The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (25 page)

Another word that deserves a second look is
justice
. Both Senator John McCain and Bush adviser Karen Hughes called for “swift
justice
” to be meted out to the perpetrators, ordinarily a sentiment widely shared. But the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “There should be no talk of bringing these people to ‘swift
justice
.’ … An open act of war demands a military response, not a judicial one.”

The leading suspect at the center of the terror campaign is Osama bin Laden. The
bin,
meaning “son of,” is not capped;Westerners have chosen not to capitalize the Arabic just as they have often chosen to capitalize the Hebrew
Ben,
which has the same meaning. This has nothing to do with correctness; it is strictly idiosyncratic convention, varying among regions and stylists. (When starting a sentence with bin Laden’s name,
Times
style calls for capitalizing it, which then looks like a mistake.) Bin Laden has been given a shorthand, bogus title, much like
vice overlord, fugitive financier
and
drug kingpin:
his is
terrorist mastermind
.

The name of his organization,
Al Qaeda,
means “the base,” in looser modern Arabic, “the military headquarters.” His host in Afghanistan is the
Taliban,
a religio-political group whose name means “those who seek.” The Arab word
talib,
“student,” has been given a Persian suffix,
-an,
which is an unusual amalgam or was a mistake.

The Taliban (proper noun construed as plural)
harbor
bin Laden and the base of his organization. That is now becoming a political verb with a vengeance.

“We will make no distinction,” President Bush said, “between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who
harbor
them.” A key sense of the verb
harbor
is “to give shelter and concealment to wrongdoers.” The next day, Bush used the noun form creatively: “This is an enemy that thinks its
harbors
are safe, but they won’t be safe forever.” That was an extension of the noun’s present meaning of “place of shelter, haven, port” to “place where evildoers think they are out of reach of punishment.”

Finally, the word
terrorist
. It is rooted in the Latin
terrere,
“to frighten,” and the
-ist
was coined in France to castigate the perpetrators of the Reign of Terror. Edmund Burke in 1795 defined the word in English: “Those hell-hounds called
terrorists
… are let loose on the people.”

The sternly judgmental word should not be avoided or euphemized. Nobody can accurately call those who plotted, financed and carried out the infamous mass slaughter of September 11
militants, resistance fighters,
gunmen, partisans
or
guerrillas
. The most precise word to describe a person or group who murders even one innocent civilian to send a political message is
terrorist
.

I can explain where the
-an
in
Talib-an
came from:
-an
is the regular animate
masculine plural ending in Pashto, the native language of the vast majority
of the Taliban. The close relationship between Persian and Pashto accounts for their having identical plural markers.

Barbara Robson, PhD

Arlington, Virginia

Invest.
“The Northern Alliance does not want to physically enter Kabul,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell on the Nov. 11, 2001,
Meet the
Press,
expressing more of a diplomat’s hope than stating a fact. “So we think it’d be better if they were to
invest
—if I can pull an old military term out of my background—
invest
the city, make it untenable for the Taliban to continue to occupy Kabul, and then we’ll see where we are.”

In the
Weekly Standard,
Robert Kagan and William Kristol saw in Powell’s use of that military sense of the verb the essence of two different strategies that had riven the State and Defense departments in the first two months of war in Afghanistan. “The key word was
‘invest,
’” they wrote, “by which Powell meant surround but not enter.” State’s priority was to create a new coalition government; Defense’s priority was to help the anti Taliban fighters take the city. The Pentagon’s view prevailed, and the city was entered rather than
invested
.

It was not Powell’s first use of the verb in its military sense, cautioning the northern fighters. He told
India Today
two weeks before that “they want to at least
invest
Kabul. Whether they go into Kabul or not, or whether that’s the best thing to do or not, remains to be seen.”

The verb’s original meaning is rooted in the Latin
vestire,
“to dress, clothe.” A
vestment
is a ceremonial robe; a
vest
is a sleeveless garment now worn more by stylish women than by male business executives.

Now comes the connection with Powell’s meaning. The transitive verb to
vest
has since 1583 meant “to envelop a person with an article of clothing.” A couple of months ago, when the newspaper publisher Conrad Black became a member of Britain’s House of Lords, his induction was called an
investiture
as well as an
ennoblement
. Jonathan Swift, in his 1704
Tale of a Tub,
extended the meaning with a metaphor: “They held the Universe to be a large suit of clothes which
invests
every thing.” This sense of the verb is defined by “to cover, to surround with a garment.”

It was also applied to the surrounding movement of an army: “No wearisomnesse of long siege & assault,” goes the translation of the Roman Titus Livius by Philemon Holland in 1600, “is able to raise the Roman armie from any towne once by them
invested
.” We are now into the siege mentality. To a military strategist,
invest
means “to surround, to besiege, to cut off escape”—but not to invade or occupy. That’s what Powell had in mind, giving him time to build an internal government, but—if all the scuttlebutt about the inner workings of the National Security Council is true—not what the Pentagon’s Donald Rumsfeld had in mind.

What about
investigate
? No etymological connection with “cover up,” except in its most modern sense. The ultimate Latin root is
vestigium,
“footprint,” which investigators track. Forget about it here; it will only lead to confusion. But the verb
invest
has also long meant “to employ for profitable use,” or at least does mean that in those times when the market has not fallen out of bed.

Those looking glumly at retirement investments know what
vested
means: “having a consummated right.” Those of us with a quarter-century at the
Times
are popping our
vested
buttons. The pejorative phrase
vested interest,
in regard to the privileged class, was coined by the economist Henry George, who died of a stroke while running for mayor of New York in 1897. In that regard, Aloysius (Just Call Me Vic) Meyers, lieutenant governor of the state of Washington a half-century ago, told voters, “Habitually I go without a
vest
so that I can’t be accused of standing for the
vested
interests.” Few caught his play on the original clothing sense of
habitually.

In 1948 I covered the
investiture
of Queen Juliana in Amsterdam, and then the
coronation
of King Baudouin in Belgium. The Dutch explained to me that investiture is more democratic. The Dutch word, if I can remember some fifty years later, is
Inhuldiging,
which means something like ennoblement.

Daniel Schorr

National Public Radio

Washington, D.C.

Iron Fist.
“They wanted this
iron fist
to command them.” That was the statement of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, about the need for discipline among the English troops sent to the Canadian frontier in the 1812 war with the United States. The victor over Napoleon at Waterloo became known as “the Iron Duke.”

Iron is hard. An
iron hand
is rule that is rigid, stubborn, severe, even cruel;
iron-fisted
has an additional connotation of “parsimonious, closefisted, niggardly.”

Thus it was surprising to read in several articles that an
iron fist
was in control of the Republican convention in Philadelphia in August 2000. The attribution, though not in direct quotation of a full sentence, was to George W. Bush himself in the week before he became his party’s nominee. In the
New York Times,
the prescient R. W. Apple Jr. wrote, “If there are abortion rights supporters at the podium this week, for example, they will talk about something else, thanks to what Mr. Bush calls his
‘iron fist
’ control of the proceedings.”

That’s a curious phrase from a candidate who popularized the marriage of the adjective
compassionate
with the noun
conservative
. The decidedly noncompassionate phrase
iron fist
has not even the smooth qualifier that Thomas Carlyle reported in 1850 was used by the Iron Duke’s defeated rival: “Soft of speech and manner, yet with an inflexible rigour of command …
‘iron hand
in a velvet glove,’ as Napoleon defined it.”

Strange that Bush should adopt that phrase; perhaps it was a slip under stress. Political figures from Austin are sensitive to the political meanings of words.

For example, Karl Rove (invariably described as “Bush’s chief strategist”; there is apparently nobody with the title “deputy strategist”) demonstrated a grasp of nuance in an interview on the
New York Times
/ABC News Web-cast at the GOP convention. His questioner had asked about the gap between the convention’s “moderate, inclusive message” of those chosen to speak and the notably conservative views of the delegates shown in polls.

“Let me correct,” Rove responded quickly. “You said
‘inclusive
and
moderate
.’ What we’re saying is, it’s ‘inclusive and
compassionately conservative
.’”

What was the chief strategist’s chief strategy, while accepting the adjective
inclusive,
in going out of his way to reject the nearly synonymous adjective
moderate
?

Rove knew that
moderate,
when used as a noun, causes political reverberations. From a conservative’s point of view, a
moderate
is the liberal’s way of avoiding the pejorative tag of
liberal
. From a liberal’s point of view,
moderate
is not only self-applicable but also a friendly way of describing a Republican who is not a hard-core, reactionary, troglodyte kook.

The word’s political sense was born in the Eisenhower administration. Minutes of the Nov. 4, 1954, cabinet meeting reported the president using the phrase “a policy of
moderation
.” Adlai Stevenson, a year later, told a fund-raising audience: “
Moderation,
yes! Stagnation, no!” At the same dinner, Averell Harriman, a potential opponent for the 1956 Democratic nomination, disagreed: “There is no such word as
moderation
in the Democratic vocabulary.”

The conservative columnist William F. Buckley wrote at that time, “I resist
moderate
because it is a base-stealing word for the benefit of GOP liberals.” The Nelson Rockefeller wing of the party at first accepted it in the early ’60s, but then supporters of Barry Goldwater used it in derision, to catch the centrist minority off the Republican political base. On July 14, 1963, Rockefeller denounced Goldwater “extremists” for a philosophy “wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principle.”

I recall dragging a large banner across the San Francisco Cow Palace floor at the 1964 convention that read “Stay in the Mainstream!” But as Francis Bacon pointed out in “On Faction,” written in 1597, “a few who are stiff do tire out a great number that are more
moderate
.” The Goldwaterite true believers scorned the electoral
mainstream
and lost in a landslide; four years later, Nixon steered toward it and narrowly won.