Mr Biden debate #1 may be remembered as a sudden jolt.

Of course, incumbency is a powerful tool and Mr Biden has been in the business for over fifty years and may yet survive to be the candidate in November but after the debate concluded, US dollar and futures markets responded positively to the expectations of a second Trump administration and the betting sites saw a spike in wagers.  PredictIt, which packages the candidates as stocks with a price had Biden opening at 48 cents (ie a 48% chance of victory in November) which plummeted to 33 cents as the debate unfolded and within hours Trump had settled at 60 (up 7 from opening), Biden at 30.

Prior to one of the debates between the two in 2020, Mr Trump had his own explanation for how the DNC prepared his opponent for such occasions.  In 2024, it would seem, the dose should have been increased.

Réchauffé

Réchauffé (pronounced rey-shoh-fey )

(1) A warmed-up dish of food; the use of leftovers.

(2) By extension, anything old or stale brought back into service; old material reworked or rehashed.

Circa 1800: From the French réchauffé, past participle of réchauffer (to re-heat), the construct being r(e)- (again) + échauffer (to warm) (from the Vulgar Latin excalefāre, the construct being ex- (the intensive prefix + calefacere ( to warm).  In English, the spelling is usually rechauffe and the word was a direct borrowing from the French rechauffe, the feminine réchauffée, the masculine plural rechauffes & the feminine plural réchauffées.  Échauffer was related to Middle & Old French chaufer (which persists in modern French as chauffer) (to warm), ultimately from Latin cal(e)facere (to make hot), the construct being cale– (stem of calēre (to be hot) + facere (to make).  The Middle French chaufer was the source of English chafe (to wear or abrade by rubbing) although the original meaning was ”to warm, heat”, and that sense survives in culinary use, the chafing dish a receptacle which consists of a metal dish with a lamp or heating appliance beneath, used for keeping food hot at the table.

In English, few prefixes have been more productively applied than re- but, being a direct import from the French, re-chauffe never emerged.  The re- prefix is from the Middle English re-, from the circa 1200 Old French re-, from the Latin re- & red- (back; anew; again; against), from the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (again), a metathetic alteration of wert- (to turn).  It displaced the native English ed- & eft-.  A hyphen is not normally included in words formed using this prefix, except when the absence of a hyphen would (1) make the meaning unclear, (2) when the word with which the prefix is combined begins with a capital letter, (3) when the word with which the is combined with begins with another “re”, (4) when the word with which the prefix is combined with begins with “e”, (5) when the word formed is identical in form to another word in which re- does not have any of the senses listed above.  As late as the early twentieth century, the dieresis was sometimes used instead of a hyphen (eg reemerge) but this is now rare except when demanded for historic authenticity or if there’s an attempt deliberately to affect the archaic.  Re- may (and has) been applied to almost any verb and previously irregular constructions appear regularly in informal use; the exception is all forms of “be” and the modal verbs (can, should etc).  Although it seems certain the origin of the Latin re- is the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (which has a parallel in Umbrian re-), beyond that it’s uncertain and while it seems always to have conveyed the general sense of "back" or "backwards", there were instances where the precise was unclear and the prolific productivity in Classical Latin tended make things obscure.

Rechauffe entered English early in the nineteenth century in the figurative sense which had for some time been current in France, suggesting something (ideas, literature etc) or someone (actors, artists and (especially) politicians) old being rehashed or recycled (hence the common phrase c’est du réchauffé (meaning “it’s old hat)).  That remains the most common use in English but by the late 1800s, the original sense in French (reheated food) had been picked up across the channel, presumably because “Réchauffé Bœuf bourguignon” is a more appealing dish than “yesterday’s stew”.

Lasagna (lasagne).

Before the figurative use prevailed, rechauffe referred to reheating food left over from an earlier meal, a practice doubtless common since cooking became a thing and one commendable for reducing waste and encouraging thrift.  It needs however to be undertaken with care because cooked food cannot be stored for too long without the quality deteriorating or the risk of unpleasant bacterial infection increasing.  As a general principle, never re-cook; only reheat left-overs which retain their wholesomeness.  Where possible, cut the cooked food finely (increasing the surface area will quicken the reheating and enhance the penetration of flavor, where necessary adding additional moisture (sauces or a gravy) during the reheating.  There are some foods which probably should never been reheated (most famously chicken) and some which are said to benefit from being left overnight, notably lasagna (lasagne) which many insist seems to gain some richness once rechauffed.

The politically rechauffed

Politicians in the modern age are rechauffed with less frequency than was once tolerated.  It’s hard now to imagine major political parties allowing someone who let them to defeat at an election being further indulged but in earlier times, Australia and the United States provided a few examples:

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) gained the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States in 1896, 1900 & 1908, losing each time.  For a generation he dominated his party but is probably now better remembered as the anti-evolutionist lawyer in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial“ (State of Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes).  His daughter once had to sprint to catch a bus and remarked "I'm the first member of my family successfully to run for something". 

Dr HV Evatt (1894-1965) was a judge of the High Court who entered politics, becoming leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), leading them to defeat in three successive elections, 1954, 1955 & 1958.  They were difficult days for the ALP and Evatt’s declining mental acuity, subsequently attributed to arteriosclerosis, was noted even at the time.  Later, those who knew him would differ greatly on just when the instability began though all would agree there was at some point madness which was sad because his mind undeniably had been brilliant.

Evatt’s successor as ALP leader was Arthur Calwell (1896-1973), a devoted Roman Catholic who in dress and manner seemed a figure from an earlier age.  He contested three elections (1961, 1963 & 1966) without success although he came close in the first, actually gaining more votes than his opponent though without securing the requisite number of seats (shades of crooked Hillary Clinton in 2016).  However, in 1966 he lost in a landslide, a result which would have implications, the extent of his loss meaning not even the landslide the ALP achieved in 1969 was enough to secure victory (had the ALP been able to gain government in 1969 rather than 1972 history would have been very different).  His slim volume Be Just and Fear Not (1972) remains one of the better Australian political memoirs and while he never became prime-minister, he was in 1963 created a Knight Commander of St Gregory the Great with Silver Star (the honor conferred by Pope Paul VI (1897-1978; pope 1963-1978)) so there was that.  Some time earlier, Calwell had announced there was little chance of an ALP victory short of "the visitation of the the Angel of Death to Raheen" (Raheen the residence of Archbishop Dr Daniel Mannix (1864–1963; Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne 1917-1963)) but whether the Holy See knighting him shortly after the death of the meddling priest was related isn't known.  In the Vatican however, there may have been a few among the curia who also prayed for the visit; when once it was suggested Dr Mannix might be found "a job in Rome" one papal envoy went pale and muttered "the Lord forbid". 

It was Sir Robert Menzies 1894–1978 (prime-minister of Australia 1939-1941 & 1949-1966) who thrice defeated both Evatt and Calwell.  Written-off after losing office in 1941 (the famous phrase of the era that “Menzies couldn’t lead a flock of homing pigeons” summed up the feeling) his rechauffe was all the more remarkable because he followed a path which rarely succeeds, forming a new political party as his platform, one that survives to this day as the country’s most successful electoral machine.  Menzies said of Dr Evatt: “I disliked him, I distrusted him” but served as one of the pallbearers at his funeral, some wondering what “the Doc”, whose feelings were reciprocal, would have made of that.

Adlai Stevenson, 1952.

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) had no easy task running for US President in 1952 against Dwight Eisenhower (1885-1969; US president 1953-1961).  That he lost to the popular soldier who had been supreme commander not only of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe but also of NATO (1921-1952) was less a surprise than the fact the general’s margin of victory wasn’t greater.  In the prosperous 1950s, the Democratic nomination to run against Eisenhower wasn’t really a good career move but Stevenson sought the party’s endorsement and it unexpectedly turned into a fairly nasty contest after the general suffered a heart attack, encouraging some previously reticent Democrats to enter the fray.  The president however recovered well and won in a landslide.  When Stevenson died in London, many obituaries ran the famous photograph of him on the hustings in 1952 with a hole in his shoe.

Two crooks converse: Richard Nixon (left) & Lyndon Baines Johnson, the White House, 1968.

Eisenhower’s vice-president was Richard Nixon (1913-1994, US president 1969-1974) perhaps the most remarkable rechauffe of the modern age.  His famous defeat in the 1960 presidential election seemed bad enough but what appeared the final nail in his political coffin was losing the gubernatorial contest in California two years later and most suspect that for any other politician, that really would have been the end.  His tenacity however was legendary and assisted by the lucky circumstances of the 1960s: (1) the huge loss by Republican Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) in 1964, (2) the various traumas of the Vietnam War, (3) social unrest and (4) the implosion of LBJ’s (Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1908-1973; US president 1963-1969) presidency, Nixon returned to win convincingly in 1968 and massively in 1972.  From there it ended badly but the Nixon of 1960 does deserve some credit.  After being told he’d lost by “an electoral eyelash” and there was evidence of much fraud (and that evidence was compelling, unlike the allegations in 2020), his advisors told him he had sound grounds on which challenge the result.  Nixon declined to pursue the matter, arguing the institution of the presidency was too important to suggest it was tainted.  “Nobody steals the presidency of the United States” he told his aides.  Not all of his successors have shared his view.

The rechauffe of John Howard (b 1939; Australian prime-minister 1996-2007) proved a remarkable success and one he’d come not to expect.  Having lost the 1987 election after a bizarre schism in conservatives politics, he’d been written off, a judgement with which he agreed, telling one interviewer that a comeback “…really would be Lazarus with a triple bypass” yet the universe shifted and he regained the leadership, winning four successive elections (even a now rare upper house majority which proved a poisoned chalice).  The circumstances of his remarkable success would have surprised him because his assumption had long been it would come when "the times will suit me" by which he meant he would be the one turned to to deal with dire economic circumstances and general distress.  Instead, during his long tenure, the economy grew as never before and his government's coffers were awash with cash.  Sometimes one gets lucky.  Howard's internecine opponent of the 1980s, Andrew Peacock (1939-2021) was also recycled but without success, his tilt at the 1990 election no more productive than his loss in 1984.  One of his opponents, noting the rechauffe, explored the culinary metaphor further, observing that “a soufflé never rises twice”.  That was an allusion to his image as someone rather insubstantial but he’ll always be remembered for allowing the country to have two elections contested by a Mr Peacock and a Mr Hawke.  It was a time of such coincidences, the National Party (the old Country Party) at the time including Mr Blunt (Charles Blunt, b 1951) and Mr Sharp (John Sharp, b 1954).

The Crooked Hillary Clinton Burger (2016) as advertised (left) and as sold (right) after having been taken from the cold storage facility where it had been stored since 2008, rechauffed and served as "freshly made".

Ambushed in 2008 by Barack Obama's (b 1961; US president 2009-2017) twenty-first century style campaign to secure the Democratic Party's nomination for that years presidential election, crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) ran another analogue era effort in 2016 against Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021).  To an extent, it worked because crooked Hillary did gain an absolute majority of votes cast but failed to secure the requisite numbers in the Electoral College because the campaign team neglected adequately to target areas in states both her crew and the Democrat National Committee (DNC) regarded either (1) solidly in the possession of their machine or (2) populated by folk from the "basket of deplorables" and thus not worthy only resource allocation.  Like the candidate, the 2016 campaign was something not greatly different from the 2008 plan, taken from the cold-room, rechauffed and served with the claim it was fresh.  It wasn't quite that the staff had "learned nothing and forgotten everything" but it does seem the operation was top-heavy with political operatives and lacking in those with a mastery of the techniques of data analysis.  All the evidence suggests there was no lack of data, just an inability to extract from it enough useful information.  Fortunately, in 2017, crooked Hillary published What Happened (a work of a dozen-odd pages somehow  padded out to over 500 using the "how to write an Amazon best-seller" template), in which she explained how everything was someone else's fault.