Now that I’ve sucked you in with the bait, I’ll wallop you with the switch. This is going to be brief... and it’s hardly going to talk about the Left at all. Sue me. Instead, I’ll bore you with a short excursion into the meaning and use of a word.
Here’s a proposition I'm confident pretty much everyone here, on every side of the DKos meta squabbles, can agree on: There are some very silly ideas expressed on this web site. A particularly silly one is the idea that the word “apologist” is some sort of an insult. I’ve even seen it HR’d, though not recently. This apologist-as-insult notion pops up from time to time, most recently last night, right here. This isn’t any kind of a call-out of any of the participants in that thread; the discussion was brief and civil, even—wonder of wonders—borderline good-natured. It was fine. The Kossacks who disagreed with me were utterly mistaken, but they were nice about it.
Cordial, civil... but wrong wrong wrong. “Apologist” is a perfectly neutral word; it doesn’t become an insult merely because it makes some Kossacks uncomfortable. Here are various definitions of “apologist,” from The Free Dictionary:
1. A person who argues in defense or justification of something, such as a doctrine, policy, or institution.
2. A person who offers a defense by argument
3. A person who defends an idea, faith, cause, or institution.
4. A person who defends, in speech or writing, a faith, doctrine, idea, or action.
5. A person who argues to defend or justify some policy or institution; "an apologist for capital punishment."
See anything negative in any of those definitions? Me either. Nor am I cherry-picking to make a case; those are the only definitions given. You can look it up.
So why are Kossacks confused? We usually see the term used on DKos in the sense of “An apologist for the Obama administration.” Unquestionably, it appears most often in conjunction with other comments that are more or less critical. So that’s part of it; a sort of linguistic “guilt by association.” If other words in a comment are less-than-positive, even disparaging, this one must be too. More basically though, I think the confusion stems from a real misunderstanding of the meaning of the word. “Apologist” sounds like “apology,” and it does of course share the same Greek root... and what does one apologize for, if not for being wrong or making some sort of mistake? It’s a short jump from the notion of apologizing to that of making excuses, to “I’m sorry, but...” I think the Kossacks who object to “apologist” feel like they’re being accused of making excuses for the President and the Democratic Party, and that might indeed be disparaging; it might feel like an insult; hell, it might be an insult... if “apologizing” were indeed the meaning of “apologist.”
It never has meant that though. Originally, in classical Greece, an apologia was simply a speech given by the defendant in a court case. The classic example (so to speak) is Socrates’ passionate justification of his life and teachings. Paul uses the term in much the same way in the New Testament. In the related word-form "apologetics" it refers mostly to a defense or proof of Christianity. The exact word "apologist" arrived in English around 1640, via French apologiste. A summary of apologetics through the ages can be found here. Nowhere is it anything but neutral or even positive; nowhere are there any negative connotations at all. 2500 years of usage aren’t washed away by some objections on DKos, particularly not by objections stemming from a basic misunderstanding.
Now, probably this misunderstanding isn’t limited to Kossacks. It may well be endemic in America or in the whole English-speaking world. And, of course language is an ever-evolving human creation, and English, with its enormous, unmatched vocabulary, may be more protean than most. The time may come when “apologist” is used by most as an insult; in that case, the dictionaries will eventually reflect the change. Until they do, we can reasonably stick with what they say now, and use a perfectly good word when it seems apt to us.
And about the title: I really do consider myself an unashamed apologist for the left, without the slightest irony or sarcasm... and I would hardly be likely to insult myself, now would I? I'd put it on a bumper sticker, if I were prone to such things. Unashamed, unabashed, unafraid.
Our next lesson: ilk.
and oh, ahem... each and every one of my previous diaries has made the rec List, a nearly unparalleled perfect record. Y’all really wouldn’t want to be responsible for ruining that, now WOULD you? Just sayin'.
