univocal

Jacob Frank is a complicated character who escapes univocal judgment.

It’s pretty commonplace—to some extent in journalism, academic finance literature, and economics—to talk about investors or shareholders as if they were all sort of necessarily of one mind about things or that they always agree or that they should be expected to agree or that we could clearly and easily represent their interests in a sort of univocal way.

But the narrative emerging from key players in the Arab world for which Tunisia’s Arab Spring legacy presents a clear challenge — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt — was far more univocal: The events in Tunisia marked the death knell for political Islam in democracy.

“The univocal narrative, the chronological installation, who’s telling the story, what histories are not being told.”

For even very familiar terms there is no univocal public meaning to find.