What to do with a pet peeve? “Own” it. It’s a peeve, and no more. Take care not to become peevish. On rare occasion, however, a peeve merits pursuit and, once pinned down, even theological examination.

Here’s a candidate: the weaselly abuse of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” and “appropriately” and “inappropriately.” A teacher reports that a student behaves inappropriately. A wife admonishes her husband to dress appropriately. A psychiatrist notes that a patient exhibits inappropriate affect. And who hasn’t wondered about how to respond appropriately to an invitation. But the plot thickens. In our less than civil civic wars, the AI chatbot Grok has been serving up “inappropriate” statements.

Let me be perfectly clear, unlike the politicians who only pretend to be, why I’m peeved about the misuse of these words. My gripe is that they become cosmetic cover-up words. The teacher doesn’t want to say that the student is a foul-mouthed brat. The wife has had it with hubby’s polka dot pants. The patient giggles when she should cry. We wouldn’t be caught dead at the neighbor’s barbecue. And the plot thickens because Grok is anchored in the world of Elon Musk.

But wait! I’ve advanced enough on my high horse of indignation. Upon examination of my pet peeve, I have discovered that a foremost ancestor of “the appropriate and the inappropriate” is more noble than its latest offspring. It happens that Cicero, the finest rhetorician of antiquity, paid tribute to decorum. He used the term to translate the Greek πρέπον. The word suggests an appreciation of the fittingness of things, whether one’s feelings or speech or appearance. The standard English translation of decorum is “propriety.”

Long ago the poet Horace expressed the sentiment Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country). For Horace it was a noble sentiment. Yet for Wilfred Owen, facing death in the trenches of World War I, it was odious. In his poem Dulce et Decorum Est he tells a friend that if he were to see the horrors of combat he “would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.”

Much, of course, depends on one’s death and one’s country. (Consider the death of a Nazi conscript who dies storming the Warsaw ghetto.) And whether loyalty is noble or ignoble, proper or not, depends on its object. The novelist E. M. Forster wrote, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.” Here, too, there are questions to ask. Who is the friend? What is the country? Dante relegates Brutus to the lowest circle of Hell because he betrayed his friend Julius Caesar rather than his country Rome.

So where does my pursuit of a pet peeve lead? What do my examples suggest? I’ve cited a Roman rhetorician, a Roman poet, plus a Roman assassin and his emperor. Allow me, then, to cite a maxim of Roman law: abusus non tollit usum. That is, abuse does not take away proper use. To be sure, the language of the appropriate and the inappropriate, of the fitting and the unfitting, can be employed in any number of dodgy ways. Dodgy people are repeat offenders. But Cicero was a master of decorum, rightly understood.

Let me turn now from the broadly cultural to the specifically theological. St. Thomas Aquinas, who often cites Cicero, sometimes uses arguments from fittingness. He does not do so to construct the proof of a thesis. His aim, rather, is to help us understand why God acts as He does. Thomas uses a simple and anthropomorphic example to illustrate his method: Why is that lad riding a horse? Because it’s more fitting to ride a horse [though not mine!] than to walk if we want to get somewhere quickly (ST III, q. 1, art. 2). Now from the ordinary to the sublime. The Father need not have chosen the Incarnation of His Son to redeem the fallen human race. But Thomas tells us that “It was fitting that God, by reason of his infinite goodness, should unite human flesh to Himself for man’s salvation” (ST III, q. 1, art. 1). God’s choosing to do so shows profound solidarity with us. Indeed, at the Offertory of every Mass, our prayer is that “we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

Dare I say, gentle reader, whether fitting or not, that even pursuing a pet peeve can have a most surprising and salutary outcome?