In March, after Limbaugh had called a young woman named Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" for publicly advocating contraceptive health insurance coverage, the most Governor Romney was willing to say was that Limbaugh's odious remarks were "not the language I would have used".
When asked whether he and Elizabeth engaged in "sexual intercourse," Beecher at first blanched, because such language was "loathsome and odious stuff, that I don't talk about," but under questioning seemed to say that perhaps Mrs. Tilton had sexual relations with him but he had not had sex with her.
But when someone uses moral language and calls someone "vicious", "odious", or "depraved", she "expresses sentiments, in which, he expects, all his audience are to concur with him" (Hume 1751: 260).
When someone speaks of another's behavior as "vicious or odious or depraved, he then speaks another language, and expresses sentiments, in which he expects all his audience to concur with him" (EPM, 272).
By adding the word "honour" to killing, we use the language of those who justify this odious crime on the basis of "honourable" motives.
So I was recruited to organize before-school language classes, a task that involves one of the most odious tasks you can ever do for a PTA: collect checks.
And there were lots more, often dressed up in pseudo-intellectual language, branding Islam backward or denouncing its beliefs and practices as "odious," and culminating in an ultimatum by which Islam's, and therefore Muslims', place in Britain was deemed conditional on adaptation to suit the critics' tastes: "If Islam is to be truly accepted as part of British society it must embrace science.
