A Big, Bad Word

“But the thinking man ought to deploy le mot juste—the precise term—because of the heartburn it gives petty tyranny, as all truths reliably do.”

It has been voiced a lot lately. Refreshingly often, in fact, for a sound that can offend at least one entire nation. Sometimes, there is no escaping it. On the treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang since 2014, for example, what alternative could a serious person substitute? (Austere housing policy? Strongly subsidized family-planning? Nothing else will do.) Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not prevaricate in this instance. But, historically, the American establishment has been frugal with its use. To dodge the word on one annual occasion especially, chief executives, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in 1981, have contorted themselves with a muffled twinge and a bite of the lip—the unavoidable symptoms of a choked truth.

Forget international justice. There is one good reason to cough up the wounding phrase: Terminological inexactitude is embarrassing for the speaker and patronizing to the listener. On the modern American political stage, the ring of sincerity would be almost avant-garde.

Absent the Armenian genocide—that wasn’t so difficult, was it? I say it all the time—it is doubtful whether Raphael Lemkin would have been moved to invent the term in 1943, before the scope of the Holocaust had become wholly apparent. By way of prelude, the more than two million Ottoman Armenians mostly east of Anatolia had been regularly robbed and hounded in the second half of the 19th century, and markedly during the reign of Abdul Hamid II, the imperial endling. An Armenian merchant class had long attracted the resentment of the Muslim majority, as did the emergence of Armenian revolutionary nationalists after 1878 (some of whom attempted to dispatch the Red Sultan in 1905) that of the Sublime Porte.