Couth

Squad leaders were responsible for doing periodic checks to make sure soldiers were living a couth lifestyle, as Joes would compete regularly to see whose room was nicer.

So Dennis May thrilled me in a recent issue when he described Raymond Mays' 1939 E.R.A. racer as a "couth" little Merc-like model.

Yet the dancers are beautiful, their cool movement has a couth simplicity, and there are moments when a gesture of almost absolute beauty stands transfixed in some transom of sublime comprehension.

[John] Dankworth's care over the shaping and presentation of his music led occasionally to complaints that it was clever, lightweight stuff, lacking the rough passion which many regarded as the mark of authentic jazz, a view summed up by the critic Kitty Grime in the much-quoted phrase "couth, kempt and shevelled".

That man has no couth.

There is an aspect of the cultural conservative argument that sometimes drifts dangerously close to tha view, elitist to the core, as elitist as the New Class, as elitist as limousine liberalism: The public ain't got no couth. You can hear those old-fashioned elitist wheels spinning: Maybe we need a few government regulations to deal with the couth shortage.

My daughters have long and inappropriately been members of the Committee to Reform Dad's Hygiene, taking me to task for my supposed lack of couth.

Couth and manners are intensely subjective concepts. Each culture has its own standards of acceptable table manners, for instance.

You got no couth, Ed. You was raised no-count is what you were. No count and you ain't got a lick of couth.

We transformed the uncouths into couths, the unkempts into kempts, the inerts into erts! We did it all by speaking to teen-agers on their own terms and in their own language.