The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (4 page)

Cheney’s
body man,
reports Schmitt, is Brian McCormack, an earnest young guy from New Jersey who considers himself a jack-of-all-trades. He carries Big Time’s coat, passes him messages, “keeps him up to date and on time” and generally sticks close by to do whatever errand or task Cheney needs done.

A
Times
reporter who covers the president, Frank Bruni, says that George W. Bush’s
body man
is Logan Walters, retained in that key post from the campaign. Walters jots down addresses for thank-you notes, declines gifts worth more than fifty dollars and holds the cell phone that keeps his boss reachable by his inner circle. (Sign of intimacy: a cow on the Bush ranch, born on the aide’s birthday, is named Logan.)

The informal job title is not to be confused with
the man with the briefcase,
the ever-present carrier of the codes needed by the president to respond to a hostile missile launch. It is more specific and intimate than
gofer,
a term applied to any aide ready to “go fer” coffee or do other menial tasks.

The earliest citation I can find after a quick rattling of the cages is from a 1988 article by Susan Trausch of the
Boston Globe:
“Every candidate has a
body man,
someone who fulfills a kind of mothering role on the trail. The
body man
makes sure the candidate’s tie is straight for the TV debate, keeps his mood up and makes sure he gets his favorite cereal for breakfast.” The columnist Chris Matthews, who used the phrase in print in 1989, recalls that JFK’s
body man
was David Powers.

The phrase suggests that the aide does not deal with the president’s mind. However, the title was given more dignity recently by Mary McGrory in the
Washington Post
. “Thanks to
The West Wing,
the classy television series,” she wrote, “everyone knows what a
‘body man’
is. He’s the one who hovers over the Big Man, making sure his suit is pressed, his shoes are shined and his speech is stapled in order.” Then the columnist, aware of the power of access, gave the job a prestigious boost: “He’s also a press secretary without portfolio, a policy adviser and a diplomat who keeps the locals from pestering the boss.”

The
body
in
body man
is an attributive noun, which means it does the job of an adjective—as in
body suit, body blow
and
body snatcher
.

I thought that
main man
was merely an embellishment of
man,
which I have been led to believe became a black term of address in order to counteract the racist put-down,
boy.

Laurence Urdang
Old Lyme, Connecticut

Broadband.
His necktie was defiantly ripped away. His old-fashioned mustache was shaved off. All but rocking on the soles of his feet and snapping his fingers to illustrate his with-it-ness, the new boss of AOL Time Warner Inc. announced to the world, “I am a
broadband
person.”

As if that transmogrification were not enough, Gerald M. Levin—until now a fairly dignified executive—added plaintively, “I’m an
interactive
guy.” But
interactive
is yesterday’s word, for years meaning “acting upon each other” and then meaning “reciprocating by electronic means”; now used mainly by aging Wunderkinder straining to keep pace, it awaits the coinage of its opposite,
interinactive,
“a one-way flow of data.” Hip, connected e-lexies in this winter of our content provision focused on his
broadband
personhood.

That word has a glorious history in the northern dialects of Britain. “The verie euill thoughts of the wicked,” wrote Zachary Boyd in
Last Battell,
his 1629 masterpiece, “in that day shalbe spread out and laide in
broadband
before the face of God.” James O. Halliwell, in his 1847
Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words,
reminded us that a band was a space twenty yards square, and
broad-band
was “corn laid out in the sheaf on the band, and spread out to dry after rain.”

Over three centuries, the
band
evolved from a marked-out strip of land into “a range of radio frequencies or wavelengths.” In 1956, W. A. Heflin’s
U.S. Air Force Dictionary
defined
broadband
as “a band having a wide range of frequencies.” In our time, it morphed into a medium that not only transmits a wide range of radio, video and data signals, but also can carry other independent channels in their own bandwidths, or space on the band. (On these multiple spaces the communicators still seem to lay out wet corn.)

Then metaphor began to beat the
broadband
. The adjective (sometimes hyphenated) is still used to describe multiplex communications networks, but in more sweeping terms. “In a
broad-band
world,” wrote Andrew Sullivan in the
New York Times,
“even the distinctions among telephone wires, cables and satellites will be erased. There will be one cultural-economic tube.” The
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
wrote of “the
broad-band
war, the struggle over who will control the ability to deliver seamless streams of data to consumers.”

And now, in an interinactive linguistic breakthrough, Mr. Levin has extended the metaphor from networks to human beings. “I am a
broadband
person” means more, in my view, than “I work in an industry characterized by simultaneous transmission of multiple channels.” It means that he sees himself as a person with
broadband
personal characteristics—able to think, speak, gesture, persuade, broadcast and data-disseminate in an unlimited way, while chewing gum at the same time.

Look at yourself, dear reader. Are you a
narrowband
person, cribbed, cabin’d and confined in a strait gate—or are you the sort whose mind ranges far out over the amber waves of corn? By rejecting the “verie euill thoughts of the wicked,” you, too, can mega-merge yourself into a
broadband
person.

If that’s your choice, move quickly to so identify yourself, because telecommuning lingo changes fast, and
broadband
is sure to be crowded out soon.

Bundling.
The great American counterspook, Paul Redmond, left a word-news tip in the dead drop that is my answering machine: “Check out
bundling
.”

Old-timers remember that word fondly from their spooning days. “
Bundling
was originally courting in bed,” noted an 1874 British slang dictionary, “the lovers being tied or bundled up to prevent undue familiarities. The practice still obtains in Wales.”

This 1781 term for an early form of what is now called “safe sex,” apparently pioneered by the prudent Welsh, was derived from the Old English
bindan,
“to bind together,” and was later applied to “men and women sleeping together, where the divisions of the house will not permit of better or more decent accommodation, with all their clothes on.”

Fast-forward to the Arizona legislature in 1956, which prohibited “
bundling
or combining various limited benefit insurance policies.” The pejorative connotation grew when the Justice Department in 1975 accused IBM of charging anticompetitive prices for
bundling
hardware and software services. The European Community repeated the complaint in 1981, and John Tagliabue defined the word in the
New York Times:
“the practice of what is called
bundling
—selling the elements of a computer system as a package to prevent competitors from supplying them at perhaps better conditions.”

Today the term obtains, to use the archaic verb, in the Microsoft case, as a federal judge ruled that the company illegally
bundled
its Web browser with its Windows operating system. In my legal-etymological interpretation, the company is appealing on the grounds that separate divisions wrapped up in bed together, fully clothed, are not making love.

Thus do old terms find new uses in the brave new wide Web world. For example, the trade name SPAM—created in 1937 by Hormel Foods out of the first and last letters of “spiced ham”—has, when uncapitalized, come to mean “junk e-mail,” with a second sense of “the random posting of advertisements on computer bulletin boards.”

A fanciful speculation about the metaphoric reason for the adoption of
spamming
by the computer world can be found in the excellent
Newton’s Telecom Dictionary,
sixteenth edition: “the term is derived from a brand of pink, canned meat that splatters messily when hurled.” (A spokesman for Hormel vociferously denies this, and tests run at the Safire Semantic Kitchens confirm that uncanned SPAM, when hurled against a wall at a normal speed, bounces rather than splatters.)

Cache,
pronounced “cash,” from the French verb
cacher,
“to hide,” came to mean “a hiding place for valuables”; it was especially applied to holes dug to conceal provisions and ammunition. (One reason given by the Pentagon for the U.S. incursion into Cambodia in 1969 was to capture buried arms, causing the Nixon aide Len Garment to ask, “Can you check a
cache
?”)

In usage by the new lingo, information is
cached
by placing it closer to the user to make it more accessible, which also places less strain on limited computer and network resources. The meaning has changed from the sinister “hiding place” to a more positive “nearby holding place.”

A
cookie
originated as a small Dutch cake and became the term for a baked morsel to be passed around after the
canapés
have been devoured. The metaphoric origin of
cookie
in computerese is obscure, but its meaning is “a text file placed on a computer’s hard disk by an Internet server to track the client’s habits and tastes.” Marketers say it provides convenience and unexpected choices to clients; privacy guardians warn that a
cookie
can follow a customer’s movements around the Web to create an invasive profile. A
cookie pusher
was a term coined in World War II to be a derogation of diplomats who attended too many receptions; now it is an exponent of “targeted marketing.”

Attendant
began as “one who waits upon or accompanies,” as in Milton’s “Lest sin Surprise thee, and her black
attendant,
Death.” After adoption by airlines of
flight attendant
when
stewardess
was taken as sexist, the word was snapped up by technologists and now has two meanings. The first is “an inexpensive computer that leans heavily on its connection to more sophisticated computers.” The second meaning bothers me. “An attendant is an operator of a phone system console,” lexicographer Harry Newton reports. “Typically, it’s the first person in a company to answer an incoming call. That person
attends
the phone system; when the company’s phone is answered by a machine, that’s an
automated attendant
.”

What’s the matter with
operator
? My mother was a telephone
operator
and proud of it. An
operator
suggests an active, purposeful, hands-on person engaging with a device or system; an
attendant
is more passive, sometimes just hanging around “in waiting.” The machine, or system, that is operated is secondary to the human in charge, but the phone system that is merely
attended
is the master.

Hello, Central?

Anent (ahem) your column on technological borrowings: I believe that in its cybersense, “cache” is pronounced with a long “a,” as in “case.”

Allan M. Siegal
The New York Times
New York, New York

Another current context for bundling is the device for getting around campaign contribution limits of $5,000 from a PAC or $1,000 from an individual. Emily’s List is the best-known liberal practitioner of collecting a bunch of checks for one candidate and handing them over all at once to show that you’re worth more than $1,000 or $5,000, but various corporate operatives do it, too.

Adam Clymer
The New York Times
Washington, D.C.

C

Can a Pig Fly?
The modifier universally adopted by journalists and political figures to describe our aircraft was
lumbering
.

After one jingoistic
New York Times
columnist described the Aries as having been “
lumbering
along at about 350 mph,” another
Times
pundit sensitive to loaded words noted coolly that “U.S. sources have insisted that the Chinese fighter planes must have been at fault, because they are so much nimbler than our
‘lumbering’
surveillance plane.”

Lumbering
soon achieved code status for “it couldn’t have been our fault.” “We had a slow,
lumbering,
relatively unmaneuverable aircraft,” said House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde; “they had a fighter plane.” Larry Eagleburger, the heavyset, slow-moving former secretary of state, asserted, “You know, our aircraft is a slow,
lumbering
thing.”

Origin is the Swedish
lomra,
“to resound,” and
loma,
“to walk heavily”; Middle English picked up the imitative word (like
rumbling, crumbling, cumbrous, ponderous
) in the 14th century as
lomeren
. A clip of the last syllable led to
lumber,
a collection of useless goods, like old wooden tables and chairs, that impede movement. British slang still uses
lumbered
to mean “laden, weighed down, encumbered.”

No wonder our unapologetic servicemembers call it “the flying pig.”

Cardinal Placement.
A
New Yorker
editor wonders about “the westward title migration” of cardinals. “How come it always used to be Francis Cardinal Spellman and Richard Cardinal Cushing and now all of a sudden it’s Cardinal Edward M. Egan and Cardinal Bernard F. Law?”

This is the least of the church’s problems. The 1999
New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
reports, “Church authorities no longer place
Cardinal
between given name and surname.” In a 1987 column in this space irreverently but respectfully titled “Long Time No See” (the archaic
see
is the “seat of power”), I quoted His Eminence Johannes Willebrands, who is today the chamberlain of the College of Cardinals, as cheerfully waving off the placement of the title between his first and last names with “We don’t do that anymore.”

But many still do: the archbishop of New York, identified by the
Times,
the Associated Press and most television reporters as “Cardinal Edward M. Egan,” last month signed his vigorous denunciation of the abuse of children with a traditional “Edward Cardinal Egan.” As with pronunciation and usage, it’s a matter heavily influenced by style.

Carpe Diem.
Justifying his plans for transition planning during the vote-counting turmoil, Governor George W. Bush said that it was important “to show the American people that this administration will be ready to
seize the moment
.” Two weeks later, in his first speech as president-elect, he told the nation, “We must
seize the moment
and deliver.”

This is a case for PAW. The Poetic Allusion Watch is maintained in this space to call attention to the roots of our current metaphors that are expressed in flights of vaguely remembered poetry. Whether the Republican candidate knew it or not, he was alluding to a phrase in an ode by the Roman poet Horace:
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero,
“
Seize the day,
put no trust in the future.”

At its first citation in English, Lord Byron in 1817 took the phrase to mean, in his words, “never anticipate.” That philosophical approach was akin to Robert Herrick’s 1648 “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” expressed much later in the song “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).” The literary critic Northrop Frye wrote in 1957 that Horace’s
carpe diem
was “based on a moment of pleasure in experience.”

But two strange things happened to Horace’s phrase on its way to political oratory. First, the day was radically shortened to an hour and finally to a moment. This may have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s promulgation of the Spanish phrase
el momento de la verdad,
“moment of truth.” More to the point, the meaning expressed by
carpe diem
shifted from the hedonistic “live it up while you have the chance” to an exhortation to be bold, recalling Shakespeare’s “tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” The two U.S. presidents who did most to fix the speeded-up phrase in the current political lexicon were Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In his State of the Union message in 1971, Nixon said, “If we act boldly—if we
seize this moment,
“ we could close great gaps, and he warned in 1972 that “if we failed to
seize this moment,
“ we would be untrue to generations yet unborn.

When asked why he named his 1992 book
Seize the Moment
rather than quote his own frequent use, Nixon said: “I quoted from a poem that Mao Zedong had written in which he said, ‘Seize the day, seize the hour, because many things urgently remain to be done.’ …We should
seize the moment,
not for Communism, but for the victory of freedom.”

Clinton became so enamored of the phrase that he used it eleven times on the final day of his 1996 campaign for re-election: “Will you
seize the da
y tomorrow and help us expand family leave?” he asked voters in Cleveland. “Will you
seize the day
and help us balance the budget? … You’ve got to
seize the day
and help us reform health care. You’ve got to
seize the day
.”

In the years following that multiple seizure, Clinton went for the accelerated form adopted by Nixon. In the summer of 2000, he urged Republican senators to “
seize this moment,
to stop the delays.” Meanwhile, GOP Senator John McCain was reminding his Republican colleagues of their obligation “to
seize this moment
to help build a safer, freer and more prosperous world.” Democrats hastily snatched the phrase back: soon after Bill Bradley said “I feel an urgency to
seize this moment,
“ Al Gore asked voters in New York, “Will we
seize this moment
to extend prosperity and share it widely, or will we just lavish more on those who need it least?”

The phrase in the Horace ode, its meaning twisted from “live it up” to “be bold” in Mao’s accelerated corollary, is now enshrined in the book of golden political clichés. Because I did not want Bush’s repetition of it to go unnoticed, I thought the time ripe, the day upon us and the hour propitious to take this opportunity to …

I know you’ll get a lot of mail from Horace lovers on this. You mention the translation of
carpe diem
in English as “seize the day.” In fact, the original Latin verb
carpere
means “to pluck.” Rather than the fairly abrupt, “beat out the competition” feel of “seize the day,” the original more properly connotes a gentler, more thoughtful “harvest the day,” make the best of what time we have, etc. Caverley’s 1861 translation, for example, beautifully renders the end of the poem as, “Mistrust To-morrow, catch the blossom of To-day.”

Henry Martin
New York, New York

Carvilification.
In his book
Stickin’: The Case for Loyalty,
James Carville seemed pleased that he had been called “Clinton’s
gunsel
“ by the columnist Richard Cohen. “I’m sure I am one,” the Clinton loyalist and henchman observed in a footnote. “I just don’t know what it is.”

Filling those voids in vocabulary is the scholarly public service demanded by readers of this column.

American moviegoers first became familiar with the word when spoken by Humphrey Bogart, playing Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled private detective, Sam Spade, in
The Maltese Falcon
. Bogie looked contemptuously at the young bodyguard played by Elisha Cook Jr. and told Sydney Green-street, “Keep that
gunsel
away from me.”

Most readers of
Black Mask
magazine in 1929, when the story first appeared, and moviegoers in the 1940s thought that
gunsel
was a variant of
gunman
. It is not; in a 1965 article, the mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner revealed why Hammett used it.

The editor of
Black Mask,
Joseph Shaw, was on guard against the use of vulgarisms by his writers. Hammett, eager to slip one by, had a character describe his activity as “on the gooseberry lay,” tramp lingo for “stealing clothes from clotheslines,” its connotation larcenous but not vulgar.

“Shaw wrote Hammett telling him that he was deleting the ‘gooseberry lay’ from the story,” Gardner recalled, “and that
Black Mask
would never publish anything like that. But he left the word
gunsel
because Hammett had used it so casually that Shaw took it for granted that the word pertained to a hired gunman. Actually,
gunsel,
or
gonzel,
is a very naughty word with no relation whatever to a bodyguard.”

The term in tramp slang is derived from the Yiddish
gendzl,
or “gosling”; the young goose symbolized a homosexual boy. An earlier use was defined in
American Speech
in 1933 as “
Gonzel,
Catamite” (a corruption of the name of Jupiter’s cupbearer, Ganymede).

“All the writers of the hard-boiled school of realism,” noted Gardner, “started talking about a
gunsel
as the equivalent of a gunman…. The aftereffects of that joke are still seen in American murder stories.”

And in columns by pundits who mean no such thing. And in books by impervious loyalists.

Celibate.
A debate rages over whether sexual abuse is related to celibacy. On an Easter telecast of
Meet the Press,
the Reverend John McCloskey said the church was “looking for people who are capable of living the celibate life, who are capable of living a chaste life.” What’s the difference between
celibacy
and
chastity
?

Plenty; you can be one without being the other. The
Catholic Encyclopedia
defines
celibacy
as “the renunciation of marriage … for the more perfect observance of chastity.”

To be
celibate
is to be single, to be unmarried, the priestly purpose of which is to remain chaste. To be
chaste,
from the Latin
casta,
“morally pure,” is to deny all sexual intercourse. The goal of
celibacy,
not the state of
celibacy,
is
chastity
.

Now here comes the semantic problem. In many cases, people in all walks of life choose to be
celibate
because they do not like the notion of living all the time with people of the opposite sex, or with people of their own sex; they just prefer the single life. If, in so living, they abjure all sexual intercourse, they are both
celibate
and
chaste
. But if they fool around occasionally or even regularly, as millions do, they can rightly claim to be
celibate
without being
chaste
.