It all depends what you mean by…

On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was interviewed by presenter James Naughtie. Straw was being his usual evasive self. After one particularly slippery passage Naughtie burst out “Oh come on, that’s Jesuitical”. I fell to wondering how many listeners would know what that meant. Naughtie clearly thought of it as synonomous with ‘cleverly evasive’, but strictly speaking it simply means ‘of or pertaining to the jesuits’, the religious order founded by St Ignatius of Loyola in 1534. As someone who was educated by the Jesuits, I assumed for years that the term ‘Jesuitical’ was a compliment, but somewhere along the line the Order’s reputation for tortuous justification of indefensible propositions gained the upper hand, and the term acquired its modern connotation: ‘characteristic of their principles and methods. designing; cunning; deceitful; crafty’. In this case, therefore, I suppose Naughtie was correct.

Come to think of it, the severely bespectacled Straw would make a rather good Jesuit. I can see him in a soutane now.