The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (28 page)

That official rejection of
legacy
-itis may have led to the banning of the word itself in White House usage. Podesta probably winced when President Clinton, at a recent fund-raising gathering of American Indians, deplored United States negligence of their rights, adding, “This is the part of the historical
legacy
we want to be proud of.” However, it was not in the context of Clinton’s own historical bequest to the American people and could thus not be construed as a violation of the ban.

The Latin
legare
means “to dispute” and “to bequeath,” which is fitting when you consider how many bequests are disputed. Not in dispute, however, is the 1460 coinage by Robert Henryson, who writes of a widow’s “
legacy
and lamentation.”

Despite its ban, watch for what is sure to be the most overused word of the coming interregnum. An unwanted gift from a predecessor, parent or older sibling is derogated as a ha-me-down; a happier, lasting bequest is called a
legacy
with legs.

Legit.
“
Legitimacy
is a word that we’ve tossed around an awful lot in the last few weeks,” Cokie Roberts said on ABC during the uncertain interregnum.

True, but the problem we’ve been having is with the verb form: is it
legitimate,
with the last syllable pronounced “mate,” as distinct from the adjective ending “mit”? Or is the verb
legitimatize,
as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright uses it? Or should the word meaning “to make lawful” be shortened to
legitimize,
which my copy editor suggested I use in a recent column instead of
legitimate
?

“The oldest form is
legitimate,
” says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of
Webster’s New World Dictionary,
“which tends to be used in the historical sense of ‘to make a bastard child
legitimate
.’” This is not the specific sense that television’s talking heads use in discussing George W. Bush’s forthcoming presidency. For them, the sense is “to become widely recognized as being legal,” and the preferred form is the one used by Al Gore during the contested count: “The next president should be
legitimized
in an election in which every vote that is legally cast is counted.”

When Andrew Card, Bush’s designated chief of staff, said, “The Supreme Court ruling
legitimizes
many of our concerns” about other, adverse judicial decisions, he was in the mainstream of usage. How can we be sure? A search on the Westlaw database shows
legitimized
running ahead of
legitimated
by six to one, with
legitimatized
with its extra syllable trailing far behind, and you can do your own recount.

Relatedly, Brian Williams of MSNBC sent me a message over the air re-cently: “If you’re listening, do a Sunday column on
disenfranchised
that’s being used incorrectly by both sides.”

I was listening and heard that question raised by other logic-obsessed colleagues in the news business: shouldn’t the opposite of
enfranchise
be
disfranchise,
which the Merriam-Webster dictionary likes, and not the unnecessarily longer
disenfranchise
? If common usage knocks a syllable out of
legitimatize,
why doesn’t it do the same to
disenfranchise
?

It does not because language is not neat and tidy. The Old French
enfranchir,
its meaning originally “to make free,” which we now take to mean “to enable to vote,” is one word, despite Samuel Johnson’s dubious derivation two centuries ago. To show its opposite, the
dis-
goes in front of the whole word, on the analogy of
disenthrall
and
disenchant
. Loosen up, Brian and Merriam-Webster; go with the flow.

Ligging.
Amorous Brits not yet ready to
hook up
traditionally get their kicks by
snogging,
their word for “smooching.” But they have another word for the lifestyle of the freeloader:
ligging
.

“The Cannes Film Festival may or may not be a shrine to cinema,” wrote Frederic Peugeot of Agence France-Presse last month, “but one thing it certainly is: an adventure playground for
liggers
.” He defined the noun as “the camp followers who have developed the skills of freeloading and gate-crashing to a fine art.”

The
Daily Mail
defines it as “being on the list of every P.R. company, leading to a multitude of party invites. This results in the
ligger
existing on a diet that consists solely of free canapes and Champagne.” The
Times of
London
derided “a lifetime of limelight
ligging
.”

Lig
is a dialect variation of
lie
.
Ligging
was first spotted by the
Oxford
English Dictionary
in 1960—“the mere
‘ligging
’ layabout.” The definition: “to idle or lie about; also, (slang) to sponge, to ‘freeload,’ to gate-crash or attend parties.”

This is a word from the mother country that zings home, and should be adopted in the colonies.

Livid.
“One longtime friend of the president,” wrote Neil A. Lewis of the
New York Times,
“said Mr. Clinton was
‘livid,
off-the-wall angry’ about the disbarment proceedings.”

Off the wall,
hyphenated as above when used as a compound modifier of the word it precedes, is a figure of speech that shows staying power. It can mean “bizarre,” with a second sense of “being a few apples short of a picnic.” It should not be confused with an earlier phrase,
up the wall,
“into a fury,” now fallen into desuetude. Evidently
off the wall,
as used above, carries with it some of the fury associated with
up the wall.

Less easy to figure out is the meaning of
livid
. It is a word that President Clinton used recently in response to a question put to him by a Justice Department counsel seeking his knowledge of illegal campaign contributions: “All I can tell you,” said Clinton, “is that I was
livid
about it.”

What color do you turn when you turn
livid
? Red with anger? Purple with rage? White with fury?

The Latin
livere
means “to be blue.” The Old Slavic
sliva
is “plum.” (A few shots of the liquor called
slivovitz
will make you either flushed or ashen-faced.) This is cognate with the Old English
sloe,
a reddish-purple blackthorn berry that gives a sloe gin fizz its color. Whash neksht?

Early usage: a writer named Henry de Knyghton used
livid
in 1258 to describe corpses. Thomas Norton in his 1477 incunabula best seller,
The
Ordinall of Alchimy,
wrote of “This Waun Colour called
Lividitie,
In Envious Men useth much to be.” That
waun
suggests the modern
wan,
“pale.” James Fenimore Cooper, in his 1841
Deerslayer,
had a character “almost
livid
with emotion,” but never said what color that was; however, Walter Scott’s 1814 use of the word as a modifier of a color—“his trembling lips are
livid
blue”—suggests to me that the meaning was “pallid, ashen, leaden.”

The lexicographer Frank Abate, former editor in chief of American dictionaries for Oxford University Press, disagrees: “The idea of ‘pale’ in the
OED
seems to me to be misleading. The image I have is that of a violently angry person, with eyes bulging and a deep reddish color in the face—such a deep color that it suggests bluishness.” There are usages that treat the word as meaning “black and blue, the color of bruises,” and a furious person has long been said to get “blue in the face.”

Fred Shapiro of Yale reports that “the contexts of the many early uses I have examined make it clear that the color associated with the state of
livid
anger is a pale one.” His citation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1890 “His swarthy features blanched to a
livid
gray”—with
blanched
meaning “turned white”—clinches the primary meaning for me: “pale, drained of color.”

This just in: it may not be a color, or lack of color, at all. The word
livid
has so long been associated with anger that it has lost its coloration and now means “infuriated.”

While we’re hopping mad, turn to another recent statement of President Clinton that in its expression of irritation touches three dialect bases. Addressing the way the media bash candidates in the current campaign, he observed testily: “I think it’s a bunch of
bull
…. I do not think America is very well served by all this
rigamarole
…. That’s a bunch of
hooey
.”

Bull,
a truncated form of what used to be called “a barnyard epithet,” is no longer considered a vulgarism. The animal itself is the acceptable euphemism for its manure. (This has not happened with
chicken
in a similar barnyardism because the name of the animal already has a slang meaning of “cowardly.”)

Rigamarole,
which added a syllable to the 1736
rigmarole,
means “incoherent harangue; a lengthy, meaningless procedure or tale.” It is derived from
rig-my-role,
which some etymologists say is derived from a
ragman’s
roll
or backpack containing a variety of unrelated items.

Hooey
is a mystery. The synonym for “nonsense, baloney, hogwash” is cited in the
OED
as coined in 1924 in
Plastic Age,
by Percy Marks: “My prof ’s full of
hooey
. He doesn’t know a C theme from an A one.” The poet W. H. Auden derided “Lip-smacking Imps of mawk and
hooey,
” and the feminist author Germaine Greer in her 1970
Female Eunuch
rescued equestrian interests of women from psychological leers with “The horse between a girl’s legs is supposed to be a gigantic penis. What
hooey
!”

Clinton’s usage echoed that of Harry Truman, who told a 1948 news conference that unless it could be adopted on a national scale, “daylight saving is a lot of
hooey
.” Origin obscure. My speculation:
hoo
is a sound made with an exhalation of breath that expresses wonderment or disdain.
Hoo-boy!
Don’t make such a
hoo-hah.
(This speculation could be a blinding flash of insight, or … )

“Hooey” is a vulgar Russian term for the male member: “Na hooey”—meaning, “screw it.” “Ne sooey hooey v chai”—loosely meaning “don’t screw around”—literally “don’t stir the tea with your [male member].”

I especially enjoyed your mention of Germaine Greer’s unintentionally ironic, “The horse between a girl’s legs is supposed to be a gigantic penis. What hooey!” Because … it is!

Dick Wallingford

Napa, California

Coincidentally or not, “hooey” bears a strong resemblance to a Russian vulgarism for the penis, which in Cyrillic would resemble something like
xyn
and is transliterated approximately as “khuy.” It is used in much the same way as we use “hooey” and worse, as in “nyekhuya nye znayet,” which translates quite literally as “He don’t know dick.”

Annie Gottlieb

New York, New York

Lockboxing Day.
If any issue dominated the 2000 campaign, it was Social Security; if any cliché dominated, it was “the third rail of American politics”; and if any word was given the glow of energy from that power source, it was
lockbox.

It landed in the political lexicon in 1995, as House Speaker Newt Gingrich promised that a spending bill would be amended to include what he called “a
lockbox
provision” stipulating that no spending cuts would be used to offset tax reductions. This was purely symbolic because government funds are fungible.

Bill Archer, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, used the
lockbox
in 1999: “We created the Social Security
lockbox
to lock that money up so it cannot be spent for anything else.” GOP leaders actually used a strongbox as a prop for television coverage.