You're right about Wolfe's point in the article, but if we talk about the "moral tone of the time", which is what I thought we were talking about, the language we use didn't come into the equation. Otherwise, we're into Chomskims and such, and I'm not really qualified to go there. Semiotics, or as my prof, a semiotician himself at the time, called it, 'semi-idiotics'?
"Moral tone of the times" is the difference between our approach to life in America, in all that it suggests, today and those that preceeded us in, say, 1956. Sex relations, race relations, employer - employee relations, everything else.