So the Philistines were not that philistine after all...

Once a good insult is embedded in the language, historical truth seldom matters

‘Oh my gawd!” a none-too-bright old schoolmate was fond of exclaiming if you said, for instance, that you didn’t like Merchant Ivory films. “You are SUCH a palestine!” He meant “philistine”, of course, and we all sniggered at him. But now it turns out, three decades on, that he is semi-vindicated.

Whatever it was he did mean, it wasn’t philistine. As Satan, Judas Iscariot and Potiphar’s wife will testify, once you’ve got a bad press in the Bible it tends to stick. But far from being culturally challenged dunderheads well deserving of a good smiting with the jawbone of an ass, the historical Philistines were – the experts say – “great traders, master builders and one of the most civilised peoples of their time”.

Academics studying the ruined Philistine city of Ashkelon have discovered that DNA evidence suggests the Philistines may have been descended from ancient Greeks who never went home after the Trojan war. They were wine-makers, expert potters and architects, wide-ranging and curious navigators and world-leading smelters of metal. So their long status as a byword for people with no culture is undeserved.

What, then, are we to call the uncultured, incurious and semi-literate among us if we can’t call them philistines? “Trumpites”? “Love Islanders”? “Influencers”? None of them has the same ring. My hunch, for what it’s worth, is that the small-p usage will take some eradicating. Words – even if they start out as technical terms or even proper nouns – take on a life of their own once they are released into the wild. They rampage off like Frankenstein – who wasn’t, of course, the monster.

Philistines aren’t the only historical peoples to cop it thanks to the victors writing the history. Indeed, you can more or less read a history of civilisational power shifts in the synonymy of extinct peoples. In vain, for instance, have scholars pointed out that the “Dark Ages” weren’t really dark at all: they get a bad rap thanks to Petrarch, who had an agenda of his own.

In vain do you point out to newspaper columnists who rail against Islamism as a “medieval death cult” that medieval Islam was the then flower of global civilisation – rational, tolerant and outward-looking (and, by the way, responsible for the survival in translation of the key texts of the classical world). The backward-seeming stuff, you might protest, was mostly invented in the 20th century by nutcases like Sayyid Qutb. But no one talks about going “reactionary mid-20th-century on your ass”, so it remains a useful shorthand.

In vain do you try to historicise the small-c use of “crusade” as a campaign for something good and righteous. In vain do you persuade Indiana Jones fans or Tory home secretaries that “thugs” were most likely an orientalist bogeyman, that there’s more to dervishes than whirling, and that Amazons most likely didn’t exist. In vain do you speak up for the Vandals and the Goths, the Sophists and the Cynics, the Pharisees and the Assassins. All of these groupings now have a life as common nouns that only very dimly reflect, if they don’t outright caricature, historical realities; and invariably do so thanks to accounts we inherited from their enemies.

And don’t let’s get started on Animals Ill-Served By Metaphor. Rats are not treacherous, ducks aren’t cute (they’re little feathery gang-rapists), foxes aren’t notably wily, owls aren’t wise – indeed, there’s reason to suppose that owls are thick as pigshit (which isn’t all that thick); chameleons, mind: you’re on safe ground with chameleons, if you can find them.

The same goes for other words that have taken on metaphorical or general usages far from their origins. You can try to tell PR professionals and pretentious restaurateurs that “deconstruct” doesn’t mean “serve the ingredients for a shepherd’s pie separately”, but for all but a few hardcore Derrideans in academic philosophy departments that ship has sailed. And those who supposedly misuse “decimate” by failing to restrict it to describing the punishment of a Roman legion by killing one man in 10… those people, like it or not, have the whip hand now. There’s not much call for the original use of the word, and most of us will tend to think that’s a good thing.

So eat up your deconstructed shepherd’s pie like a good lad, and don’t be a palestine.

Sam Leith is the author of Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page.

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