The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (35 page)

In examining the new words of espionage, let us not neglect the secrets of an old word about secret dealings.
Surreptitious
means “taken by stealth; unauthorized; clandestine.” It comes from the Latin
surreptitius,
“obtained by surreption,” with the
rep
from
rapere,
“to quickly seize or snatch,” also the root of
rapid
and
rape
.

You never heard the word
surreption
? Neither did I; the form the word takes is always the adjective, never the noun. But the
Oxford English Dictionary
says the obsolete term means “suppression of truth or fact for the purpose of obtaining something; fraudulent misrepresentation.” I’ll find a use for it when some politician clams up.

Now about
clam up,
a 1916 Americanism that describes what a good spy does when caught. But how did a clam, known for its ability to shut itself tightly, clamping its shell, get its name? From the Teutonic
klamb,
“to press or squeeze together.” Before that, and perhaps unrelatedly, we have the Latin
clam,
“secretly, in private”; the
m
changed to
n,
which led to
clandestinus,
“secret, hidden”—and to the work of those who practice legal surreption in the clandestine service.

Never Said It.
“Let them eat cake.” Those words have come ringing down the centuries as the height of hauteur. Marie Antoinette was never able to live them down, even after the queen followed her husband, Louis XVI, to the guillotine after the French Revolution. To this day, whenever a hard-hearted trickle-downer suggests that a rising tide lifts all the boats, he or she is denounced for having “an arrogant let-them-eat-cake attitude,” unconcerned with the needs of the common people.

She never said it. The source of this canard is the sixth book of
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, ‘Let them eat cake.’” (The words, in French, read “
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
.”)

However, these words were written in or about 1770, the same year the daughter of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire arrived in France to marry its crown prince. Rousseau was attributing that saying to some other “great princess.” The truth about Marie was just the opposite: she recognized the need for austerity at court and reduced the royal household staff, but in so doing offended snooty nobles, who proceeded to down-mouth her for posterity. I get incensed at this historical linguistic injustice every time I look up the phrase.

Nor is that the only never-said-it. Who can forget “The Guard dies, but never surrenders” (“
Le Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas
”)? The Count Cambronne, the head of Napoleon’s most loyal troops at the battle ofWa-terloo, and to whom it was attributed, went to his grave wishing we would forget it, because he insisted that he never said it. A half-century after the battle, the writer Edouard Fournier credited a reporter named Rougemont with the creation of the ringing phrase. It may be counter-apocryphal, but some say the count’s battlefield response to a demand for surrender was the expletive “
merde!
”—a favorite Hemingway word for excrement and sometimes referred to in France as “
le mot de Cambronne
.”

These belated corrections are made here today because of a response received after a correction of a more recent misconception: Richard Nixon’s never-said “I have a secret plan to end the war.” I challenged anyone to come up with a contemporary citation directly quoting the 1968 candidate saying it; nobody ever has.

Because word got around the White House that great misattributions were being straightened out in this space, the following handwritten note came in from Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser: “Bill-Since you have asserted frequently that Bill Clinton is the ‘architect of the strategic partnership’ with Beijing, and because you are a stickler for the facts, I would like you to show me one instance in which the President describes the relationship as a
strategic partnership
.”

Gee, could it be that Clinton is being unjustly saddled with a never-said-it? You can get hundreds of citation hits on the databases when you type in “
strategic partnership
” and “Clinton.” An article in Japan’s daily
Yomiuri Shimbun
in 1998: “Last year, Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited the United States, and this year, U.S. President Bill Clinton returned the visit. On both occasions, the two countries began using the term ‘
strategic partnership
’ between the two powers to describe their relationship.” Robyn Lim wrote recently in the
International Herald Tribune,
“Two years ago, Mr. Clinton announced a ‘
strategic partnership
’ with China.” And a vituperative right-wing
New York Times
columnist (albeit a stickler for the facts) has been writing frequently of “Clinton, architect of the discredited ‘
strategic partnership
’ with Beijing.” Could we all be wrong?

Berger goes on: “On many occasions we have said that we would hope to develop a
strategic partnership,
i.e., described it as an aspirational goal. But there is a big difference between describing an objective for the future and what exists today. I can provide you what the President actually
said
in Beijing.”

And so, upon my eager request, he did. On July 3, 1998, the president (
Times
style, unlike White House style, is to lowercase the name of the office) said in Hong Kong, “My view is that the potential we have for a
strategic
partnership
is quite strong.” This followed by five days Jiang Zemin’s usage: “progress in the direction of building a constructive
strategic partnership
.”

In each case, and in a dozen other citations provided by the White House, the Clinton context is, as Berger asserts, “aspirational”—a hope for the future. If the future were the only context for the Clinton use of the phrase, then all of us who have been deriding the president as “architect of the discredited policy of a
strategic partnership
”—as if it signified his notion of a present state of affairs—would surely owe him and his advisers abject apologies.

And yet there is the problem of the Clinton statement to business leaders in Shanghai on July 1, 1998, dutifully provided by the White House. Discussing normal trade treatment for China, an issue then known as MFN (for “most favored nation”), Clinton warned what would happen if Congress did not respond to his plea to vote to renew the normal treatment.

“Failure to renew that would sever our economic ties,” he said, “denying us the benefits of China’s growth, endangering the
strategic partnership,
turning our back on the world’s largest nation at a time when cooperation for peace and stability is more important and more productive than ever.”

When Berger saw that citation, he must have uttered an American translation of
le mot de Cambronne,
but to his credit he did not remove it from the file. A close analysis of the structure of that sentence, especially its concluding “at a time” clause, indicates clearly that the president was speaking of the
strategic partnership
as something now in existence- a current relationship that would be endangered if Congress failed to act as he wished. Had he only put
prospective, potential
or
hoped-for
in front of the key phrase, the Berger hypothesis would have been unchallengeable.

You could say in Clinton’s defense that he was ad-libbing and intended to follow the agreed-upon future formulation but just slipped into the present tense on a single occasion. And it is undeniable that the other Clinton and Jiang citations follow the prospective-relationship formula.

What’s fair? We should recall the raw deals that loose historians have given the brioche-free Marie Antoinette, the die-hard count and the secretplan less Nixon. Unless other usages surface, accuracy-stickling Sino-phobes should limit themselves to castigating “the
‘strategic partnership’
that Clinton frequently hoped for and in one instance suggested his policy produced.”

No Child Behind.
Democrats are somewhat irked at the adoption by President Bush of a phrase that belonged to education reformers: to
leave no child behind
.

“If schools do not teach and will not change,” he told a campaign rally in October 2000, “instead of accepting the status quo, we will give parents better options, different choices. We’ll
leave no child behind
in America.”

When President Bush’s first budget proposed reductions in some childcare programs, the
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert wrote: “He hijacked the copyrighted slogan of the liberal Children’s Defense Fund and then repeated the slogan like a mantra, telling anyone who would listen that his administration would
‘leave no child behind.’
Mr. Bush has only been president two months, and already he’s leaving the children behind.”

Who coined the powerful phrase? Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, in 1993 credited “the black community,” but further research tracked it more specifically to Barbara Sabol, in November 1991 a member of the CDF’s Black Community Crusade for Children. One year earlier, on Nov. 15, 1990, the
Courier-Journal
in Louisville, Kentucky, reported that Dave Armstrong, a Jefferson County judge, in asking a juvenile-justice commission for better community care for children, said, “We can
leave no child behind
.”

Seven years before that, at a White House reception on July 28, 1983, President Ronald Reagan told the National Council of Negro Women that he had “begun to outline an agenda for excellence in education that will
leave no child behind
. Mari Maseng Will, who worked on that speech, says, “President Reagan has not, to my knowledge, been credited with the phrase.”

Until now. And until someone comes up with an earlier citation, the Gipper’s the coiner.

Nomenclature Wars.
When did the
inheritance tax
(a pro-taxing term) become the
estate tax
(a neutral term)? And who changed it to the
death tax,
which has a built-in anti-tax message?

In the same way, who abolished
most favored nation
? MFN, as it used to be initialized, was a trade status equal to that of the
most favored nation
—which was denied to certain countries, often for human rights reasons. But the phrase made it seem as if China, for example, would become the most favored nation—and most people did not favor that. So the name was changed to
nondiscriminatory trade practices
—and who was in favor of discrimination? The name was changed further to
normal trade relations,
leaving opponents to espouse
abnormal relations,
a loser. The name changes helped change the policy.

The classic example was
pro-life,
adopted by those who were
anti-abortion
. This not only put the case in positive terms (which
anti-abortion
did not) but also suggested that the opposition was
pro-death
. In their defense, people who opposed restrictions on abortion adopted the term
pro-choice
. Thus a right to abort was presented in the more favorable light of a right to choose.

In the war of words in the Middle East, the Palestinians won. Israel referred to the land gained after it repelled invasions as
Judea and Samaria,
the ancient names of the land. The Arab world preferred the
West Bank,
situated on the west bank of the Jordan River in what had been Transjordan. For a time, the Israelis fell back to the
administered territories
and later to the
disputed territories,
but almost all the media adopted
West Bank
as distinct from Israel proper, and any traditionalist reference to
Judea and Samaria
is now considered quaint or slanted.

Remember when
global warming
was a hotly disputed phrase? At the sudden order of the Great Namechanger,
global warming
was iced and
global climate change
took its place. No explanation; no argument; the order came down, and multitudes on both sides of that argument marched off in lockstep.

“The latest semantic fashion in Congress,” reports the
Hill,
Martin Tolchin’s lively Washington weekly, “is renaming
fast track trade authority
as
trade promotion authority,
or TPA.”
Fast track
apparently reminds too many Republicans of the Clinton era.