 This slow erasure of “evil” and its cognates from many European languages, which began in the seventeenth century, was due to the rejection of the concept of evil, especially by elites. Doctors, moral philosophers, natural scientists, and even theologians shied away from evil—preferring more tractable notions like badness, harm, and misfortune, or quasi-quantifiable concepts like pain, suffering, trauma, and disutility. Traditional views of ontologically substantive and supernatural evil—something able to possess a body or terrorize a soul—came to be seen as quaint, unscientific, embarrassing (Ruppel 2019).