The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (13 page)

Grammarians, lexicographers and all those living in syntax will find delectation in plunging into a deep, delicious analysis of this emerging phenomenon. And to those happy linguists we can only say …

There are a lot of intransitive verbs in the language, and, when somebody tells you “Get lost!” you probably don’t wonder where you should get lost (since, of course, if everyone knew where, you wouldn’t be lost). What is wrong with enjoy, intransitive verb, meaning simply, “enjoy yourself; indulge in enjoyment”? There is nothing defective about a paradigm of a verb that, among many that have, has shifted from transitive to transitive/intransitive or even just intransitive.

Laurence Urdang

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Your column leads in with a comment about how Japanese waitresses, uh, servers would never make a comment analogous to “enjoy” because it is non Asian, but instead would make some kind of self-deprecating remark that is comical to Western ears. Westerners love to trot out the whole Asian self-abnegation bit, but it is overblown.

Sometimes one does encounter an echo of that self-deprecatory remark, but more likely your waitron will say something like “go-yukkuri dozo” (go ahead, relax, take your time) or just “dozo” (go ahead).

Adam Rice

Austin, Texas

In your learned paper on the Rise of the Intransitive, you do not mention some of the predecessors of
enjoy.
By recent I mean of course those I have seen born and taking hold.
Identify
is one of them. One used to “identify oneself” with Dracula or some other favorite character. Again, to say he “converted to Catholicism” would have seemed strange before our blessed day. One said: “he was converted,” or “he converted himself,” or “became a convert.” I suspect that the intransitive grew out of “he converted to oil,” when “his furnace” is understood by the context. During the protests here against apartheid, universities and other philanthropies were urged “to divest,” that is, get rid of South African securities. “Divest!” sounds to me like the motto of the Strip-Tease Defense League.

Matching the change in verb use is the reverse twist, as in
rankle
and
boggle,
now made transitive. It’s a pity in both cases. We need
it rankles
for
the festering thought of a slight or an insult, and the other for resisting, being reluctant, hesitating as
the result of a shock.
We have plenty of other words for the current
boggle
glued to “the mind” in the sense of discomfiting, bewildering, confusing.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

Enroned.
“I don’t want to
Enron
the American people,” said the Democrat Tom Daschle, defining the new verb in his next sentence. “I don’t want to see them holding the bag at the end of the day just like Enron employees have held the bag.”

The workers who have been
enroned
(if we’re going to use the name as a general verb meaning “cheated,” drop the eponym’s initial capital, as we did with
boycott
and
bork
) are called
Enronites
. (This specific group of cheatees takes a capital.)

Other energy-related companies, wrote Bethany McLean in
Fortune,
“disclaimed any sort of
Enronesque
behavior.” In forming an adjective,
-esque
strikes me as a more elegant suffix than
-ish,
as in
enronish
or the less critical
enronlike
. (
Child-ish
is “puerile, immature,” always with a pejorative connotation, while
child-like
is “innocent,” always endearing.)

Michael Wolff, a columnist for
New York
magazine, committed a late hit on Tina Brown when her
Talk
magazine folded, describing the buzz-worthily glamorous editor as “a little
enronish
.” This caused the linguistically savvy Jim Sullivan of the
Boston Globe
to note that the adjective “
enronish
captures the spirit of the big magazine cannonball but not its style. It is clunky.
Enronian
rolls off the tongue. Someone responsible for large-scale destruction is then an
‘enronista
.’ The process of destruction:
enronism
. The verb is simply the name, as in ‘He got
enroned
last Thursday.’ “

Note the general agreement about the spelling of the verb. The
o
in
En-ron
is pronounced
ah,
as in “on,” and not
oh,
as in “throne.” When adding -
ed
after the single
n,
however, the word appears to invite the pronunciation rhyming with “enthroned.” Should we, then, double the
n
to produce
enronned
? No. If this has been worrying you, stop worrying. The analogy to follow is that of
environ,
as in Lincoln’s “I am
environed
with difficulties”—one
n,
pronounced
ah,
not
oh
. To
enron
has a lot more snap than the unimaginative to
enronize
.

The suffix -
on
is considered by corporate image makers in the energy and technology fields to be a futuristic syllable—hence Exxon and Chevron, Raytheon and Micron. In the naming of the merged Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth companies in 1986, the consultants Lippincott & Margulies suggested
Enteron,
of Greek origin, which began with the first syllable of
energy
and concluded with the slick, with-it
on
. What’s more, a specialized industrial sense of
enteron
was reported to be “a pipeline system transmitting nourishment.”

However, when it was pointed out to the directors that the common medical meaning of
enteron
was “alimentary canal, intestines, guts,” company officials hastily demanded that a new name be found evocative of energy and the future but with no suggestion of upset stomach or bowel movement. I confirmed this history of corporate nomenclature in a call to Mark Palmer, a spokesman for the bankrupt company. “Legend has it,” he added, “that they told the naming firm that they had twenty-four hours to come up with something else or they wouldn’t pay them a plug nickel—and they came up with
Enron
.” Palmer seemed relieved that was all he was being asked about.

The namers did not worry about the association with football’s
end run
or the possible play on “take the money
enron
.” In future corporate naming,
en-
is very likely to be avoided as a prefix, and the suffix
-on
is off.

Er, um (ahem).
A well-watched Russian newscast called
Naked Truth
is anchored by a woman with a serious expression who slowly strips as she recounts the major events of the day. The weather forecaster is topless. Above the AP article about this news uncoverage, the
Seattle Times
carried the headline “Russian Anchorwomen Do the Nudes,
er,
News.”

At about the same time last year, the
New York Times
headlined an article about Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Senate using that same representation of a verbal delay: “The Wonk,
er,
Woman Behind Mrs. Clinton.”

These are examples in headlines of the arch pause. In olden times, writers drew attention to puns, nice turns of phrase or metaphors that the inattentive reader might otherwise miss with
so to speak, as it were
or
if you will
. Now the preferred little alarm to awake the sleepy is the written
er,
um, uh, ah, well
or, for extreme throat-clearing,
ahem
.

The signification of the arch pause with an
er
or an
um
is rampant in journalese. It says, “Here comes a little witticism, you ninny,” as in this usage by Al Kamen in the
Washington Post:
“Loop fans will recall Tuesday’s item on Monica S. Lewinsky preparing to field questions from law students in Manhattan that night as part of an upcoming HBO special. It was quite an,
um,
affair.” That meaning of the pause—“Gee, but I’m being naughty here”—recently extended to the gardening pages of the
New York Times:
“The spring peeper, Pseudacris crucifer,” croaked Anne Raver in a delightful piece about frogs, “is one of the chorus frogs, so-called because of its joyful song heralding warmer weather and,
ahem,
the joys of mating.”

Sometimes the arch pause says, “I am understating,” as in the
Times
columnist Gail Collins’s “The wounds of the primary campaign have,
um,
not exactly healed.” At other times, the writer, as if wondering, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” asks the reader’s pardon for having the audacity to wax metaphoric, as in my colleague Paul Krugman’s reference to “the renewed enthusiasm of Americans for huge, gas-guzzling vehicles—an enthusiasm,
er,
fueled by cheap gas.” In the same way, Andrew Coyne of Canada’s
National Post
wrote last month that an energy report’s “call for increasing capacity on interstate transmission lines is,
er,
well grounded.”

Writing about the movie
The Mummy Returns,
the UPI Hollywood reporter Vernon Scott pulled out all the lingual stops: “While plots for mummy movies thicken and special effects provide more gaudy mayhem, the deep, primeval horror of the walking dead has been
well, er, ah,
deadened, so to speak.” The reader who did not appreciate that metaphoric play must be wrapped in gauze.

The publication that led the way in the use of the arch pause is the
Economist
. In 1975, it wrote of the lawyers in the offices of Arab nations participating in the economic boycott of Israel: “Each office has the task of seeing that its country’s trade relations are strictly,
er,
kosher.” A year later, it wrote that “for Westminster to interfere with Edinburgh would be like,
er,
the House of Lords rejecting Commons legislation.” And in the same month, an article on industrial success was headlined, “Take a Bow, Britain (
er,
Wales).”

In British English, the self-deprecating hesitation or Churchillian stutter is often used to draw attention to what follows; Rudyard Kipling in 1913 described life in smoking rooms as seen “through clouds of ‘
Ers
’ and ‘
Ums
.’” Americans tend to see it as expressive of indecision. I put that to Johnny Grimond, editor of the
Economist
’s style guide: “Probably when we’ve resorted to
er
or
um,
it’s not so much an indication of indecision,” he replied with authority, “but when one is led inexorably to a conclusion that is embarrassing or awkward or obvious.”

Geoffrey Nunberg, who does a regular language feature on NPR’s
Fresh Air,
says he thinks that the use of the written
er, um, uh,
is an articulation of the dash, with which writers like Thackeray and Trollope indicated a rethinking of what went before. “In theory, in writing there should never be any false starts and pauses. When you use
er
or
um,
you are reproducing in a fictitious way the process of communication. It’s a specious sense of the writer letting you in on the business of composition.” Nunberg fears, as I do, that we’ll see much more of this reconstruction of the writer’s thought process in e-mail, which usually revels in the conversational and prefers the appearance of a work in progress.

If the goal of the writer is to reflect a character’s sloppy spoken language or to set on paper some revealing oral self-correction, then the pauses signified by
er
and its ilk serve a communicative purpose. We all make sounds that show we are thinking before we speak, and a writer’s recording of them, though sometimes annoying, adds verisimilitude to dialogue.

But that’s not the arch pause in narrative or commentary. My target today is not just the signifier for “Here comes one of my best zingers” but the one that says, “I ostentatiously hesitate to say this.” A good example of the latter is in a note that President George Bush the elder wrote to his wife, Barbara, after being told that his opponent, Michael Dukakis, was scoring points with voters by showing public affection for his wife, Kitty. “Sweetsie, please look at how Mike and Kitty do it,” Bush wrote. “Try to be closer in, more—
well, er
romantic—on camera.”