The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (12 page)

Presumptive
means “probable,” based on a reasonable assumption, as in “Bush and Gore have been, for a year, the
presumptive
standard-bearers.” The meaning of
presumptuous
departs sharply from that, to “arrogant, assuming the unwarranted”—the presuming in that formulation to be unreasonable, not to mention uppity and pushy.

Few suffixes split the meaning so drastically from the root word. A subtler difference was examined some years ago, when a State Department spokesman denounced as
contemptible
an article of mine sneering at some feckless action of the then secretary. An alert reporter followed up with “Don’t you mean
contemptuous
?” To which the quick-thinking diplomat replied, “That, too.”

Doofusism.
“Bush has been minimized and diminished by Hollywood liberals,” said Lionel Chetwynd, a Hollywood conservative, about the new president, “and it’s reflected in all those
Saturday Night Live
sketches, which depict him as a
doofus
.”

The derogation
doofus
popped up in the ’60s and is usually thought to be an alteration of
goofus,
the noun form of
goofy
. However, the German
doof
means “dull-witted,” and there is this file entry in the
Dictionary of American Regional English,
harking to the ’50s: “As a boy growing up around adults who used German words, I heard ‘
doofus
’ a lot … to mean something like ‘you dumbass.’ “

The synonym
dumb-ass
made its third appearance in the
New York Times
two months ago when President Clinton was reported to have told
Rolling Stone
interviewer Jann Wenner, “And it was only then that I worked out with Colin Powell this
dumb-ass
‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing.”

The magazine immediately issued a correction, saying that its stenographer had erred in transcribing
don’t ask
as
dumb-ass,
which suggested that the president had repeated the phrase. The White House’s recording of the interview had been taped over, perhaps in a fit of frugality, and a Clinton spokesman was pleased to accept
Rolling Stone
’s apology.

Apparently the sensitivity to the possible use of the term stemmed from a notion that
dumb-ass
is a mild vulgarism referring to the posterior. More likely, it is a variant of
jackass,
the name of an innocent animal that bears the burden of frequent disparagement for stubbornness or stupidity.

Both as a modifier and as a noun,
dumb-ass
should be hyphenated as an aid to avert pronunciation of the silent
b
. Caution should be exercised in applying
dumb
to a person who is mute, because of the second sense of the word, meaning “unintelligent,” but as a noun,
dumb-ass
can be used without shame as a suitable synonym for
doofus
.

Duckmanship.
There should be no debate over the meaning of
weaponized:
a biological or chemical agent “put in a form that can be used effectively in a weapon.”

Asked about “weapons grade” anthrax, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, replied: “You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or
weaponized
or not
weaponized
. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent.” The scientist added, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.”

Not quite. Coinage of this political aphorism is attributed to the labor leader Walter Reuther in the late 1930s, on how to identify a Communist: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it just may be a duck.”

If it sounds like an old aphorism and works like an old aphorism …

E

Enchiladaville.
The governor of California, Gray Davis, after meeting with President Bush about the energy shortage causing rolling blackouts in the Golden State, said, “The
big enchilada,
the thing that really matters, above all else, is temporary price relief.”

The governor is wandering in a no-man’s-land between a
whole enchilada
and the
big enchilada
. A
whole enchilada
means “the entirety of a thing,” its synonyms “the whole ball of wax,” “whole nine yards,” “whole schmear” and the etymologically mysterious “whole shebang.” After Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, the former California governor Ronald Reagan said that Democrats, long the majority party in Congress, could no longer claim that divided government impeded progress. “The Democrats cannot fuzz up the issue by blaming the White House,” he said. “They’ve got the
whole enchilada
now.”

The
big enchilada
is not a situation but a person. It is “the boss, the person of undoubted authority and influence, the one on top,” and from a law officer’s point of view, “the main target.” In a taped Watergate conversation in 1973, Bob Haldeman says of John Mitchell, the former attorney general, “He is as high up as they’ve got.” John Ehrlichman concurs, “He’s the
big enchilada
.” Queried about the coinage of this variant, Ehrlichman wrote me from jail a few years later: “I coined the phrase. I’ve cooked my own enchiladas for years. My California upbringing. Could have said ‘big fish’ or ‘top dog’ or ‘big cheese,’ I guess.”

Governor Davis has been using
big enchilada
to mean, as he defines it himself, “the thing that really matters above all else”—the
ne plus ultra,
the “acme, ultimate” or “most profound degree.” In my view it confuses two distinct slang terms.

An
enchilada
is a tortilla into which is rolled a mixture of meat or beans and seasoned with a sauce made of chili, a hot red pepper (the
chil
in
enchilada
). The entire thing can be eaten by a person of great influence in the dark.

Your discussion of the
whole enchilada
included practically every variant. In fact, it might be said that you gave your readers the whole
kit and caboodle.
My immigrant mother loved this expression and made it her own, by combining Yiddish and English into
de gantze caboodle.

Sam Unterricht

Hewlett, New York

The End of Minority.
The San Diego City Council last month voted to strike the word
minority
from official use.

Ordinarily, I resist
diktats
about language from politicians (in which I am in a you-know-what), but in California, no racial or ethnic or linguistic group is in the majority. Does that make everybody a
minority?
Only to statisticians and demographers. First, a
minority
is a group, not an individual; you can say, “I am a member of a
minority,
“ but you strain the bounds of good usage when you say, “I am a
minority
.” This bound is strained frequently.

Second,
minority
in the past half-century has taken on a meaning of “nonwhite.” Though white Jews, Muslims and Buddhists are also self-identified as
minorities,
the primary sense is clear: say, “I’m a
minority
American,” and everyone knows you mean you are black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian or whatever combination you told the census taker.

The word gained that sense, says Fred R. Shapiro, who is editing the
Yale Dictionary of Quotations,
when the Supreme Court in the 1938
United States v. Carolene Products Co.
referred in a footnote to religious, ethnic, national and racial groups as “discrete and insular
minorities
.” In 1949, the
Journal of Negro Education
first used the noun as an adjective in writing of “
minority
workers.”

A turning point came when the
Washington Post
in 1977 reported, “Washington, the nation’s premier black city, with a
minority
population of more than 70 percent … ” The newspaper then asked itself, “A ‘minority’ population of more than 70 percent?” That it characterized as “racial math” and editorialized that it preferred the old, realistic math.

In one of his final-week farewells, President Bill Clinton posed the profound question, “What will the terms
majority
and
minority
mean when there is no
majority
race in America?”

He did not stay for an answer, but mine would be, Drop the racial sense of
minority
. They’re not crazy in San Diego.

In the United States, non-Hispanic whites still make up the national majority. But more than half of the one hundred most populous cities have a nonwhite majority, which makes many whites a minority in their hometowns. That new
minority
is learning not to get waspish.

Enjoy!
A lissome Japanese waitress at the Yosaku restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, presented me with a bowl of
Nabayaki Udon
—thick noodles in broth with bits of chicken and shrimp—and then smiled and said, “Enjoy.”

That is not a Japanese word. Indeed, that invitation to pleasure in eating is not an Asian attitude. According to my
Times
colleague Nicholas D. Kristof, author with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of
Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia,
servers of food in Japan are likely to say
honno okuchi yogoshi de gozaimasuga,
“here’s a little something that will make your mouth dirty.” The idea is to apologize for the meal and to suggest humbly that it will not be enjoyable at all to the honored guest. The Chinese equivalent, as a mouthwatering repast is placed before the eater, is
meishemma cai,
or “this food is nothing much.”

In American eateries, however, and in restaurants around the world that cater to English-speaking patrons, the new server’s imperative—Enjoy!—can be heard. The mock-stern but cheerful command is spreading like the Asian leguminous vine kudzu, rivaling the readily understood
OK
and the widely accepted
no problem
as a major American contribution to a universal language.

Waiters (or servers, as the unisexy prefer to be called) in every culture have their national phrases to accompany the placement of a plate.
Bon appétit,
say the French, and the wish for a hearty appetite is expressed in Greek as
kali orexi,
in Spanish as
buen provecho
and in German as
guten Appetit
.

A German waiter is as likely to say simply
bitte,
which usually means “please,” and the same idea is expressed in New York’s Russian Tea Room as
pozhaluista
. The closest translation of these would be the neutral comment of American hash slingers as they plonk down the plate: “There you go.”

A British butler is likely to warn, “The plate is hot, Madam.” Until a decade or so ago, the Yiddish term was
es gezunterheyt,
“eat in good health”; the Gaelic equivalent is
sláinte,
“health.”

But then along came the imperative, intransitive
Enjoy!
That exhortation has become so ubiquitous that in a Diner’s Bill of Rights concocted recently by Zagat’s restaurant survey, one of the inalienable rights of patrons was “for the waiter NOT to say
‘enjoy
’ after the food is served.”

How did it all begin? In his 1958 book,
For 2 Cents Plain,
Harry Golden wrote: “When my mother served our meals … she would always say,
‘Enjoy, enjoy
.’ … The word
enjoy
was seldom used by itself. It was always repeated.” Accordingly, Golden’s next best seller was titled
Enjoy, Enjoy!
In 1968, the
New York Times
reporter Marylin Bender quoted the furrier Jacques Kaplan on the effects of inflation: “Whenever they felt money would lose its value, people would gorge themselves. It’s a dancing over the volcano attitude, an
enjoy-enjoy
philosophy.”

Even as the dialectically duplicated verb lost its duplication on its journey to general usage, lexicographers noticed the way the hortatory
Enjoy!
did not transmit action to an object. Lillian Feinsilver wrote in her Yiddish dictionary in 1970 that
enjoy
as an intransitive verb “has become fairly common in recent years…. ‘
Enjoy
yourself ’ was abbreviated to the simple
‘Enjoy
’ by the solicitous Jewish mother.” She noted the oddly intransitive usage by the violinist Mischa Elman: “I get a great kick out of life. I know how to
enjoy
.”

Now, as a service to philological scholars, we examine the grammatical puzzlement contained in this seemingly simple food fiat.
Enjoy yourself,
meaning “have a good time,” is clearly reflexive, turning the verb’s action back on
you,
the understood subject. But the simple and now far more common
Enjoy!
poses the question:
Enjoy
what? The food? Yourself gorging the food? The object is indeterminate; the verb’s action does not know where to go.

“When used solely in the imperative mood,” says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster’s New World Dictionaries, “the intransitive verb
‘enjoy
’ may well qualify as a ‘defective paradigm,’ whereby a word fails to exhibit the full range of expected inflections. How odd that a word of such felicitous intent seems to reveal itself only in the stern imperative.”

Jeffrey McQuain, the new editor of the newsletter
Copy Editor,
calls the new use of
Enjoy!
“the implied intransitive” because it has no direct object but implies there should be one. He tracks the construction back to the ancient
Eat!
or the Italian
Mangia! Mangia!

“The implied intransitive is especially popular in sports shorthand,” McQuain says. “Coaches and fans yell their advice in the imperative mood without the subject (you) and without the object.” Thus,
Bunt!
could mean either “Bunt the ball” or “Bunt, you miserable hitter.”

Beware the loss of clarity in the defective paradigm or the implied intransitive. Until recently, verbs could be transitive (I
love
you) or intransitive (I
love
). Ron Meyers of New York deplores the de-transitivizing trend, using as his examples “please wait while your credit card is
authorizing
“and “this book usually
ships
in three days.” What subject of the sentence is doing the authorizing or shipping? What object is the verb’s action being done to?