The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (38 page)

On the hook
is military usage for “on a radiotelephone hookup.” In his 1976
Grunts,
C. R. Anderson wrote, “Six
on the hook,
Sir.” (
Six
is a frequent radio call sign for the unit commanding officer.) An easier-to-understand term is
on the horn,
as all who remember yelling “Hello Central!” into the speaker of the telephone hanging on the wall fondly recall. The other term—and one I should have used—is
on the blower,
which has a nicely archaic feel.

Dial into this: all the metaphors for telephonic communication are direly in need of updating. Dials are gone (have you seen
Punch M for Murder?)
. Because of wireless cell phones, a line now requires a retronym:
landline
. (If you’re calling from a cave, use the
landline
.) Use e-mail; stay off the dog. (That’s Cockney rhyming slang of the second order: the dog, which chews a
bone,
rhymes with
phone
. That’s a little out of date, too.)

In my opinion,
on the blower
originated as a nautical/naval expression referring to a ship’s speaking tube connecting (especially) the bridge with the engine room. To signal the person at the other end that one wanted to talk to, one blew into the tube, which created a whistle-like signal at the other end, prompting the other person to pick up the tube.

Laurence Urdang

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Old Guard.
“Let others argue the case for the
old guard,
” Al Gore said in his Los Angeles acceptance speech. “We’re the
new guard
.”

In Michigan two days earlier, the vice president scorned “the failed ways of the
old guard,
” and one night before, his choice for vice president, Joseph Lieberman, asked the Democratic convention, “Are we going to elect the
old guard
that created the problems or a
new guard
that will continue to work solving them?”

From this we can safely assume that Democrats have formulated a rhetorical strategy to get around the In party’s traditional “time for a change” problem. “My goodness,” exclaimed the CNN analyst William Schneider as the slogan was repeated, “they’ve been in for eight year—show can they be the
new guard
?”

As the old song goes, wishing will make it so. The daring idea is to take the “new” out of
newcomer
and the “in” out of
incumbent
. How? By hanging the
old guard
label on the challengers, those who have been the Ins for the past two terms cast themselves as the contrasting
new guard
. No such audacious reversal has been suggested since Adlai Stevenson countered the charges of a “mess in Washington” by saying that the GOP slogan in 1952 should be “Throw the rascals in.”

As the fair-minded reader will note, the scholarly function of this linguistic column during a presidential campaign is to examine, with scrupulous nonpartisanship, the roots of its catchphrases.

“The Guard dies, but never surrenders” (“
La Garde meurt, mais ne serend pas
”) was supposed to have been said by Count Cambronne on June 18, 1815, rejecting the Duke of Wellington’s call for Napoleon’s surrender after the battle of Waterloo. He did not say “the
old
Guard”; indeed, Cambronne went to his grave denying that he ever said anything of the sort, which was one of the last times anybody denied making a historic utterance. (I erred recently in attributing the wrong gender to
La Garde
.
J’en suis désolé
.)

Others suggested that the count had said, simply and forcefully,
merde!
—an expletive of excrement, which sounds like
meurt,
the French for “dies.” General Anthony McAuliffe of the United States, rejecting surrender at Bastogne in the World War II Battle of the Bulge, is also suspected of having used a more forceful expression than his recorded “
Nuts!
” But I digress.

Even if Cambronne did say, “The Guard dies,” etc., whence comes the
old
Guard? Evidently this was the familiar name of the Imperial Guard of Napoleon I, cited in an 1809 message to the emperor as
la vieille Garde
and repeated by him in his final adieu in 1814: “Soldiers of my
Old Guard:
I bid you farewell.”

The phrase was not extended beyond the specific Napoleonic troops until applied to “grim sea grenadiers” by the American novelist Herman Melville, in
White-Jacket
in 1850, who called them “hearty old members of the
Old Guard
.” The phrase continued to have an affectionate, loyal-veteran connotation until 1880, when supporters of a third term for President Ulysses S. Grant wore medallions proclaiming “
Old Guard
” on them; Democrats reacted by using the phrase as a description of Republican reactionaries.

That is the current sense. Aware of this, a conservative Republican group in the 1970s, the Young Americans for Freedom, named its publication the
New Guard
. But in political terminology, anything can be freely swiped. In this case, that is what the creative Gore word-slingers seeking to keep the Democrats in office have done in their coordinated effort to derogate the freshness of the Bush challenge.

On the Right’s Words.
William F. Buckley announced last month that he has decided to give up public speaking; in its stead, this pioneering practitioner of self-mocking rodomontade has endowed his conservative followers with
Let Us Talk of Many Things,
a high-stylish compilation of fifty years of piquant and literate comment.

His speeches show his easy way of teaching as if in passing. “I shall not introduce—the rhetoricians call this
paraleipsis
—the wonderful woman sitting, appropriately, on my left, Mrs. Robert Kennedy.” This is a device of emphasis by pretending to omit (the old “to say nothing of” and “not to mention” trick). When you
paralep
like that, but then call attention to your own emphasis-by-omission, you’re subtly instructing.

He also provokes you to teach yourself. Buckley is known for his delight in using unfamiliar words. He referred to Henry Kissinger and “one truth no one can challenge: the
petrology
of our association.” I had to look it up:
petrology
is the study of the structure of rocks. So why not say “the rock-solid quality of our association”? Because the speaker sometimes wants to push his audience a little. He is saying, Go look up the word—work on it a little—and then you won’t forget it or my point.

He’s made those of us in the word trade stretch. “There is pleasure in even a little progress,” he said in tribute to the conservative thinker James Burnham, “even among those of us taught, at our mother’s knee, not to seek to
immanentize the eschaton
.”

Eschatology
is the study of ultimate destiny, the purpose of life reckoned at the last accounting. The
eschaton
is its Greek root: the last thing, the divinely ordained climax of history, with its present sense of a final judgment that should inform our lives. That’s the easy part.

But
immanentize
? The Latin
immanere,
“to remain in,” leads us to
immanent,
“inherent, intrinsic,” with a special philosophical sense of “confined to the mind.” It’s not a word I would use because
inherent
does the job and
immanent
is too easily confused with
imminent,
“about to take place,” with a connotation of danger.

So I admitted defeat and called Buckley.

“The source of
immanentize the eschaton
is the 1952
New Science of Politics,
by Eric Voegelin,” he explained. “It’s a warning against taking ultimate reality and treating it pantheistically, rather than as an objective philosophical phenomenon.” The conservative pioneer added: “It was turned into a bumper sticker by the Young Americans for Freedom. Delicious, don’t you think?”

“The petrology of our association,” my foot! Buckley has over-reached with that figment of speech
. Petrology
is not the structure of rocks. It is the study of rocks, and in the science of the Earth it is generally taken to mean the origin of rocks—how they got that way. I am a petrologist. I know from petrology.

Buckley no doubt came at this private and irreproducible meaning through his biblical understanding. This is the way I used to introduce my subject at the start of a course in petrology. This is not about petroleum, I used to say; oil from rocks. This is from
petrus,
rock and
logos,
word. It means this is The Word about Rocks. (If you want the full discourse on
logos,
read Tolstoy’s translation and extended commentary on the gospel of John. If you get past
logos,
let me know.) This word
petrology
should be understood not from the more familiar oil of rocks but from what is in English an apparent pun by Jesus in the New Testament.

When Simon Bar-Joan proclaims the Christ, Jesus responds: “Thou art Peter, and upon the
rock
I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 16:18-19)

This powerful statement is taken by the Buckley faithful to be prophetic of the founding of the Christian church in Rome by the apostle Peter. I am told by Jesuits that this is not an actual pun in the original Greek.

S. A. Morse

Research Professor of Petrology

University of Massachusetts

Amherst, Massachusetts

Your piece on Buckley reminded me of my latest memorable encounter with him. He murmured something nice about my book, identifying himself as a member of that generation and then said, “So thank you for enhancing my already exaggerated sense of self-importance.”

Tom Brokaw

NBC News

New York, New York

Operation Proceed.
When the governor of Massachusetts, Paul Cel-lucci, is confirmed as our ambassador to Canada, Lt. Gov. Jane Swift will become our first pregnant acting governor. “And although no governor has ever given birth before,” wrote the
New York Times
columnist Gail Collins, “plenty of them take to their beds for one reason or another. Mr. Cellucci himself underwent heart surgery while in office. ‘We like to call it a
procedure,
’ said an aide.” Ms. Collins noted wryly that Jane Swift “is expecting a
procedure
in June.”

That spotted and skewered a rising euphemism. When do you have an
operation,
when a
procedure,
and how is each different from having
surgery
?

LaSalle Leffall Jr., MD, professor of surgery at Howard University Hospital, says: “Every
operation
is a
procedure,
but not every
procedure
is an
operation
. A
colonoscopy,
for example, is a
procedure
and not an
operation
.

“You can say ‘a surgical
procedure,
’” Dr. Leffall continues, “but it would be redundant to say ‘a surgical
operation
.’ But
surgery
is a discipline of using manual means for diagnosis and treatment. I’d never say, ‘He had
surgery
.’”

Claude H. Organ Jr., MD, a surgeon and editor of the AMA’s
Archives of
Surgery,
agrees that “the word that a lot of people are using today that is not appropriate is
surgeries
.” But he uses
operation
and
procedure
interchangeably, as does George McGee, MD, who adds, “in general, if it requires an incision, then it would be called an
operation
.”

Eric Rose, MD, chairman of surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, uses a nice metaphor to illustrate the difference: “If a
procedure
is a melody, then an
operation
is a symphony. A lot of component
procedures
make up an
operation
.”