The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (24 page)

I

In a Persian Mirror.
“With words we govern men,” said Benjamin Disraeli. To which we have a corollary: by proverbs we enliven copy. Adages never age.

The insightful and gutsy reporting from Iran of Elaine Sciolino of the
New York Times
has led to a book,
Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran
. Seemingly in passing, but actually to illuminate culture, she tosses in local proverbs.

For decades, adage-trackers have sought the origin of what John F. Kennedy described only as an old saying: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The earliest pre-Kennedy use we have found so far is in a 1951 film,
The Desert Fox,
spoken by a German general. But Sciolino cites a Persian proverb that suggests its source may be in folk wisdom from another land and an ancient time: “Winners have large families, but losers are orphans.”

She learned another saying from a filmmaker willing to discuss censorship while inside Iran, but never while abroad. Why, if Persians have the courage to complain of repression at home, are they reluctant to criticize the regime when abroad? “As my father used to say, ‘If your head breaks, it is better that it breaks in your own hat.’”

A third proverb strikes the Western ear as arcane, referring as it does to a flaky confection of crushed sesame seeds in honey, but might be the sort of wisdom to impart to political candidates lagging in public-opinion polls: “Have patience, and I’ll make halvah for you from unripe grapes.”

In Word Heaven.
In his youth, your leering great-grandfather dated a
chorus girl
. Your grandfather, his leer slightly modified in the 1930s, dated a
chorine
. And what did your father call the dancer he dated, after both
chorus girl
and
chorine
gained a ditzy or lascivious connotation?

If he was in showbiz, he called her a
terp
(from Terpsichore, the muse of dance) or a
gypsy,
and was invited, along with the cast’s families, to the rehearsal called “the gypsy run-through.” If he was a stage-door Johnny, Pops called the object of his affection what we call her today: a
dancer
.

That’s because the choreographer Agnes de Mille changed the nature of the chorus in the 1943 musical play
Oklahoma!
The stereotype of the bored, gum-chewing, leg-pumping
chorine
was transformed into the reality of dancing actors and singers. Even the performers in
A Chorus Line
in 1975 were not labeled
chorines
or
chorus boys;
they were identified as
members of the troupe
or
ensemble
or just
dancers
and
principal dancers
.

This raises the question (no, not
begs the question,
which has to do with circular obfuscation): where do words like
chorine
go when they fall into what Grover Cleveland called “innocuous desuetude”? We remember them; we know what they mean; but not even old fogies use them anymore. What happens to these ghostly darlings?

“Whenever we edit a new edition of one of our dictionaries,” says Joe Pickett, executive editor of American Heritage, “we consider which words we should delete.” He’s like a cowboy forced to shoot a favorite old horse. “We have to be careful about what we consider to be a ‘dead word.’” People still find obsolete terms in old books and turn to the dictionary expecting to find their meanings.

In 1998, Pickett was on the verge of eliminating
chad
to make room for one of the many new words rushing into the language: “What could be more insignificant than those little bits of paper punched out from cards used in an obsolete computing technology?” But because there was still occasional use involving elections, his lexicographers left it in—“and are we glad we did.” It became the hottest word of the year 2000.
^*

What became of the noun
motorcar,
or the verb
motoring
? Roadkill, both of them, along with dreams of leggy
chorines
who were the bee’s knees in the rumble seat. And where is
centigrade
today, now that Anders Celsius’s last name has replaced it?
Centi-
became ambiguous when the metric system came along: did it mean
one hundred
or
one-hundredth
? And the last syllable—
grade
—could mean
step
or
degree
.

Language mavens no longer use
tautology;
it has been thrust aside by
redundancy
(and when I am caught out erring along those lines, the Squad Squad has a pleonasm).

Dictionaries have no labels for words that are still in use but seem to be breathing their last. When no use is recorded after 1755 (when Samuel Johnson published his dictionary), most lexicographers mark it “obsolete”; if the word is only occasionally used after that glorious watershed date, it’s marked “archaic.” But how are we to warn those who turn to dictionaries for guidance that
industrialist
is passé and
financier
hopelessly out of it?

Whole phrases die, too. When I chastised the FBI recently for denying the existence of what every crime reporter knows is called the Cold Case squad, an e-mail message came in asking about another cold case: the Dead Letter Office. I called the Postal Service to see if the phrase was still in use and was told by its forthright spokesman, Gerry Kreienkamp, that “we no longer have a ‘Dead Letter Office.’ We stopped using those words in 1994. There are three
Mail Recovery Centers,
in Atlanta, St. Paul and San Francisco, where letters with no discernible address for either the recipient or the sender are sent.” What if I mailed a letter addressed to the Dead Letter Office with no return address? Where would it be delivered? Long pause. “To one of our three
Mail Recovery Centers,
I suppose.”

I like to think of these words and phrases as unforgotten angels in a Word Heaven, ready to revisit the language when the need for them arises.
Hussy,
for example, was originally a phonetic reduction of
housewife
and came to mean “a mischievous, ill-behaved woman.” As it faded from memory, Alan Herbert rose in Parliament to deliver his first, or “maiden,” speech to the House of Commons, by tradition a mild and deferential effort. When it came across as fiery and substantive, Winston Churchill promptly denounced this “maiden” as “a brazen
hussy
of a speech.” And so a delicious old word was saved; no such luck for
chorine
.

The distinction that I—and, I believe, many of my colleagues-make between Obsolete and Archaic is that the former means that the word, expression, or sense is no longer in use, and the latter refers to a word that is essentially obsolete but is used occasionally to evoke a sense of times gone by. Words like
pantywaist
I should probably label as obsolete; a word like
yclept,
which crops up either facetiously or evocatively in speech and writing now and then, I should label as archaic.

Laurence Urdang

Old Lyme, Connecticut

The phrase
“brazen hussy”
has been immortalized in the name of a variant of a common European plant, the Lesser Celandine (
Ranunculus ficaria
). Some years ago the renowned English garden writer and plantsman, Christopher Lloyd, noticed plants with chocolate brown to bronze leaves. He christened them “Brazen Hussy” and they are now cultivated on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA, the name “Brazen Hussy” has also been applied to a cultivar of the Plantain Lily (
Hosta
) that has bright yellow leaves.

Victoria Matthews

Denver, Colorado

Infamy.
The first draft of President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to Congress for a declaration of war began, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history.” In his second draft, he crossed out “world history” and substituted a condemnatory word that was far more memorable:
infamy
.

Though its adjective,
infamous,
was frequently used, the noun
infamy
was less familiar. It means “evil fame, shameful repute, notorious disgrace” and befitted the nation’s shock at the bloody destruction at Pearl Harbor, a successful surprise blow that was instantly characterized by the victim nation as a “sneak attack.”

The word, with its connotation of wartime shock and horror, was chosen by headline writers to label the terrorist attack on New York and Washington that demolished the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a portion of the Pentagon. In newspapers and on television, the historical
day of infamy
was the label chosen, along with the more general “attack on America.”

The killers were
hijackers
. This Americanism, origin unknown, was first cited in 1912 as to
kick up high jack,
which
Dialect Notes
defined as “to cause a disturbance”; ten years later, a book about hobos noted “
hi-jacking,
or robbing men at night when sleeping in the jungles.” In the 1960s, as terrorists began seizing control of airliners, the verb
skyjack
was coined, but it has since fallen into disuse.

The suicidal hijackers were able to slip a new weapon through the metal detectors: a
box cutter,
defined in the on-top-of-the-news
New Oxford
American Dictionary
as “a thin, inexpensive razor-blade knife designed to open cardboard boxes.” Barbara Olson, a passenger aboard the airliner doomed to be crashed into the Pentagon, was able to telephone her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson; she told him that the hijackers were armed with knives and what she called a
cardboard cutter
.

These terrorists were
suicide bombers,
a phrase used in a 1981 Associated Press dispatch by Tom Baldwin in Lebanon about the driving of an explosives-laden car into the Iraqi Embassy. In 1983,
Newsweek
reported that “the winds of fanaticism have blown up a merciless throng of killers: the assassins, thugs, kamikazes-and now the
suicide bombers
.”

Kamikaze
is Japanese for “divine wind,” a reference to a storm in the 13th century that blew away a fleet of invading Mongols. In World War II, the word described suicidal pilots who dived their planes into enemy ships. English has now absorbed the word: Al Hunt of the
Wall Street Journal
wrote last week that airline policy “was turned upside down by these
kamikaze
fanatics.”

Hunt, like President Bush and many others, called these acts of murder-suicide
cowardly
. That is not a modifier I would use, nor would I employ its synonym
dastardly
(though FDR did), which also means “shrinking from danger.” If anything, the suicide bomber or suicide hijacker is maniacally fearless, the normal human survival instinct overwhelmed by hatred or brainwashed fervor.
Senseless
and
mindless
are other mistaken modifiers of these killings: the sense, or evil purpose, of modern barbaric murder is to carry out a blindly worshipped leader’s desire to shock, horrify and ultimately intimidate the target’s civilized compatriots.