The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (22 page)

During that war,
homeland
was applied to the islands of Japan, as distinct from the territory conquered by the Japanese in their quest for empire. Winston Churchill wrote in 1941 that “we should therefore face now the problems … of driving Japan back to her
homelands
and regaining undisputed mastery in the Pacific.” Harry Truman, in a diary entry dated July 18, 1945, referred to the Manhattan Project producing an atomic bomb: “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their
homeland
.” One week later, at the Potsdam conference, the word appeared in an official diplomatic document: “The full application of our military power,” the Big Three warned, would lead to “the utter devastation of the Japanese
homeland
.”

The word surfaced in South Africa in 1962 amid the controversy about apartheid. R. F. Botha, then South Africa’s foreign minister, introduced the “Bantu
Homelands
Citizenship Bill” in 1969 linking blacks to tribal sites of origin, or “Bantustans,” in an effort thereby to separate the races permanently. This was denounced as evidence that white supremacists in South Africa regarded black Africans as aliens.

A kind of linguistic full circle was reached when Arabs in the Middle East sought to reject the Jewish state in their midst by evoking the word so long associated with Israel: the PLO, in Article 1 of its national charter of 1968, stated, “Palestine is the national
homeland
of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab
homeland
.” (Later, a spokesman appropriated another Israeli phrase in demanding “a right of return.”)

Then, in 1997, the U.S. government got into the
homeland
act. In the Quadrennial Defense Review mandated by Congress, a defense panel was set up to rethink military strategy up to 2020. The panel foresaw a need to counter potential terrorism and other “transnational threats to the sovereign territory of the nation.” Its recommendation of an “increased emphasis on
homeland
defense” did not get much attention.

Almost one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States, the Bush administration established an Office of
Homeland
Security. Why was
security
substituted for
defense
? A rationale was set forward that security was the umbrella term, incorporating local and national public-health preparedness for attack, the defense of the nation offered by the armed services, plus the intelligence and internal security activities of the CIA, FBI and local police. (In fact, I’m told by secret nomenclature sources,
security
was chosen because the Defense Department did not want any jurisdictional confusion with the new White House organization.)

Americans have adopted
homeland
much as Russians chose
motherland
and Germans
fatherland
. An association exists with the World War II phrase the
home front,
which was a metaphor then (as opposed to
war front
) but is a reality now in light of September 11.

The British are different. “
Home
on the range,
home
of the brave,
hometown
boy,” wrote John Mullan in Britain’s
Guardian
. “Perhaps
‘home
’ is an easier word for patriotic Americans than it would be for us.
Homeliness
is at a premium in such anxious times … a word was wanted that sounded reassuring but unaggressive. Americans have become more sensitive or more wary about the
homeliness
of their geopolitical talk.” In referring to their place of origin, speakers of British English prefer
this country
to
homeland
.

Mullan’s usage brings up a tangential point: Britons use
homeliness
for what we would call
homeyness
. To Americans,
homely
has unfortunately come to mean “almost ugly.” We still use the compound adjective
downhome
to mean “unpretentious, devoid of affectation,” and
homeboy
is black slang for a friend in or from the neighborhood, but the lovely
homely
is an insult. This shows a lack of appreciation for the boy or girl next door.

Contrariwise, the Yiddish
haimish
means “homely” but is a compliment, suggesting home cooking for food and a homebody for a person who does not long for dancing in nightclubs or trips to spas. Few Americans use
homelike,
which I apply warmly to residents of my
homeland
.

Hooking Up.
“Only yesterday,” notes the copywriter for the Farrar, Straus & Giroux fall catalog, “boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that.” No longer; first base is today deep kissing, also known as
tonsil hockey
. The writer then speeds up to date in orally touching second and rounding third base, which is now “going all the way,” and slides home with a surprise twist of the old sex-as-baseball metaphor: “Home plate is being introduced by name.”

The occasion for this recollection and updating of antediluvian teenage lingo is the promotion of a new book of essays and short fiction by Tom Wolfe titled
Hooking Up
. “How rarely our
hooked-up
boys and girls are introduced by name!” laments the promotion copy, which goes on to promise a chronicle of “everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves, thanks to the new fields of genetics and neuroscience.”

Wolfe has a sensitivity to
le mot juste
in describing social phenomena. The title of his
Right Stuff,
a book about the early astronauts, has now become part of the language, as is his popularization of the mathematicians’
pushing the envelope
. In selecting
Hooking Up
as his title, he is again on the cusp of usage.

When we hear a sultry seductress say to an aging Lothario, “We’ll
hook up
one of these days,” what does her promise mean? (A Lothario is a male deceiver, from a character in Nicholas Rowe’s 1703 play,
The Fair Penitent
. My need to point this out is what philologists call “coinage compulsion.”)

The compound noun
hook-up
(which the
Times
no longer hyphenates) was born in a political context in 1903, as “a
hook-up
with the reform bunch,” and meant a general linkage. In 1930, the term became specific, as “a national
hook-up
” came to denote a radio network.

As a verb, to
hook up
has for a century also meant “to marry,” a synonym of “to get hitched,” as a horse is to a wagon. But not until the 1980s did the meaning change to a less formal sexual involvement. It was first defined as “to pick someone up at a party” and then progressed to “become sexually involved with; to make out.”

The swinging sense mainstreamed in 1995. “A few women insist,” wrote
USA Today,
“they never go out with the intention of
‘hooking up’
or having sex,” while a CNN commentator noted, “The kids see shacking up and
hooking up
as the equivalent of marriage.” In 1997, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
quoted a Brown University student as saying, “In a normal Brown relationship, you meet, get drunk,
hook up
and then either avoid eye contact the next day or find yourself in a relationship.” The scholarly reporter noted, “Depending on the context, a
hook-up
can mean anything from 20 minutes of strenuous kissing to spending the night together fully clothed to sexual intercourse.”

To
be hooked,
taken from the fishing vocabulary, is to be addicted to drugs; however, with the addition of
up
to make the compound, the term has no sinister narcotics meaning. In current usage, which may not last long and is probably already fading, it most often means “have a sexual relationship.” Nor is the “linking” verb limited to American English. An exasperated Liz Jones, editor of
Marie Claire,
wrote in the
Sunday Times of London
this year about men who are habitual sexual deceivers (Lotharios), “Are all men like this or is it just the ones I
hook up
with?”

Let’s go back to first base.
Tonsil hockey,
as used at Farrar, Straus & Giroux to mean “deep kissing,” is at least a decade old, having replaced
tonsil boxing
. A more recent variation is
tongue sushi,
which shows some metaphoric imagination: the Japanese sushi—cold rice rolled up with bits of raw fish and vegetables—is evoked to describe the mutual rolling-up of teenage linguae engaged in lubricious osculation.

Tonsil hockey
goalies have, in a spasm of good taste, rejected the phrase, popular in the ’80s, to
suck face.
That undeniably vivid but odious locution seems to have been replaced in some localities with the almost euphemistic
mess around
. Its variants include
mashing, macking
(from
smack,
the sound of a kiss) and
mugging,
the senses of which run the semantic gamut from “flirting” to “foreplay with no intention of intercourse.” Those familiar with Old Slang would call it “taking a long lead off first base.”

Though
hooking up
seems a mediumistic metaphor for what used to be euphemized as “sleeping together,” it is more romantic than the phrase in current use on college campuses:
parallel parking
.

“Hooked up” and “hook up” have at least two meanings in auto racing. In drag racing or acceleration testing, a car hooks up when, after initial wheel-spin (one word in car magazines), the tires finally grab the pavement and the car takes off. In track racing, particularly but not exclusively NASCAR stock car racing, a car is said to be hooked up when it is handling ideally well and not incidentally is easy to drive fast enough to be a winner.

John Strother

Princeton, New Jersey

Hurr I.
Your eyeglasses have been specked with dust or speckled with stains. Or, as in my case, a new Bernese Mountain puppy has besmeared my spectacles with the saliva dog lovers call “puppy lick.”

No source of moisture is near with which to clean the glasses. What do you do? The answer is easy: you breathe heavily on the lenses to form a vapor on them, which you wipe off with a tissue.

Question: What is the verb to describe the action you take to moisturize the lens? There is no single correct answer, but in regional-dialect coinage, there are always some answers. Sitting next to me in our car with our puppy, Geneva, wriggling on her lap, my wife, Helene, said, “You’d better
hurr
on your glasses if you expect to see the road.”

That was onomatopoeia in action. The sound of deliberately expelling breath is
hurr
or
huh
or, in cases involving irate discovery,
hah!
In this instance, the sound created the verb first cited in a 1947
American Speech
quarterly as “
Huh-ing
your glasses.”

I believe the new member of your household belongs to a breed properly known as the Bernese Mountain Dog. That makes her a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy. A Bernese Mountain puppy is a Swiss hill.

Patricia M. Sherwood

Editor,
The Quotable Dog Lover

Windham, Connecticut

Hurr II.
You want to clean your glasses. You are in the middle of a desert and no water is handy, so you breathe heavily on your spectacles to form a vapor on them. The question was posed here to the Lexicographic Irregulars: what is the verb to describe the action you take to moisturize the lenses?

The purpose of this scholarly endeavor is not merely to survey the different locutions for the same action in regional English (“different strokes for different folks,” as painters, lovers and the cardiologists say). More to the pedagogical point, this snapshot of varied usage is to illuminate the competition that precedes the acceptance of a neologism in the general language.

We began with
hurr:
“You’d better
hurr
on your glasses if you expect to see the road” was the sentence used to stimulate discussion, backed up with a 1947 citation for
huh,
sometimes pronounced
hunh
. “One of my daily chores when I was commissioned in the RAF during World War II,” writes Horace Hone of Palm Coast, Florida, “was to polish the brass buttons on my tunic. Occasionally we would pass muster by breathing on them and giving a brisk rub. This was known as
huhing
and preceded your citation by half a decade.”