?.This meaning appeared in English near the end of the eighteenth century. Edmund Burke is credited with the first use of diplomacy in 1796: ?The only excuse for all our mendicant diplomacy is ... that it has been founded on absolute necessity?. As you may guess from that quotation, at first diplomacy was an unflattering word, echoing Sir Henry Wotton?s disdainful contention that ?An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country?.

Even in more modern times diplomacy has continued to have a bad press: the Encyclopedia Britannica remarked in 1870 that ?What we know of diplomacy was long regarded ... partly as a kind of activity morally somewhat suspect?. The adjective diplomatic has evolved further. Since a diplomat was someone who negotiated treaties and the like, to be a good diplomat meant that one was a skilled negotiator; it also implied care not to give offence unnecessarily and wrapping up awkward truths in a pleasant wrapper.

As Isaac Goldberg wrote in the twenties: ?Diplomacy is to do and say / The nastiest thing in the nicest way?. So we now commonly use the word in the sense of being tactful or being good at personal relations, a sense which is new enough not to be included in the big Oxford English Dictionary entry, written the better part of a century ago. It?s a long way from folded bits of paper.

<B>Ashveen Kutowaroo

(ashveen [email protected]<B>