The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (15 page)

This linguistic case is ripe for semantic decision; certiorari accepted.
Federal
(from
foedus,
“league”) is an adjective that has come to mean “characteristic of a national union” and not “of a confederation”;
federalize,
despite the powers denied the national government and reserved for the states and the people in the Tenth Amendment, is a verb meaning “to bring under central control.”

However, the Supreme Court, even as it has recently been devolving power from the central government to the states,
cleaves
to the earliest meaning: Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a decision this month briefly departing from that decentralizing trend, said that a federal law protecting drivers’ privacy over South Carolina’s objections “did not run afoul of the
federalism
principles.” He was using
federalism
as Patrick Henry did, in the sense of “sharing power.”

I care not what semantic course others may take; as for me, give me current meaning or give me death. Time for the Supremes to bow to the inexorability of common usage, a kind of Tenth Amendment of language change. Most people take
federalism
to mean “dominated by the federal government,” much as the empire-building Hamilton intended. In this, Chief Justice Rehnquist is behind the times.

Thus, the headline words “in Blow to
Federalism,
“ which meant “anti-central government,” were correctly up to date; it would have been even better stated as “in Blow to
Federalizing
.” Norma Loquendi’s final decision is remanded to the court for reversal.

You used the phrase, “certiorari accepted,” in apparent mimicry of the Supreme Court’s exercise of its discretionary jurisdiction to review lower-court decisions. In asking the Court to consider a case, a lawyer files a petition for a writ of certiorari; such a writ would direct a lower court to certify the record of a case for review (certiorari = that it be certified). If four members of the Court vote in favor of the petition, the Court “grants” a writ of certiorari, an action often shortened to “cert. granted.” Thus, certiorari is not accepted or rejected, it is granted or denied.

Again in apparent imitation of judicial locutions, you declare that “Norma Loquendi’s final decision is remanded to the court for reversal.” When the Supreme Court decides against a lower-court decision, it does not send the case back for reversal; it reverses the decision itself and then remands the case to the inferior court. A common formulation would be that “the decision below is reversed and the case remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion”; this diplomatic form of words leaves the lower court with a measure of latitude in deciding how to deal with the reversal.

J. William Doolittle

Washington, D.C.

You assert that the word “federalism” was “coined in 1788 by Patrick Henry.” This appears to be a well-researched assertion, perhaps derived from a search in the American Memory database, pointing to Henry’s usage of “federalism” on June 6, 1788. The citation improves upon the
Oxford English Dictionary
’s 1793 dating and the June 14, 1788, first use in the
Dictionary of Americanisms.

A search in the Accessible Archives database, however, yields an earlier example of this word. A December 26, 1787, “letter from a gentleman in Salem” quoted in the January 16, 1788, issue of the
Pennsylvania Gazette,
includes the following sentence: “For before the federalism of a HANCOCK, a BOWDOIN, a DANA, a KING, and many other illustrious characters, who are members of the convention, anti-federalism must droop, and recoil in silent shame.”

Fred R. Shapiro

Editor,
The Yale Dictionary of Quotations

New Haven, Connecticut

Finagle.
Reporting from the recent Arab summit meeting in Beirut, Neil MacFarquhar of the
New York Times
wrote that some participants could be found wandering through the smoke-filled hotel lobby talking to “reporters who
finagle
their way through dragnet security.”

The use of that apparent Yiddishism in covering an Arab event struck me as amusing. I turned to Leo Rosten’s
Joys of Yiddish
for a rundown on
finagle
—and could not find it.

That’s because it is not a Yiddishism. (Funny, you don’t look English.) Like
mishmash,
which dates to 15th-century English, the verb
finagle
is a word that sounds Germanic. It rhymes with
bagel,
from the Old High German verb
boug,
“to bend.” (A store in Boston calls itself Finagle a Bagel.)

The verb appears occasionally in the
Times,
especially in the entertainment sections, not in quotation marks. Describing the movie
Family Man:
“the plot allows him to
finagle
his way back to Wall Street.” Describing Richard Wagner’s
Ring
operas: “You cannot pursue power without sabotaging love; you cannot have love without relinquishing power. Wotan tries to
finagle
this.”

That’s because it is not slang, but a once-special term now in such general use that it has shed its dialect status. One proposed origin is in the southwest English shires:
fainaigue,
“to cheat; to renege on a debt; to deceive by flattery,” perhaps associated with the Old French
fornier,
“to deny.”

However, the
Dictionary of American Regional English
speculates that it may be an eponym from Gregor von Feinaigle, a “German proponent of mnemonics who lectured (and was often ridiculed) in England and France.” (It’s an easy way to remember his name.)

Finagler
first appeared in the United States in 1922. In current use, the element of outright cheating has faded; its primary sense is no longer “to obtain by trickery or dishonest means.” Deft deception now dominates:
finagle,
as we use it today, is “to slyly gain entry or advantage; skillfully to employ a devious scheme to achieve one’s ends.” A
finagler
is one who knows the ins and outs of power brokerage and favor exchange, who finds ways to exploit the weaknesses of others, who knows how to use indirection to gain leverage and win some small but useful advantage.

A crook he’s not; a devious schemer the
finagler
remains, drawing minor opprobrium for his methods as well as a tut-tutting admiration for his ability to deliver results.

In chemistry at Brooklyn College in the fifties, to use “Finagle’s Constant” was to create data to support a predetermined result. It’s also interesting that “finagle” rhymes with “inveigle,” which has meanings, or at least connotations, that overlap “finagle.” See if you can finagle to inveigle Hegel out of his bagel.

Martin Smith

Ypsilanti, Michigan

Fire That Wall.
The hot new word in primary politics this season is
firewall
.

Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, told the Gannett News Service that in thirteen state contests after the New Hampshire primary, “virtually every one of those states presents the possibility of a
firewall
.” (In a parody in the
Weekly Standard,
Rove was shown to be conducting “Operation
Firewall.”)

“In the past week,” said Dan Schnur, John McCain’s communications director, “you’ve started to see the Bush people talk about Michigan as a
firewall
.”

The word clearly has a Bush connotation. In a United Press International dispatch in 1989 about the political genius of the GOP’s Lee Atwater, it was noted that “what clinched the nomination was a political
firewall
Atwater constructed with the pack of Southern primaries on Super Tuesday.”

Jeffrey Birnbaum wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
just after that 1988 campaign that Bush’s strategy “was to lock into place a political
firewall
in the Midwest to prevent any late surge by Democrat Michael Dukakis.”

In political parlance, the word means “an unassailable political barrier; a front-running state campaign denying a creditable showing to a challenger who must do well in that area for his or her underdog campaign to sur-vive.”

The word is also used more generally. The Alliance for Worker Retirement Security accused President Clinton of trying to “break the traditional
firewall
between Social Security and income taxes.” The
Washington Post
noted in 1987 that Reagan officials said they were “committed to nurturing the contras as a
firewall
against Communism.” The word is stronger than
bulwark
and not as rickety as
rampart;
it has replaced the earlier
seawall.

In his 1951
Dictionary of Americanisms,
Mitford Mathews cited a 1759 transaction of the Moravian Historical Society regarding the proper way to build a house: “the chimney and
firewall
shall be made strictly according to the draft.” The wall built to prevent the spread of fire was extended metaphorically to a barrier against anything harmful. More recently, in computer lingo, a
firewall
is a security system set up to protect a network from direct attack by hackers through the Internet; in politics, it is now the preventive preferred by strategists who, if the
firewall
fails, turn to
damage control
.

In an aircraft with the engine in front, the
firewall
is the fireproof barrier between the engine compartment and the crew/passenger compartment. In flying, it is sometimes urgently necessary to go to full power, which is done by pushing the throttle(s) all the way in (or forward), i.e. towards the firewall, hence the verb “to firewall” the engines.

Professor Steven H. Weintraub

Louisiana State University

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Fog of War.
“The early days of any battle introduce what’s called the
fog of war,
“ said Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, “and we’re still looking through that fog to find the truth.” Senator Hillary Clinton used the same military metaphor: “We need to cut through the bureaucratic and turf battles…. We need to cut through the
fog of war
here at home.”

They were speaking of the frustrating investigation into the source of anthrax in the mail. This picked up on the repeated uses of the phrase at the embattled Defense Department regarding the air campaign in Afghanistan. Asked if he could be sure that Osama bin Laden would not try to escape to another country, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied: “I can’t be sure of anything in life. In the
fog of war,
it is a confused picture on the ground. Half of the 24 hours is darkness, there’s a bit of a problem with dust in that region and weather’s going to get bad soon. You can’t be sure of anything.” General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, later chimed in with “In the
fog of war,
things happen that you don’t expect.” Twelve years before, a predecessor of his at that job, Admiral William Crowe, extended that uncertainty principle; he said that his Pentagon officers “hear a lot about the
fog of war,
but they’ve also learned that the fog of peacetime is rather mind-boggling as well.”

This fog originally crept in on the little cat feet of Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian strategist whose 1832 book,
On War,
guided generals of many nations through the wars of the 20th century. Using the direct literal translation of the 19th century, his words were “The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not unfrequently—like the effect of a fog or moonshine—gives to things exaggerated dimension and an unnatural appearance.” (In the same book,
Vom Kriege
in German, published one year after his death, Clausewitz wrote, “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” Few books are immortal-quotation twofers.)

In a two-front war such as we are now experiencing, the phrase is also used to recall past periods of confusion and apprehension and to offer per-spective: “Right after Pearl Harbor,” said Representative Lindsey Graham of South Carolina after the anthrax scare forced the House of Representatives into recess, “this country was in a bit of a
fog of war
. It took us a while to get up and running. But over time, we got our footing.”

My colleague in columny down the hall, Maureen Dowd, found a way to turn the phrase around. She evoked the terrorist danger from spores and viruses sprayed in a fine mist: “We know about the
fog of war
. Now we learn about the
war of fog
.”