The Northampton Seminar
More than one commentator criticizing Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating has accused the agency of chutzpah; a Supreme Court justice wrote a recent dissent describing the petitioners’ argument in a public finance case as an instance of the same quality, and a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination finds so much chutzpah in the incumbent’s behavior that she is impelled to use the word before she’s even learned to pronounce it. The past few months have seen a jump in chutzpah sightings—in public uses of the Yiddish word for nerve or audacity, if not in chutzpah itself, which has become so predictable a feature of public life that it now provokes weary resignation as often as outrage or fury.
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