(EDIT: removed the first part since I realized you were replying to some comment further up, not my example.)

> Rust has, unfortunately, changed the narrative so that people now believe memory safety is a property of the language, when it is one of the implementation.

I am not sure I agree with that (the concept of memory-safe languages looong predates Rust), but you can just define a memory-safe language as one where all conforming implementations are memory-safe -- making it a feature of the language itself, not just a feature of a particular implementation.

I am not really saying the term is not useful, the idea that it is the only legitimate way of memory safety is what I am questioning.