Until the mid-1960s, Catholic associations had a moderator, a pipe-smoking gentleman in a cassock or later black suit, appointed by a bishop to keep an eye on the morals of the members of the club. Nowadays, no public discussion evening can be announced without mentioning which schnapping journalist will act as moderator. And NRC wrote a few weeks ago that the Pope decided to moderate a heated discussion between young people with whom he had met.
Heavy water
Moderators and moderate go back to the latin verb moderate that to moderate means to determine the measure of something and thus to direct and lead. The English word moderate ‘moderate’, still recalls the original meaning, just like that of the nuclear physics concept moderator dust, heavy water or graphite that slow down the speed of neutrons. In moderari we also recognize modestill used, among other things, as a term in music for the way in which the notes are ordered, and on which our modern fashion goes back.
In classical Latin, a moderator was a leader, someone who arranged and controlled things. Much later, when Latin was only the language of scholars and academia, the moderator became the moderator of public philosophical disputations. He made sure that the quarreling parties did not literally get into each other’s hair. In Oxford, the officer who oversees certain public examinations is still called that. This English-Latin moderator is one of the founders of the current debate leader.
The moderator became the moderator of public philosophical disputations
The history of the southern United States knows the Regulator-Moderator War, which raged in the then independent Republic of Texas between 1839 and 1844. In the new Texas, which had only just broken away from Mexico, hardly anything was arranged. This lawlessness was a thorn in the side of the Regulators and they began to make laws and regulations for everything. The Moderators, who favored a much more moderate system, did not accept this. Hence the war.
Our national history also has a failed one Moderation. In 1566, then King Philip II promised to soften the measures against the heretics in the Low Countries, but unfortunately it remained with words, which led the popular vernacular to corrupt Philips’ Moderation into Murder.
We hardly know moderation in today’s Dutch except in the computer language where we mainly use this term after the Anglo-Saxon example for a person who has to manage the traffic on a digital news forum. We still find the old word in dead tempered, ‘very calm’, and which clearly goes back to the meaning moderate. The task of the spiritual moderator of Roman Catholic sororities intended by the bishop was wisely left open: to direct and lead or to temper the rebellious ideas of the young people or perhaps both.