Wordwatch: Infamous

I’ve commented on our current use of this word before, but I am prompted to return to it by some interesting examples I’ve come across lately. Here are two:

“What made March a truly terrible month were the protests that erupted outside Batley Grammar School last week after word got out that a Religious Education teacher had shown his pupils one of the infamous Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad” – from the Free Speech Union Monthly Newsletter for March. 

“… deception has been the Kremlin’s default position, historically, when faced with public health disasters. Chernobyl is the most famous example. But almost as notorious was the 1979 cover-up of a leak of weaponised anthrax spores… Russia’s health service is infamously underfunded…” – Spectator, 17 April 2021.

These two reports occur in particularly telling contexts. One is that of the Muslim responses to satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and the other is the policy of the Kremlin towards publicising significant threats to public health. Both are matters with implications of considerable importance to us all. They both are issues that involve serious moral questions. Questions that require us to have at our disposal a vocabulary that’s tuned finely enough to distinguish degrees of moral seriousness and decide on weighty moral judgements. 

So which word would you choose in the two cases I’ve cited? I am happiest with ‘infamous’ when I can see that a judgement is being made: “In Western commentary on the Pavlik Morozov story, Pavlik’s denunciation is seen as infamous because its target was his father…” – London Review of Books, November 2005. And if we can’t use ‘infamous’ in this weighty, serious sense, what term is available? 

Now, moral seriousness and moral judgements are deeply unfashionable these days. The very word ‘moral’ has acquired pejorative overtones: it seems to imply old-fashioned, stuck-up self-righteousness and hypocrisy. We are nervous about making moral judgments because there are so many people out there who think differently from us and may be inclined to reciprocate by making moral judgments against us. These are the benefits of our wonderfully diverse modern society. The prevalence of social media has no doubt increased our tendency to think along these lines.

So a word that used, not long ago – I’m thinking of the 1980s – to carry with it the severest condemnation, is now an adjective with a range of applications so broad that I’ve given up trying to define it. What word would you use if you had to find a single adjective for, say, Stalin’s Terror or Pol Pot’s deliberate reduction of the people of Cambodia to starvation? My word of choice in such cases has always been ‘infamous’, and I don’t know of another. 

Roget’s Thesaurus provides the primary synonyms for ‘infamous’: disreputable, discreditable, dishonest, heinous. There is some flexibility here, but the general sense of moral dubiety, if not downright condemnation, is clear. ‘Heinous’, particularly, is unambiguously negative. The O.E.D. gives synonyms for it: ‘hateful’, ‘odious, ‘highly criminal’ and ‘wicked’. But ‘heinous’ is, if anything, even less in current use than the traditional sense of ‘infamous’ itself. 

In the late seventeenth century, the Free School at Appleby Magna in Leicestershire dismissed staff “if found to be of infamous life upon evident proof”, and that basic sense of outright condemnation survived until recently. From Oscar Wilde: “…as for Lord Illingworth, I don’t believe he is capable of anything infamous or base” – A Woman of No Importance, 1892.

 In 1990, Peter Ackroyd, in his Dickens, could speak of “the customary barbs of the infamous against the famous …”, where ‘infamous’ embodies a moral idea that sets it against non-judgmental ‘famous’. But strange things were about to happen to the word.  

Try this: “Bryan Forbes’s now-infamous production of Macbeth …”: Gilbert Adair – The Postmodernist always Rings Twice, 1992. The word needed here is ‘notorious’, which doesn’t have to convey a moral position. But in the twenty-first century, the two words have regularly been used indiscriminately: “Faliraki, a resort infamous for violence, drunkenness and sexual excesses” – Daily Telegraph, 2003. 

And now, moral questions begin to emerge from the ambiguity surrounding the new applications of the word: “Tiny Rowland was one of Britain’s most infamous businessmen” – Evening Standard, January 2006. If Tiny Rowland were still alive, he’d be entitled to sue; ‘notorious’ would have made better sense and is quite strong enough. Then again, he might almost have seen it as a compliment. 

“Although some dodos were hunted and eaten, the species was infamously driven to extinction within a hundred years by the arrival of cats, rats and pigs on the island” – Daily Telegraph, 2003. This is a classic. Morality cannot be predicated on the processes of nature. Even ‘notorious’ would be inappropriate here since we know of no individuals who were actively responsible for the dodo’s extinction. Surely, ‘Famously’ would do well enough?

I thought I’d found the final debasement of an important word when I read this sign at the Abbey Mill Restaurant, Tintern in 2011: ‘Home of Tintern’s Infamous Dragon Pie’. But when a correspondent in The Oldie for March 2012 published a note from a reader citing “the infamous Battle of Britain pilots,” I rolled over with my face to the wall. 

The word has indeed lost its meaning and been redefined to mean the opposite. What do we think of the cartoons of Muhammad? Is the Kremlin’s health underfunding a ‘heinous’ crime against humanity or just a political aberration? Come on, let’s get ourselves some backbone! Where has our moral sense gone?