At a high enough level of 'care and feeding' it's possible to pull off these things in assembly, or Fortran, or whatever, rendering the term completely meaningl

At a high enough level of 'care and feeding' it's possible to pull off these things in assembly, or Fortran, or whatever, rendering the term completely meaningless. C++ 'basically compiles down to C' for some constructs more than others (exceptions, RTTI, multiple inheritance goop) but if the C it compiles to is dark, arcane, unreadable crap, then this is no more illuminating than the truism that C++ basically compiles down to assembly language.