The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (20 page)

Goodness, Gracious.
Donald Rumsfeld is what used to be called a “man’s man.” He is tough-minded, direct, virile, authoritative and sure of himself. As head of the Cost of Living Council in the early ’70s, the designated inflation fighter kept a tight lid on wages and prices and taught his deputy, a kid named Dick Cheney, how to crack the whip. He ran a tight White House as President Ford’s chief of staff and later, in the business world, was named one of the ten toughest executives by
Fortune
magazine. He is again secretary of defense, and woe betide the brass hat who tries an end run to lobby for a favored weapon.

If he’s so macho, then how come the phrase that comes most frequently to his lips—the words heard most often at his high-powered news conferences—is the sort of exclamation heard on
The Golden Girls
? In the height of dudgeon, professing shock just short of horror, Rumsfeld can be heard with his grandmotherly trademark: “My
goodness gracious
!”

To NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who asked about the pace of the attack on Afghanistan, the square-jawed SecDef retorted, “To hear your question and the urgency and ‘Don’t you need quick success?’—my
goodness gracious
! go back to World War II.” (Brokaw has done very well going back to World War II.) This was using the phrase as a straight interjection. Rums-feld also uses it in an adverbial form modifying an affirmative. Asked if he wanted Osama bin Laden dead, he answered, “Oh, my
goodness gracious,
yes, after what he’s done?” adding for emphasis, “You bet your life.”

According to the spouse of a senior administration official, speaking at poolside on condition of anonymity, Rummy began using “my
goodness gracious
” at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, where he first met his wife, Joyce, and continues to use it in expostulations at home.

What does it mean? What did Charles Dickens have in mind when he had a character in his 1841 novel
Barnaby Rudge
exclaim, “
Goodness gracious
me!”?

Goodness
is a frequent euphemism for
God,
a name that many believe should not be taken in vain. Shakespeare used it that way in
Henry VIII,
and the capitalization is the clue to the substitution: “For
Goodnesse
sake, consider what you do, / How you may hurt your selfe.” The phrase, with
gracious
added, I conjecture, is based on “by the grace of God.” It also appears as
gracious sakes alive
and
goodness gracious, Agnes,
the latter partly drawn from the Latin words in the Mass,
Agnus Dei
…
miserere nobis,
“lamb of God … have mercy on us,” referring in that case to Jesus as sacrificial lamb.

By the mid 19th century, the vehement exclamation had acquired a connotation of archness associated with elitist gentlewomen. Under “Gossip,” the
New York Times
reported in 1855 in trochaic measure: “
Goodness gracious!
Mrs. Davis, / Have you heard how Mrs. Thompson / Spoilt her new broche this morning?”

Another substitute word for
God
is
gee,
though
gee whiz
and
gee whillikers!
are ways of not quite saying “Jesus.”
Gosh
led to
land o’ Goshen!
This was a favorite usage of the cartoon character Loweezy, wife of Snuffy Smith, in Billy DeBeck’s comic strip
Barney Google
. DeBeck was also responsible for popularizing the expression “tetched in the haid.” Many hear the phrase
land o’ Goshen
as “Atlantic Ocean.” That confusion is known as a “mondegreen,” from the misheard line of poetry that goes “laid him on the green.” Another example of this phenomenon, expressed by many young children parroting the Pledge of Allegiance, is “I led the pigeons to the flag.” Currently,
ohmygosh
and
omigod
are often expressed in writing as a single word, thereby avoiding the appearance of blasphemy.

The alliteration of
goodness gracious
has been matched in recent years by
good grief,
popularized by the
Peanuts
cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz. According to Joan Hall, editor of the
Dictionary of American Regional English
at the University of Wisconsin, the frequency of use of
good grief
and
goodness
gracious
is running neck and neck, with
good Lord
and
good gracious
off the pace by half.

Exclamations beginning with
great
are holding their own. You can still hear
great Caesar’s ghost!
rendered half as often as
great God!
and
great
Scott!
while
great day in the mornin’
has gained a rural connotation, and a jocular quality has overtaken
great balls of fire!

With unbowed head, we approach the secular use of
holy
. In
DARE
’s survey,
holy cow!
is the most commonly used, followed by
mackerel, smoke,
Moses
and
cats
. (Don’t e-mail me another; we are dealing here with exclamations neither profane nor obscene, not popular expletives.)

Have you noticed, from many of the ejaculations cited above, how religious allusions dominate the world of exclamation?

Examples: from
ye gods and little fishes
and
heavenly days
to
hell’s bells
and
mercy me,
the lexicon of astonishment is rooted in the wonderment at the eternal.
Well, I swan
is a way of ostentatiously not swearing, and the
Pete
in
for the love of Pete
and
for Pete’s sake
is Simon Peter the apostle.
My stars!
(originally
my stars alive!
) is thought by the lexicographer Sol Steinmetz to be an alteration of
myst (all) crity,
a transposition of
Christ almighty! Heavens to Betsy
is a mystery, however; Steinmetz speculates that it might be an alteration of the obsolete
bedad!
a euphemism for
by Dad!
itself a euphemism for
by Gad!
and alteration of
by God!
but that’s a long stretch. The archaic
zounds!
is known to come from “God’s wounds.”

Not all interjections of mock horror or other jowl-shaking expostulation have biblical roots. Don’t forget
fiddlesticks!
and
get off my back.
And,
for crying out loud,
you can still stamp your foot and explode with
botheration!
Come to think of it, that last is probably a euphemism for
damnation!

After these explanations, will Secretary Rumsfeld—when seemingly taken aback or ostensibly outraged by a question, and with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs sternly at his side—continue to let off steam with the use of his quaint, old-fashioned, grandmotherly
goodness gracious!
?

Son of a gun!
I hope so.
Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!
I’d hate to see him change.

Gotcha.
“A president can help purge the system of this kind of
gotcha
politics,” George W. Bush told Larry King late last year, defining the term as “pile-on politics.”

This month, Bush inaugural parade organizers gave prominent position to the University of Tennessee marching band, from the home state of Al Gore, in what the
Washington Post
called “a particularly galling case of political
gotcha
.”

This was a variation of
gotcha journalism,
a phrase defined by the
Time
magazine columnist Calvin Trillin in 1999 as “campaign coverage dominated by attempts to reveal youthful misbehavior.” Bush’s first choice for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, described the firestorm that followed revelation of her sheltering of an illegal immigrant as “a game being played by the media, a kind of
gotcha-
game, where it’s a never-ending dribble of one story after another.”

Gotcha,
the noun, has now been entered in the latest printing of
Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary,
defined as “an unexpected, usually disconcerting challenge, revelation or catch,” its etymology “an alteration of
‘got you
.’” I would add that the original verb phrase carried a second sense, “understood,” as in the exchange: “Capish?” “I
gotcha
.”

Longtime readers of “On Language” are familiar with, or are members of, the
Gotcha!
Gang, described here decades ago as “shock troops of the Nitpicker’s League” (the sort who insist that it be written “Nitpickers’ League” and have their own rump faction who demand hyphenation as
nit-pickers
). The GG takes particular delight in correcting the resident grammarian in mock-furious letters directed to “you, of all people.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald used the term in its original, simple “
got you
” meaning in
This Side of Paradise,
his 1920 novel: “Ole zebra
gotcha,
Amory?” In 1974, an informal group of New Jersey state troopers called the “I
Gotcha
Squad” was accused of harassing and intimidating Camden County politicians.

In its current usage, the elided word
gotcha
is an attributive noun modifying
journalism
or
politics
or, alliteratively,
gang
. When did it first become a noun? Dealing with its derivation as that nominative part of speech, we enter delicate slang territory.

“A sudden discomfiture or humiliation” is the definition given in the
Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang,
“or that which causes it.” Getting specific about student use in the early ’60s in the phrase “throwing a
gotcha,
” the noun
gotcha
means “the act of suddenly exposing one’s buttocks or genitals as a crude prank.” You thought the phrase had no salacious root? I can say only [insert here word under discussion]. There is no need to moon over this, because that sense of “flashing” is in decline. In a 1984 citation from the
Knoxville Journal,
the television interviewer Mike Wallace was quoted using the term in its current sense: “Wallace called that a
‘gotcha
question.’”

Ground Zero.
Three days after the World Trade Center’s twin towers were brought down, Peter Jennings told ABC-TV viewers of the emotional impact on those who had the chance “to go down to what we all call
ground zero
and see the work effort that is there and see the destruction up close.” A few days later, Bill Hemmer of CNN reviewed the alternative names of the site: “We’re going to take you now to the area known as the zone. Some people are calling it the pile, others
ground zero
.”

Though many of the workers clearing away the tons of debris still refer to the pile, the more formal designation of the place of the cataclysm has emerged—by usage, not proclamation—in the phrase that recalls nuclear devastation.

Governor George Pataki began a statement in the aftermath with “As you tour what is called
ground zero
….” President George Bush saluted “citizens near
ground zero
in New York” who rose to the occasion. Vice President Dick Cheney said: “This afternoon I was at
ground zero,
and I saw the damage at close range. It is staggering.”

The phrase had its genesis in an account of the “Trinity Test” of an atomic device on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Philip Morrison, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, wrote, “I observed the Trinity shot looking toward
Zero
from a position on the south bank of the base camp reservoir.” On July 7 of the following year, in a
New York Times
article by Hanson W. Baldwin, we have the earliest citation of the whole phrase: “The intense heat of the blast started fires as far as 3,500 feet from ‘
ground zero
’ (the point on the ground directly under the bomb’s explosion in the air).”