Up for Debate

It has not always been a term describing a gladiatorial contest or a beauty pageant. It has not always been about popularity.  It has not always felt like a truck pull. It has not always been a public event regarded by the media with lipsmacking delight simply because audience size was comparable to the Super Bowl.

Yes, the word debate comes into English through Old French debatre and its Romance analogues, all of which have something to do with fighting, quarrelling, and other forms of contestation. The  heart of debate is warfare, not oratory, or rather it’s oratory as warfare, but it’s battle nonetheless.

In Shakespeare’s day, debate could mean contest without resort to either weapons or words: “wastefull time debateth with decay” to wear down youth (youth will go, either due to decay or time’s passage, which feels to us like the same thing, anyway).

Since the 15th century, the English language has harbored a sense of debate as a description of a contest of views on matters of public importance. Whatever one’s response to the presidential and vice-presidential debates during this election cycle, you’re likely to think that there are in fact matters of public importance, and that you don’t want “wastefull time” to run the clock before the candidates have fully aired their views.

The history of the word debate has, however, many twists and turns. Here, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary, are some that might not be on your radar:

“Lowering, depreciation, degradation.” A 15th-century text indicates that if someone were to show sympathy in a particular circumstance, it would not redound to her credit – in fact, it would “cause hir owen debate.”

“To abate; to beat down, bring down,” and so on. Another 15th-century usage shows us that one might pray for forgiveness, one’s “mysdede [misdeed] to debate.” In other words, one’s faults would be minimized. Another sense in which debate means to lower.

“To depreciate, to decry.”  Meaning to debase someone or something. A 17th-century translation of Tacitus observes that someone was “debated … as ignoble.”

“To subtract.” Another 17th-century usage. “To debate from the one, and to add to the other.”

“To lessen.”  And yet another from the 17th century. Got an inflammation? A pain? The effect of treatment might result in symptoms being debated.

To degrade, to minimize, to subtract, to lessen. We’ve lost all these rather charming senses of the word debate, none of which have much life in them by the end of the 17h century, which is perhaps coincidentally the time that political parties were developing in England.

Which might be a shame. During this election cycle we’ve already seen the subtracting, the lessening, the decrying, and the degrading, or attempts in those directions. All of those things are perhaps easier than the dance of ideas we imagine the word debate is meant to sustain.

One ideal of debate is the informed, well-prepared presentation of cogent positions that stand in opposition, and in that opposition lies a tension that, like a tightrope walker’s wire, holds its delicate passenger suspended over the abyss.

Never before in my voting lifetime have I felt that the three hundred or so million of us are on that wire.

[[Image via Wikimedia Commons: Trump: BU Rob13; Clinton: Gage Skidmore]]