Obstreperous: A jovial word with an ominous back story
Jun 21, 2021
2 minutes
As bills that were passed by the United States House of Representatives pile up in the Senate, remarks that President Joe Biden made last year about whether to abolish the filibuster are back in the news. “It’s going to depend on how obstreperous sounds like something Mark Twain might have said if he’d been a middle school teacher – it’s both learned and folksy. It also played a small, though sinister, role in the most appalling period of American history, which raises questions about how we use it and words like it today.
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