Sometimes a change in the language reflects a change in the world, sometimes just a change in the way we talk about it. And sometimes it isn't easy to tell.

         Civility began its life as a word for citizenship and a close kin of civilization. But by the early 20^th century it had dwindled to a genteel term for a nominal courtesy  or for perfunctory expressions of politeness -- "They exchanged civilities"; the sort of word that transit companies posted on bus placards in those recurring campaigns aimed at getting riders and employees to be nicer to one another.

         Back then, people didn't actually talk about civility very much -- they were much more likely to complain about bad manners, rudeness or discourtesy. As late as the 1950's, the words civility and incivility were appearing in the New York Times only about five or six times a year. The words didn't take off until the 1960's -- in 1969 alone, they appeared in the Times more often than they had over the entire eight-year Eisenhower presidency, and by now they're thirty times more common in the media than they were then.

         A lot of people would explain that sudden rise in civility talk as a direct response to a breakdown in public manners: in a Public Agenda poll a couple of years ago, three quarters of the respondents said that Americans used to treat each other with more respect and courtesy in the past. But then every generation since Victorian times has had exactly the same impression. Etiquette writers in the 1920's railed about people who monopolized party lines, rude street-car conductors, women who pushed you out of their way at department stores, hosts who invited you to dinner and then made you listen to their favorite radio programs, and of course the discourteous motorists who were classified as roadster rowdies, coupe cads, and van vandals.

         But to traditionalists, the provocations of the social movements of the sixties seemed to go beyond mere breaches of decorum, or beyond anything that could be conveyed by old words like impolite, rude, and discourteous. So they reached back to reclaim an older sense of civility, which invested personal deportment with a layer of civic and political consequence.

         In a editorial that appeared just before the 1968 elections, the Wall Street Journal inveighed against what it called the New Incivility. As the Journal described them, the culprits included the student protesters, the "filthy hecklers who dogged the steps of presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey," and the "enraged Negro spokesmen" who "denied any virtue in white civilization." And the offense wasn't just in what all the hippies and protestors were saying, but their disagreeable physical appearance -- with their slovenly hair, beards and clothing and their general squalor, the Journal said, they were showing their contempt for "the world of decent manners."

         As philosophers and sociologists use the word, civility is something distinct from simple politeness -- more like the attitudes and behavior that make our public discourse possible. But in the mouth of most modern critics, the power of civility and incivility lies precisely in their ability to blur the lines between personal and public life. Incivility seems to draw everything that's coarse, irritating or merely thoughtless in American daily life into a single great rent in the nation's moral and political fabric. It's hard to think of any other social vice that covers as much ground: cell-phone abuse, brusque store clerks, airlines that keep people sitting on the tarmac for hours, telemarketers, reality TV, email spam, road rage, shock jocks and nightclub hecklers, not to mention congressional partisanship, attack ads, hostile bloggers, and belligerent talk-show hosts.  A recent book on incivility in the workplace uses the word for everything from overuse of the fax machine to excessive use of email acronyms to insisting on a fixed agenda in brainstorming sessions.

But to some people, the provocations of the social movements of the sixties seemed to go beyond mere breaches of decorum, or beyond anything that could be conveyed by old words like impolite, rude, and discourteous. So they reached back to reclaim an older meaning of civility, which invested personal deportment with a sense of civic and political consequence.

         There's clearly a lot to get worked up about out there, and incivility bundles it all up in a cognitively efficient package. The word by itself does a lot of the work of connecting the contentious tenor of political life to a general decline in personal values. Armed with the notion of incivility, critics can decry the routine crudeness of broadcast expletives, hip-hop lyrics, and gross-out movies like American Pie as the harbingers of imminent social and political disintegration. And on the other side, the word provides a pretext for writing off serious political speech in the same way we dismiss rudeness and intemperateness in everyday life. Speaking disrespectfully of the president, say, becomes morally indistinguishable from saying nasty things about a co-worker in the lunchroom. In the course of things, the charge of incivility can close off serious discussion every bit as effectively as more traditional forms of rudeness can.

What makes civility and incivility so elastic is that the words live out their entire existence on op-ed pages, with no grounding in the homey truths of everyday life. Parents don’t teach their children about civility and incivility. They teach them about things like manners, respect, and politeness -- those are the real family values. And while a lot of the things that people describe as incivility would count as simple bad manners, many of them wouldn't. When you hear somebody talk about incivility, it's useful to ask whether impoliteness or rudeness would have done as well. If so, why didn't they use those words? And if not, it's a good idea to put your hand on your wallet.