The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (39 page)

An
operation
is a surgical procedure. Patients who call operations
procedures
without the
surgical
modifying it are the sort who sit up in bed afterward and ask for a dish of stewed dried plums.

Surgery
also means a physician’s, dentist’s or veterinarian’s office (in the U.K.)
.

Herbert S. Saffir, PE, Hon. M. ASCE

Coral Gables, Florida

… Or Shut Up.
“The time for generalities without specifics,” said candidate Al Gore, “I think is just about over…. It’s kind of
put up or shut up
time.”

His opponent promptly complained about the “tone” of this remark. Amid the general fear of being counterpunched with a charge of negativity, politicians shy from any locution that can be construed as harsh. Evidently Gore was concerned about his use of the directly challenging
put up or shut up,
because he preceded it with the ameliorating
kind of
and followed it with
time.

The
time
combining form was pioneered in
party time
and was popularized by TV’s Bob Smith in the late 1940s with “Hi, kids—it’s Howdy Doody
time
!” The
time
turns the preceding word or phrase into a modifier, thereby weakening
put up or shut up
.

The substance of the charge has no place in this resolutely nonpolitical column. To philologists, however, the use of the Americanism
put up or shut up
poses a question: from what metaphor is it derived?

The earliest recorded use is in Fred H. Hart’s 1878 collection of stories,
The Sazerac Lying Club
. (This may have been a dialectical source of the poet Mary Karr’s recent memoir of her childhood,
The Liar’s Club;
that best seller is soon to be followed by the avidly awaited memoir of her adolescence,
Cherry,
a slang reference to virginity. I enjoy digressions.) In a Hart story, the initialese
PU or SU
appears, explained by a character saying, “
PU or SU
means
put up or shut up,
doesn’t it?” The caption to a cartoon in an 1884
Police Gazette
was “
Put up, shut up
or get!” (presumably, “get out” or “git”), and the Americanism was locked into language by Mark Twain in his 1889
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
with “This was a plain case of ‘
put up, or shut up
.’”

Put up what? If the metaphor is from fisticuffs, the figure of speech is one of a fighter putting up his dukes, or fists, and telling his opponent to be quiet or prepare to put up his own dukes to defend himself.

A different possibility: the phrase could come from card playing, a rich source of phrases used in politics. Samples: FDR’s
New Deal,
Truman’s
the buck stops here,
with the buck, often a silver dollar, used to mark the position of the dealer, and
stand pat,
a poker locution used once by Richard Nixon as “America cannot
stand pat,
” and struck by his speechwriter from subsequent speeches after it drew a sharp glance from the candidate’s wife.

Card playing is a strong possibility for the root because of the first verb,
put,
which is also used in
put your money where your mouth is
. To
put up
is synonymous with
ante up,
a call to place money in the ante, or “pot.” (
Ante
means “before,” and could allude to the stake that must be placed “before the draw.” In 1882, Charles Welsh wrote in his poker guide about the “eldest hand” in the game: “Before the dealer begins to deal the cards, the player next to his left, who is called the
ante-man,
or
age,
must deposit in the pool an
ante
not exceeding one-half the limit previously agreed upon.”)

Did dealer Gore obliquely demand that the ante-man put up or quietly fold? Or did he make a veiled dialect reference to the stance of a pugilist? It’s a down-and-dirty dialectical mystery.

“The buck stops here” is a Navy term. In an officers’ mess or wardroom a small object—a silver dollar would do—is placed at the table setting of the person who is to be served first that day. It is then moved to the adjoining seat, and that person is served first and his seatmate last. The term does not denote responsibility, but rather fleeting privilege. Truman was an excellent man in many ways, but alas, he was an officer in the Army, which evidently has no such sociable practice.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
^*

United States Senate

Washington, D.C.

There are two howlers in your article. (1) The stake is placed before the “deal” not the “draw” (draw is taking new cards after the deal); (2) logically the “ante-man” could never “put up or quietly fold” (fold is not meeting someone else’s bet); how could the first to bet be in that position? He could either “ante” or “pass.” Not “fold.”

Thomas R. Moore

New York, New York

P

Package Deal.
In the Left Coast convention speech introducing himself to the nation, Senator Joseph Lieberman said: “My dad lived in an orphanage when he was a child. He went to work in a bakery truck and then owned a
package store
in Stamford, Connecticut.”

The week before, however, in a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in Hartford, Lieberman used the phrase
liquor store
. Crawford Lincoln of Brimfield, Massachusetts, asks, “Was this a gentler locution to soften the image of his family’s business for a national audience?”

I’d say yes, and thereby hangs a euphemism. A
package store
is a store, not a bar, where liquor is sold by the bottle and not by the drink and where the contents of the “package” are consumed off premises.

In 1880,
Bradstreet’s
reported active trade in
package houses
. In 1890, the
London Daily News
reported that “Judge Foster recently decided that liquor could only be sold in ‘original packages,’ which is construed as meaning one or more bottles of beer or whisky. The merchants … are not allowed to sell beer or whisky by the glass.”

Our earliest evidence for the phrase
package store,
I am informed by Joanne Despres at Merriam-Webster, “is an entry in the 1918 Addenda to the
New International Dictionary
(originally published in 1909), where it is labeled ‘cant, U.S.’” (
Cant
means “jargon,” and business euphemisms fall into that category.)

Let’s face it: what the seller is selling is not a package but what is contained in the package, which is liquor. Why the squeamishness about that word? After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, state legislatures had the opportunity to license booze shops and saloons but did not want to upset the many “drys.” That led to the linguistic prettification of
saloons
as
taverns
and of shops purveying the mother’s milk of John Barleycorn as
package stores
.

Maybe the senator uses the terms interchangeably. But I have a hunch that some politically sensitive soul remembered that “drys” still exist and vote and changed the candidate for vice president’s word from
liquor
to
package
. It shows a sandpapered-fingertip sensitivity to the shades of meaning of words.

Pashmina.
Do advertising tricks—those hidden persuasions of the huckster class—get your goat? If so, consider what has been done to the
Capra hircus,
a hairy wild goat that likes to graze along the mountainsides of the Himalayas.

For generations until 1684, the maharajah of Kashmir had exclusive rights to the underfur combed from the throat and belly of this cold old goat. The maharajah’s domain was spelled
Kashmir,
a land that remains in dispute even today between India and Pakistan, but the wool was spelled
cashmere
.

Though sometimes challenged by exotic fabrics like vicuna (who now remembers what kind of coat Bernard Goldfine gave Sherman Adams?), cashmere has long been known as the finest wool that money can buy. That meant, of course, that it had to be topped by a wool even more rare, available at a higher price, to warm the skin of those late-arriving
arrivistes
who could learn to scorn the harsh feel of the cashmere worn by the riffraff.

Shahtoosh
is a no-no; that “king of wool” comes from the Tibetan antelope, an endangered species. Enter
pashmina,
pronounced “pash-MEE-nah,” a new name to create the illusion of a new goat with softer fur. The linguistic trick is to use the Persian word for the mountain goat’s fur and to ignore the name of the place—
Kashmir,
pronounced “cashmere”—where the weaving into wool is done.

Pashm
is the Persian word for “wool,” or more specifically, “soft wool from under the throat of sheep or goats.” In 1880, Mrs. A.G.F. Eliot James in
Indian Industries
wrote, “The
pashm,
or shawl-wool, is a downy substance, growing next to the skin and under the thick hair of those goats found in Thibet and in the elevated lands north of the Himalayas.” Thirteen years later, a British natural history magazine explained, “It is this
pashm
of the goat of these regions which affords the materials for the celebrated Kashmir shawls.”

Pashmina
is the Persian word for “woolen,” with a feminine ending. A couple of years ago, the
pashmina
push began. “Finer than cashmere,” touted one catalog, “extraordinarily soft, warm and lightweight.” Scarce; higher-priced; a gift even more eagerly sought after by the uxorious luxurious.

In the
Wall Street Journal
in November, Lauren Lipton shot it down: “Sit down, fashionistas:
Pashmina,
this most hyped of fabrics, is not a particularly premium kind of cashmere.” She quoted textile-science sources scoffing at the promotion and cashmere industry sources saying: “Cashmere is the hair of the cashmere goat.
Pashmina
is the same goat.”

Pashmina
marketers were quick to bleat that cashmere fibers were usually fifteen microns thick while
pashmina
’s were a few microns thinner, and their product was woven on a warp of spun silk. You can believe that if you’re a Big Spender. A company calling itself Nepal
Pashmina
Industry, in Katmandu, honestly begins its product profile with “
pashmina
(better known as cashmere).”

The source of the expression “to pull the wool over one’s eyes” is a mystery. It was first seen in a
Jamestown
(N.Y.)
Journal
in 1839, at about the same time the term
OK
appeared: “That lawyer has been trying to spread the wool over your eyes.” The allusion seems to be to spread a blanket over the head to obstruct one’s figurative sight, similar to the origin of
hoodwink;
other speculation goes as far as to suggest pulling a person’s hairpiece over his face. But no etymologist has yet come up with the specific item made of wool, or fine goat’s hair, on which the expression is based.

Perils of Parlous.
These are
parlous
times. Make that observation in a speech, and each member of your audience will frown and nod, joining in the general worriment. One or two misfits will be wondering, “Does the speaker mean
parlous
or
perilous
?”

In the
International Herald Tribune,
the historian Roger Buckley writes darkly about “the
parlous
prospects for the economy.” Bloomberg News was told by a spokesman for Cathay Pacific Airways that the airline industry “is in a
parlous
state worldwide.” The ABC anchor Peter Jennings was quoted by Mark Jurkowitz of the
Boston Globe
as saying, “We are in
parlous
economic times.”

The word is not related to
parley;
it has nothing to do with the French
parler,
“to talk.”
Parlous
has the same meaning as the word it sounds like:
perilous
. The Latin
periculum,
akin to
peritus,
“experiment,” means “risk.” But
perilous
is beyond “risky,” scarier than the general “dangerous” or the unavoidable “hazardous”; it is “fraught (meaning ‘full of, laden’) with peril.”

If
parlous
means
perilous,
who needs both? The two forms of the same word have been battling it out for seven centuries, and today we’re going to declare a winner.

Parlous
is a delicious example of linguistic syncopation. Every ragtime or jazz enthusiast knows that when you
syncopate
(from the Greek for “cut short”), you begin a note on a weak beat in the bar, sustaining it into the accented part, thereby shifting the accent. In grammar, you
syncopate
by snipping a word short or by skipping one or two syllables in the middle. Examples:
fo’c’sle
for
forecastle,
and
Chumley
for
Cholmondelay
. They don’t order
Worcestershire
sauce in Wooster, Ohio.

Usually the shorter and easier forms win, and
extrality
is likely to overtake
extraterritoriality
. However,
parlous
has an arch, archaic ring and carries a touch of the pompously bookish (like
fraught
), while
perilous
has a straightforward, sailor-take-warning feel. You won’t be incorrect if you try to impress your friends with the syncopated form of
perilous,
but if you do, it’s at your
parl
.

Ping!
From the highest reaches of the
New York Times
comes the query: “What does the verb
ping
mean, as in ‘I’ll
ping
him and ask’?”

At the same time, Microsoft Windows asked itself this question and sent my computer a copy: “What is the
ping
command and how is it used?”

Both senses are illustrated in this comment in
Internet Magazine
in May 2001: “In some offices, people are even sent to
‘ping
’ the sales department to see if their figures are ready, just as networked computers
‘ping’
one another to see if they’re still there.”

“The
ping
command,” Windows informs my machine, “is used to test whether a network connection is active.” You send your
ping
and wait for a response from the
pinged
machine. From this we get a metaphoric extension: to
ping
a person, you send an e-mail message to see if your friend is alive and online.

Do not believe the Internet dictionaries that treat the verb as an acronym for Packet Internet Groper, a Unix utility that accomplishes the above test but sounds to me like an odious new form of sexual harassment. The verb’s e-mail meaning lies halfway between “to buzz” and “to noodge.”

The origin is not, as commonly believed, in the short, high-pitched pulsing sound emitted by sonar. Before that,
ping
signified the engine sound dreaded by motorists; if your engine
pinged,
you probably had piston problems. Before that, it was the sound of a bullet’s ricochet: “If a button was shown,” wrote Sir James E. Alexander in 1835, “
ping
went a bullet at it immediately.” And before that, in 897, King Ælfred the Great, in his translation of St. Gregory’s
Liber pastoralis curae,
wrote in Old English, “He waerlice hine
pynge
mid sumum wordum,” which means “Let him prick him very cautiously with some words.” And before that, Roman noodges used the Latin
pungere,
“to prick, poke, urge.” The same basic meaning echoes through the millennia.