On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 10:47:07 +1200
Greg Ewing
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
For me, it refers to a general feeling of consistency, pureness and standing out on its own. It's abstract and doesn't have anything to do with humans.
Yep. And the proposed replacement "clean/dirty" doesn't even mean the same thing. It's entirely possible for a thing to be spotlessly clean without being beautiful or elegant.
Well, not to mention that if you care about discrimination of people (assuming one doesn't understand what polysemy is :-)), then I'm not sure that clean/dirty is much better than beautiful/ugly (see e.g. Norbert Elias "The Civilizing Process" about how cleanliness norms historically developed - at least in the Western world - in the upper classes of pacified European kingdoms), while elegant/inelegant may even be worse. Regards Antoine.