The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (36 page)

Representative David Dreier, a California Republican, requires his staff to put a dollar in a jar every time one of them uses the taboo term
fast track
. It’s the same jar he used to coerce his minions into using
normal trade relations
when they blurted out
most favored nation
.

No More Patients.
How do you get rid of mental patients in one fell swoop? Put in a more caring way, how do you make the mentally ill feel better about whatever ails them? Call them
mental-health consumers
.

Here’s the idea: A
patient
is one being cared for; in a “doctor-
patient
re-lationship,” the doctor has the power. But in a “merchant-
consumer
rela-tionship,” the
consumer
is supposedly king. When you think of health care as a commodity, to be sold by medical professionals and bought by ailing purchasers of such therapies, then the patient is a
consumer,
the boss.

“It’s a respect thing,” says Frank McMyne, a board member of the Pennsylvania affiliate of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. “It changes the relationship. If we are merely
patients,
it diminishes our ability to question the kind of treatment we are receiving.”

Dr. Karen Shore, president of the Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, is more conflicted. “I call my patients
patients
. But to a lot of people who are consumer advocates,
patient
sounds pejorative.” Her associate Sheri Laribee adds: “What
consumer
stands for is ‘someone on a health care plan.’ If I am paying for the managed health care plan, I am the
consumer
buying insurance. The managed-care organizations call people
consumers
so that they don’t have to think of them as
patients
.”

I have a quibble or two with your use of the phrase,
in one fell swoop.

Quibble one: The phrase is from Shakespeare and is actually “at one fell swoop,” although the corrupted form does appear quite frequently these days. It is uttered when Macduff has been told that his wife and his children have all been murdered at Macbeth’s command, and is an analogy to a hawk striking its prey
.

Quibble two: The phrase has a literal connotation of both suddenness—which you wanted to convey—and evil—which I presume you didn’t. I recognize that many people use the phrase simply to mean accomplishing something swiftly and completely, whether the object was good or bad. However, this often leads to unintentionally humorous statements such as, “After years of suffering, the medicine cured her
in one fell swoop.”

You might be interested in what [Bergen] Evans & [Cornelia] Evans had to say about it in
A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage
([Random House] 1957):

Normalcy.
“I was taught that
normalcy
was a nonword,” writes Floyd Norris, chief financial correspondent of the
New York Times,
“a poor substitute for
normality
invented by one of our worst presidents, and that educated people avoided the word. So I have been surprised to see it used so frequently in the
Times
since the September 11 attack. When did President Harding win the language battle? Or were my mother and my teachers wrong all along?”

They were. Norris is a colleague whose sober market advice we all should have taken throughout the recent irrational exuberance, but he was swept up by a previous generation’s Harding-hooting. Last week the economics columnist of the
Washington Post,
Robert J. Samuelson, used the word that is out-usaging
normality
3 to 1: “We are now slowly returning to
‘normalcy,’
though we don’t know what that means—and can’t know.”

I know. It means the same as
normality,
coined by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848. Nine years later a couple of mathematicians used an equally logical extension of
normal,
preferring -
cy
to -
ity
. The two forms competed,
normality
in the lead, until Harding made the alliterator’s hall of fame in 1920 with “not heroics but healing, not nostrums but
normalcy,
not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment” and (my favorite) “not experiment but equipoise.”

When mocked by users of -
ity,
the president told his critics to look it up in the dictionary—and there it was, in Merriam-Webster’s. The populace was bullish on
normalcy
. Which leads to another miscorrection:

The Defense Department junked the name
Operation Infinite Justice
for its campaign against terrorism. New title:
Operation Enduring Freedom
. “
Enduring
suggests that this is not a quick fix,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. President Bush embraced the phrase in a pep talk to the CIA: “We are on a mission to make sure that freedom is enduring.”

“There is a double meaning to
‘Enduring Freedom,’
” objected Franz Allina of the Bronx in a letter to the
Times
.
“Enduring
means ‘tolerating’ as well as ‘persevering.’” Other e-mail and faxes flew in to make the same point.

Not so. “He’s taking the root meaning of the verb,” replies Fred Mish, editor in chief of
Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate,
“and transferring it to the participial adjective. A verb can have many meanings, but they don’t all carry over to the adjective.” The intransitive verb
endure,
rooted in the Latin
durus,
“hard,” has many senses: “to last,” or “to remain firm under adversity,” but a different meaning when transferring action: “to suffer, tolerate, countenance.”

Does that difference carry over when the verb
endure
adds an -
ing
and becomes a participial adjective? No.
Enduring
is almost always used to mean “lasting, permanent,” as in “
enduring
friendship”; occasionally it means “durable,” as in “an
enduring
substance”; only once in a blue moon does it mean “tolerating,” as in “
enduring
personal attacks, he carried on.”

“The meaning that comes to mind with most people,” says the lexicographer Mish, “is the meaning Rumsfeld probably meant.” That meaning is “lasting,” using
enduring
as a modifier. The other meaning would be close to an
abnormality
. (
Abnormalcy
? No such word.)

No Sentence Fragments.
Jim Nicholson, the GOP chairman, sent out a release under a header encapsulating his party’s message for the current campaign: “Renewing America’s Purpose. Together.”

This raises the issue of sentence fragments. Slogans—from the Gaelic
sluagh
- (army)
gairm
(yell), or “battle cry”—need not be complete sentences. A Republican slogan in the 1928 campaign was “Hoover and Happiness, or Smith and Soup Houses,” which contained no verb. (The Democratic response four years later, “In Hoover We Trusted, Now We Are Busted,” was a comma splice of two complete sentences and helped elect FDR.) Some facetious slogans of the ’70s were sentences (“Support Mental Health or I’ll Kill You”) and some were not (“Dog Litter—An Issue You Can’t Sidestep”).

I have long rallied to battle cries containing verbs. “Keep Cool with Coolidge” strikes me as more forceful than “Rum, Romanism and Rebel-lion,” the ill-chosen phrase that sank James Blaine’s campaign against Grover Cleveland, though both phrases were alliterative gems. “Vote As You Shot,” with its two verbs, stirred Ulysses Grant’s followers, while “Elect a Leader Not a Lover” savaged Nelson Rockefeller, and “Make Love Not War” signs danced at demonstrations in the 1960s. All these were short sentences studded with the action of verbs and not passive sentence fragments.

What is a sentence fragment? A decade ago, I collected a bunch of “fumblerules” that demonstrated the errors they intended to correct. These ranged from “Don’t Use No Double Negatives” to “Avoid Clichés Like the Plague,” and included “No Sentence Fragments.” I confidently passed along the conventional pop-grammarian wisdom that a sentence should contain a complete thought and thus requires a verb.

Not so fast (as sentence-fragmenters say). James McCawley, the late linguistics master at the University of Chicago, took issue with my knee-jerk pedagogy. First, he noted that a sentence should
express,
rather than
be,
a complete thought. This was no nitpick; the example he gave was the answer to “What did he buy?” “A hatrack.” McCawley wrote that “
A hatrack
expresses exactly the same thought as
He bought a hatrack
and hence doesn’t express any less complete a thought: the difference between the full sentence and the sentence fragment is not in the completeness of the thought expressed but in the completeness of the form in which it is expressed.”

Furthermore, McCawley instructed me that “for something that occupies the position of a sentence to be a ‘sentence fragment,’ it is
not
necessary that it
not
contain a verb.” The fragment of an expressed thought-not a complete sentence—can indeed contain a verb: Lincoln’s anguished “And the war came” is an example.

Seized of the great grammarian’s clarifying subtlety, and willing after ten years to rethink my pronouncement (and allowing for sloganeering li-cense), I cannot now denounce the current Republican slogan as blatantly incorrect.

That slogan—“Renewing America’s Purpose. Together.”—may be choppy prose and less than catchy or rousing. And putting
together
at the end, freestanding, rather than at the beginning as “Together Renewing America’s Purpose,” seems to make the unity pitch appear to be an afterthought. But the two expressed thoughts cannot be easily denounced as an offense to good grammar. Just awkward.

No Way.
A decade ago, the youngest editor at Merriam-Webster, who was fresh out of college, noted to his boss at the
Collegiate Dictionary
offices that the system of dating senses of words was “way cool.”

That snapped Fred Mish’s head around. “It was really so striking when I first heard it,” the lexicographer recalls. “
Way
was being used as an adverb to modify the kind of adjective or adverb that it did not traditionally modify.”

In olden times, the adverb
way
was a shortening of
far away,
as in this 1868 praise of the mail service by General George Armstrong Custer: “They had braved the perils … in order to bring us,
way
out here, news from our loved ones.” (Contrary to popular belief, the last-standing Custer did not then say, “Those look like friendly Indians.”) The same sense of distance existed in the 19th century in phrases like
way off, way up
and
way over yonder
.

But in the middle of the 20th century, adverbial
way
took a sharp turn:
way-out
was a compound adjective in this 1954 Merriam-Webster citation from a toast recorded in Sing Sing prison: “I’ll make a whole lot of money for you, ’cause hustling’s in my blood, / And because I go for you and think you’re a
way-out
stud.” A drug connotation was added with a 1958 “I turn on a little, and I get
way out
“—that is, removed from reality-and was soon accompanied by a sense of avant-garde, as in Norman Mailer’s description of a favored hypothesis of his as
way out
.

Way
was long an intensifier of distance but through the popularity of
way-out
became an intensifier of anything. In 1985,
People
magazine surveyed contemporary slang and classified as admiring value judgments terms like
neato, superpeachy, awesome, intense, funky fresh, totally hot
and
way cool
.