After it came out that Elie Weisel had lost his life savings and most of the assets of his Foundation for Humanity to Bernard Madoff, someone asked him if he thought Madoff was a psychopath. "Psychopath is too nice a word for him," Weisel answered. "'Sociopath,' ‘psychopath,’ it means there is a sickness, a pathology. This man knew what he was doing. I would simply call him thief, scoundrel, criminal."

Scoundrel is a word you might expect to hear from Weisel, whom people tend to look on as an emissary from a more absolute old-world moral order. The word has a Dickensian ring -- in fact it's the very word Dickens used to describe a character who eerily foreshadowed Madoff, right down to his name. Mr. Merdle is the unscrupulous banker in Little Dorrit, probably the darkest of Dickens's novels, which by pure serendipity has been running on PBS in a BBC adaptation. Despite his obscure origins and awkward manner, Merdle is lionized by people of fashion who jostle to invest with him, until his suicide reveals that he was a swindler who left everyone who trusted in him destitute. As Dickens described it:

Numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel.

Scoundrel and its kin don't have that Dickensian rumble anymore, not just because we've rejected Victorian morality but because we've rejected the class system it rested on. Scoundrel, wretch, knave, rogue, bounder, rascal, cad -- just about every label in the Victorian moral menagerie originated as a name for the lowborn, a vagabond, a menial, or a bumpkin, and each of them implied one or another deficiency of breeding. When someone asks Merdle's Jeeves-like chief butler why he wasn't surprised to learn of his master's suicide, he answers, "Sir, Mr. Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentlemanly act on Mr. Merdle's part would surprise me."

True, scoundrel hasn't quite gone the way of cad and bounder. People still use the word when they want to suggest high-collared Victorian rectitude -- presumably what Lillian Hellman was reaching for when she used Scoundrel Time as the tile of her 1976 memoir of the McCarthy years. But unless you're Elie Weisel, it's hard to use scoundrel in earnest without coming off as starchy or superior. It isn't the word most of us would use to warn someone off a shady suitor or a dubious investment scheme; if we use it at all, it's in a jocular way. You think of the movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Steve Martin and Michael Caine playing rival con-men. You knew from the title alone that it was a comedy.

We’d probably have a different take on the movie if it had been called Dirty Rotten Sociopaths. That’s not a word we ever use affectionately. It's reserved for unsympathetic malefactors, particularly the ones who operate at a Madoffian or Ted Bundyan scale; we tend not to waste the term on small-bore grifters and muggers. But sociopath isn't the kind of clinical language that Weisel was alluding to, which exonerates badness by reframing it as illness that can be dealt with compassionately. The label has nothing to do the phenomenon that sociologists call "the medicalization of deviance" and that Steven Sondheim described crisply in "Gee, Officer Krupke": “I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived.”

People who call Madoff a sociopath have no intention of exonerating him or extenuating his actions, and most have no interest in the armchair diagnoses of the talk-show psychologists -- sociopath? narcissist? manic disorder?[1] Nowadays sociopath is just a loose term of abuse for anybody you want to claim is unfettered by the pangs of conscience. No major political figure has escaped the label, from Obama and both Clintons to George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich. You even see people calling Dick Cheney a sociopath. (I say "even" because most of the lists of diagnostic criteria for the label start with "superficially charming.")

When it comes to the crunch, sociopath doesn't really add anything to what the Victorians expressed as "heartless wretch.” Except that now the moral judgment comes draped in a white coat, as the kind of objective scientific classification that confers the authority to police and punish in the modern world. You can't suspend a kid from school nowadays just for being unruly or obstreperous; you need a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder. And you can’t put someone away just for being a scoundrel.

Of course we still have plenty of words that describe these derelictions in purely moral terms, but most of them are the colloquialisms and vulgarisms of familiar conversation. The New York Post had its writers calling Madoff "Bernie the Bum,” evoking the front stoop language of guys from the old neighborhood who don't know from narcissism or sociopathy. Donald Trump called him a sleazebag, and others compared him to a heaping quantity of ordure. And quite a few people called him a scumbag; Mad magazine even ran a spoof poster for a movie about Madoff called "Scumbag Billionaire."

As it happens, that’s the same word Bill Clinton used during the campaign last year to describe the author of an unflattering article about him in Vanity Fair. The next day he had a spokesman apologize for his language as "inappropriate." But its inappropriateness is exactly what makes this language effective: it proves that your anger is so genuine and strong that it bursts through the normal restraints.

I certainly wouldn't wax elegiac about words like scoundrel or wretch, not with the class baggage they carried. But it’s odd that we have to step outside of the language of public life when we want to express authentic indignation or forcefully reprehend someone simply for being bad. Which while I’m at it is another word that Dickens took a lot more seriously than we do.

1. Actually, it has been a while since sociopathy was a recognized psychiatric diagnosis; in DSM-IV it has been replaced by a cluster of antisocial personality disorders. Return