I have had more simple enjoyment watching Netflix The Diplomat than I have had watching any show since The West Wing. It is not coincidental, really, since Deborah Cahn, who did a good deal of writing for The West Wing is the creator of The Diplomat. That’s Deborah below.

Still, there are little things that pop up from time to time. Expressions that are a little too much or wickedly inadequate. This belongs in the former category.

Julian Hoope (Rupert Vansittart) plays a hopelessly stuffy British diplomat. What he says is always correct in some sense, but it is not ever helpful. In the setting of today’s celebration, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) is sitting with a group of men at table. She is having trouble getting comfortable in her chair, but she wants at all costs to protect the agenda of the meeting.

“I’m fine,” she says, as her struggles are noticed. “She’s not fine,” explodes Hoope, and uncorks a line about how the chairs at the table presumed men’s bodies. He laments that they will never get the full cooperation of women in the diplomatic service if they do not provide suitable furniture for them. But then he calls this mismatch of diplomat and chair, “Structural inequity in the plainest sense.”

The funny thing to me is that he isn’t wrong, but he has hijacked one of the most contemporary and difficult terms of the current political debate in the U. S. and used it to refer to a chair. If you have been reading, for instance, about “structural racism” in U. S. politics, this is the “structural” Hoope has in mind. It is a big time word; a completely contentious word. As is “inequity,”

And he’s talking about a chair. And he’s not even wrong.

The more is let it lie quietly in my mind, the more I savor it.