But the association of "hate" with unacceptable forms of intolerance and bigotry tends to color the other uses of the word as well; "political hate speech" conveys the sense of dark and irrational passions that should be ruled out of political discourse. To a certain extent that's merely an accident of English, which happens to use the same word for social pathologies like racism and anti-Semitism and for the personal antagonisms that make up half the drama of high-school life — or, for that matter, for a simple antipathy to spinach.

If you said merely that a lot of Democrats detest Bush, as the French would put it, it would be hard to summon up the same sense of alarm about their attacks on him.

Even so, it's striking how the language of polarization has shifted over the past 30 years. In the early 1970s, when Vice President Agnew went on his alliterative tear, opponents could only be crudely demonized as effete snobs or as wild-eyed hippies; in the age of Dr. Phil it is more effective to infantilize them — we'll talk about it when they're less angry.

You wonder how Harry S. Truman would have made out if "anger management" had been part of the language back then.

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Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, is heard regularly on NPR's "Fresh Air" and is the author of "The Way We Talk Now."