The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (40 page)

If any deeper etymology is required, Arthur, don’t
ping
me; I’ll
ping
you.

I strongly believe you are mistaken in writing that the network sense of
ping
doesn’t derive from analogy (direct equivalent, really) to the sonar ping
.

You send out a signal and pay attention to the response. In sonar or on a network
.

All of your examples of earlier uses of
ping
don’t have a darned thing to do with that sense of the word. They are just other uses, other meanings, of
ping.

Sonar ping may derive, cleanly and directly or obscurely and circuitously, from your referenced uses, but it’s absurd and contentious to argue that those who originated the network sense of the word didn’t take it directly from the everyday knowledge of sonar. You’ve outsmarted yourself and gotten lost in your own scholarship
.

Peter Horton

Santa Monica, California

Playing Percentages.
President Bush the elder often liked to quote Woody Allen as saying, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.” I checked with Allen, who confirmed his authorship of the line but said the percentage he mentioned was 80. Why 80? “The figure seems high to me today,” he replied, “but I know it was more than 60, and the extra syllable in 70 ruins the rhythm of the quote, so I think we should let it stand at 80.”

This is a formula for profundity, but presidents keep upping the ante, sometimes ruining the rhythm. On a fund-raising trip to California in the fall, Bill Clinton saw a baby girl reach out to him, her little fingers clutching at his hand. “Look at her,” he said. “She’s holding on. That’s 90 percent of life, just holding on.”

Ploy.
“That’s nothing but a
ploy,
” said Bill Bradley to Al Gore on
Meet the Press
last month.

The two men were locked in TV combat. Gore had just suggested that the two Democratic candidates pledge to shun TV commercials and engage only in debates. The vice president dramatically extended his hand and said: “I’m ready to agree right now. Debates aren’t
ploys
.”

Bradley looked at his opponent’s hand like an uninterested palm reader; he wasn’t having any part of the surprise offer: “No, to come here, shake my hand-that’s nothing but a
ploy
.” At Gore’s repeated use of the word, Bradley edged it with increasing scorn, adding, “I’m not someone who’s interested in tactics, Al.”

Across America, the question arose: was the no-commercials proposal a sincere suggestion, as Gore maintained, or was it merely a
ploy, tactic, ruse, stratagem
or
trick,
as Bradley insisted? Around the world, viewers asked a more fundamental question:What is a
ploy,
anyway?

The attack word is closely associated with the current campaign. Two months ago, Cragg Hines of the
Houston Chronicle
wrote that “Gore has repeatedly tried the weekly debate
ploy
against Bradley, who has refused to take the bait.” A month before that, when Gore relocated his headquarters to Nashville—the better to detach from Washington Beltway associations and reestablish middle-American roots—Tex Austin, a musician and cowboy-boot salesman, was quoted deriding the move in the
Chicago Tribune:
“This is obviously just a political
ploy
.” This drew an observation from James Dao, a
New York Times
reporter: “History may someday show that voters viewed Mr. Gore’s headquarters shift as a disingenuous
ploy
or, more likely, a move that was forgotten the day after it happened.”

The word’s origin is shrouded in mysterious Highland vapors. Most etymologists believe it to be the product of aphesis, the process by which we clip unaccented vowel syllables off a word’s stem. That is how
alone
becomes
lone
and
around
becomes
round
. (“Is the Lone Ranger
round
here, Tonto?”) In this hypothesis regarding the origin of
ploy,
the Scottish dialect clipped the
em
off the verb
employ
to create a noun that meant “activity” and later “an amusing way to pass the time; an escapade, hobby or sport.”

In 1950, Stephen Potter, the British author of
Gamesmanship
and
Lifemanship
and the coiner of
one-upmanship,
gave the word a tongue-in-cheek sense of “a maneuver to gain the better of an opponent or co-worker.” He wrote, “Each one of us can, by
ploy
or
gambit,
most naturally gain the advantage.”

In the following decade, the Potter sense of the word was snatched up into the language of diplomacy. An occasional plot device in the 19th-century novels of Anthony Trollope involved the misheard proposal or the misread caress. A man would say or do something innocuous; a Victorian maiden would interpret that word or gesture romantically and accept what she considered as amounting to a proposal of marriage; and the poor (or lucky) fellow found himself affianced.

Lord Rufford makes such a gesture to the husband-hunting Arabella Trefoil in Trollope’s 1875
American Senator
and finds himself in the center of Trefoil’s formidable attempt at landing a proper mate. (Her attempt does not succeed.) Trollope uses the same
ploy
four years later in
John Caldigate,
in which John gets thrown into a linen closet with his cousin Julia and comes out, in Julia’s and her mother’s minds, engaged.

During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President Kennedy received two messages from the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev: one was informal and ambiguous, a later one more official and threatening. He chose to ignore the later one and to interpret the earlier one as an offer to remove Soviet missiles in return for a pledge not to invade Cuba—an inference that left Khrushchev with his non-offer “accepted.” This deft maneuver was described, in what some felt was the mythmaking that followed, as “the Trollope
ploy
.”

In current usage, a
ploy
is more cunning than a
subterfuge,
not as overtly false or bookishly old-fashioned as a
ruse
and somewhat more creative than a
tactic
. It is not planned in as much detail as a
stratagem,
is less contrived than an
artifice
and does not have the coquettish quality of a
wile
. A
ploy
is more underhanded than a
maneuver
and not as playful or artful as a
dodge
.

Another synonym is
gambit,
which began as an opening move in chess that sacrifices a pawn to gain position for a more powerful piece. By metaphoric extension, a
gambit
can range from an enticing opening in conversation to a
tactic
in gaining advantage in business.

In the lexicon of trickery, a correct gamesman uses a
gambit
while an engaging rogue employs a
ploy,
and the mildest deceiver trots out a
gimmick
. When Bill Bradley’s spokesman, Eric Hauser, followed up his candidate’s
ploy
characterization by castigating Gore for “resorting to contrived
gimmicks,
” his use of
contrived
was redundant.

In politics, as we see, a
ploy
is double-edged; accusations of trickiness can get tricky. In dealing with nationalities, Winston Churchill observed in 1906, “Nothing is more fatal than a
dodge
. Wrongs will be forgiven, sufferings and losses will be forgiven or forgotten, battles will be remembered only as they recall the martial virtues of the combatants; but anything like a
trick,
will always rankle.”

I think you connived at a crime. (Note first the precise use of
connive.
) You inserted
tactic,
in the singular, among synonyms for
ploy: ruse, stratagem, trick.
That use of
tactic
in the singular destroys the root ideas of the proper word
tactics,
also a singular though it looks plural. It means
arrangement, method, system, plan of action.
To reduce it to a detail of the plan is to ignore a difference that runs through all talk about practical matters, the difference between means and their coordination
.

The distinction is embodied in all the words that end in
-ics: ethics, politics, esthetics, mathematics.
They are collectives and suffer loss when used in the singular. Usage has sanctioned “the Protestant ethic” and “the artist’s esthetic,” and there is a bare excuse for it, because in these phrases the collective idea is retained. Nobody is tempted to say that Van Gogh’s esthetic was thick oil on the brush, any more than with
system,
one would say “my system for driving nails is a hammer.”

In short, tactics is a bunch of ploys, and there’s an end
.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

Plus Which.
As Bill Clinton prepares to leave the White House, constitutionally forbidden to return as its principal occupant, some wonder: what will we miss most about his tenure? The answer to those in the dialect dodge is plain: the Ozarkian’s free-and-easy use of the American idiom.

“There are a lot of family-owned businesses,” the president said in support of reduction of inheritance taxes, “that people would like to pass down to their family members … that would be burdened by the way the estate tax works.
Plus which,
the maximum rate’s too high.”

Plus which
is an intriguing Americanism. Its meaning is not merely “plus, in addition to” or “and.” In the context of Clinton’s usage,
plus which
means “besides”; its direct synonym is the earlier “besides which,” in its adverbial sense of “moreover, furthermore”; these are connecting words that transmit greater emphasis than conjunctions like
and
or the
plus
that is unaccompanied by
which
.

Plus which,
first cited by Merriam-Webster in
Down Beat
magazine in 1950, seems to have overtaken
besides which
in recent years. Perhaps this was stimulated by the advertising industry’s fascination with
plus
at the beginning of sentences to mean “as an extra added attraction.”

The fourth edition of the
American Heritage Dictionary
labels
plus which
“not well established in formal writing”; its editor, Joe Pickett, calls the usage “a bizarre construction that combines two conjunctions and has the force of a conjunctive adverb” (indeed!).

OK; that does it with
plus which
. But in settling that meaning of “furthermore, you ninny,” we have just blundered into an area of furious lexicographic controversy: is
plus
a conjunction (which connects) or a preposition (which introduces)?

Should you say, “Two plus two
is
four” or “Two plus two
are
four”? (I’m a preppy, and say
is
.) Should you begin a sentence with
plus
? (I say no, never.) But Fred Mish, editor in chief of
Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate
and now America’s Rex of Lex, says, “Nobody should let their drawers get in a twist over this question.” (Plus this subtly demonstrates that the plural
their
can refer to the singular
nobody
in an idiom.)

If I had given someone a list of my needs, and suddenly remembered another one, I’d naturally call out
plus.
If we didn’t use
plus
we’d have to use a long-winded group of words, such as “in addition to all of which,” and by the time we’d have said all that we’d have forgotten what we needed to add
.

In its proper place,
plus
is a fine word. We couldn’t do without it. Please don’t abuse it.

Estelle Gelshenen

Northport, New York

T
WO CONJUNCTIONS
? I can agree with Mr. Pickett that “plus which” behaves like a conjunctive adverb; but when has “which” ever been defined as a conjunction? The construction is quite straightforward (although—in my opinion—the recent popularity of “plus” as a preposition, or a conjunction, or a conjunctive adverb, is an abomination and ought to be abolished!): it is simply an adverbial prepositional phrase, a preposition plus (!!!) a noun phrase or, in this instance, a pronoun object. The pronoun “which” is used to replace the noun clause(s) “that people … too high.” An analogue: “I didn’t feel like going to the birthday party; in addition to that, I hadn’t bought a gift.” My own “Sprachgefuehl” would lead me to use “in addition to that” rather than “plus which.” It has more euphony and style, at the cost of just four more syllables
.