My language was not in bad taste

A Sunday Nation correspondent said my earlier comment on Peter Kenneth was “misleading and in bad taste”. The “misleading” part of the accusation was understandable. Indeed, I addressed it in the same edition. The question is: Why “in bad taste”?

Because, according to Kenya’s users of English, a statement is “in bad taste” if either you disagree with it or it does not caress some prejudice of yours. We know — or should know — this from the letters pages of all our newspapers. Yet, usually, taste has nothing to do with such accusations. True, most of our politicians utter words in extremely bad taste. However, “bad taste” is not a category of “injustice” or “un-objectivity” or “untruth”.

A statement can be perfectly tasteful even if it is untrue and even if it destroys somebody’s name. Contrariwise, a statement can be disgusting even if it is a completely accurate representation of some reality. These facts apply to everything we consume, including words and food.

A perfectly correct and intellectually valuable statement can be made in such a way that it disgusts your feelings. Likewise, a dish of perfectly good value may force you to throw out if it is cooked badly or if it offends your cultural prejudices. Note the adjectives tasteful and disgusting.

Taste (noun) is the English equivalent of the French gout, whose antonym, degout, is what has given us our disgust. Degouter, “to disgust”, thus means to “taste badly”, to offend either the real palate (of a gourmet) or only the metaphorical palate (of an art critic, an aesthete).

We distinguish between the reality and the metaphor by describing things which please our real palates (food and drinks) as “tasty” and things which please only our metaphorical palates (clothing, bandbox, hairstyles, dance, poetry, painting, newspaper columns, etc.) as “tasteful”.

A Nation house rule bans all pictures which show the mangled bodies of human beings after, say, a road accident. Though completely objective, such pictures are deemed “un-tasteful” because they may offend a family’s feelings at table. Food may suddenly go “un-tasty”.

Like hundreds of the Nation’s “don’ts”, the ban is, of course, a form of censorship. But only Betty Kaplan and other mega-liberals may raise a hue-and-cry about it as an example of official assault on “freedom of the media”. I will grant them only this. Tastefulness may be debatable.

The French say: A chacun, son gout (“to each, his taste”). The Latins were more direct: De gustibus non disputandem. It is a waste of time to argue over questions of taste. But this is true — as the character used to say (in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop)— only “up to a point”.

For, if there were no universal conventions over such concepts as beauty, balance, symmetry and justice — and their personification in the Nilotic Goddess Maat — would it be possible to teach aesthetics on a scientific basis? So, yes, originally, I was manifestly unfair to Peter Kenneth. But I hope that my language was, nevertheless, in good taste.