The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (41 page)

Robert Frankum

Huntington, New York

As a person who has been a teacher of mathematics for a long time it is clear that “Two plus two is four” is shorter for “The sum of two plus two is four.”

Stan Lieberman

Howard Beach, New York

Two plus two equal four. So there.

“Plus” is a perfectly proper word to begin a sentence with. Similarly, “with” is a perfectly proper word to end a sentence with. Additionally,
plus
can be an adjective as well as a conjunction, as in the following sentences, and there is no rule preventing starting a sentence with an adjective:

“Plus fours are no longer fashionable in golf.”

“Plus sizes are hard to find at the mall.”

Ralph Kirshner

Center Harbor, New Hampshire

Politics Of.
Think of Ronald Reagan, and his phrases
evil empire
and
there you go again
and
make my day
come to mind, along with the derogations
star wars
and
morning in America
.

Think of George Bush the elder, and you have
a thousand points of light
and
line in the sand
and
kinder and gentler nation,
with his
voodoo economics
and
read my lips, no new taxes
tossed back at him.

Think of Bill Clinton, and—what? In his ascent to power, the vividly Carvillian
it’s the economy, stupid
was indelibly associated with Clinton; in his descent, it was the relentlessly replayed sentence accompanied by his wagging finger.

This department seeks memorable Clintonisms from friend and foe, but will begin today with a linguistic sleeper. A phrase coined by candidate Clinton in his campaign for the Democratic nomination has been gaining strength as the years flash by.

His chief rival at the time, Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, ran a TV spot claiming to be honest, truthful and unpolished—“no Bill Clinton, that’s for sure.” Asked in an Illinois cheesecake emporium in March 1992 about this and other charges about his character, Clinton replied: “I think that the American people can spot somebody that’s on their side…. They’re tired of
the politics of personal destruction
.”

As president in 1994, Clinton lashed out at Republicans in Congress for blocking his proposals, charging them with “
the politics of personal destruction
and of legislative obstruction.” This caused a Georgia member of the House minority, Representative Newt Gingrich, to call his attack “not
the politics of personal destruction;
it’s the politics of self-destruction.” After the GOP upset that year, establishing itself as the majority in the House, Clinton slammed back with: “My job is not to stand in the way and be an obstructionist force. My job is not to practice
the politics of personal destruction
.”

He continued to use the phrase as an attacking defense, culminating in a short Rose Garden speech after impeachment in 1998: “We must stop
the politics of personal destruction
. We must get rid of the poisonous venom of excessive partisanship, obsessive animosity and uncontrolled anger.” Nitpickers who winced at the redundancy of “poisonous venom” were impressed with Clinton’s alliteration in his peroration to “rise above the rancor.”

The phrase outlived the Clinton presidency. Last month, the
Washington Post
played on it in a headline above a column by George Will about the likely resistance to George W. Bush’s proposals by a Senate controlled by Democrats: “The Politics of Personal Obstruction.” When a phrase is familiar enough to take such wordplay, that is evidence that it is becoming fixed in the lexicon.

In coining phrases,
the politics of
has long been found useful. In the 1860 edition of his
Leaves of Grass,
Walt Whitman sang of “the politics of Nature”; Upton Sinclair in 1918 excoriated the “politics of hypocrisy”; Aldous Huxley titled a 1963 book
The Politics of Ecology;
and Yippies in 1968 lolled back to enjoy with Timothy Leary “the politics of ecstasy.”

In the politics of politics, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. led the way, beginning in 1949 with
The Politics of Freedom,
followed by his
Politics of Upheaval
in 1957 and, five years later,
The Politics of Hope
. This deeply impressed Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who in 1968—not an especially upbeat time in war—torn America—was optimistic enough to hail “the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.”

Poo-teen.
He may be with us for a while, so let’s get his name right: the president of Russia is Vladimir Putin, pronounced “POO-teen.” “The stem for Putin’s name is derived from
put,
meaning ‘path’ or ‘road,’” notes Albert Weeks, an NYU professor emeritus now living in Sarasota, Florida.

Marat Akchurin of the American Name Society adds: “The meaning of
Putin
was ‘the one who was born on the road’; that is, the mother was traveling when the birth took place. So, within the current political context in Russia, Putin could be taken to mean ‘transitional.’” Another possible etymology is the verb
putat,
meaning “to swaddle, bind” and, by extension, “to confuse, make ambiguous, entangle.”

Can it be connected to
Rasputin,
the derisive name for the swinging Russian monk, Grigory Novykh, who dominated the court of Czar Nicholas II? One meaning of
rasputye
is “debauched,” but another is “crossroad”;
putin
without the prefix
ras
could mean “one-track road.” Be careful not to read too much into this.

You write that the name of Russian President Putin means in Russian, “born on the road.” According to the standard Russian dictionary “Ojegov,” the name can be defined three different ways. The first meaning, from the Russian word “Putina” (POOtina), is “fishing season.” The second meaning, from the word “Put” (POOT), is a “way” or a road. The third potential meaning—which may be most apropos for Mr. Safire’s column—is from the verb “Putats” (Pootats), which means “to make a mess” or “to speak without logical connection.”

Boris Zeldin and Damian Schaible

Jersey City, New Jersey

Pop Go the Lyrics.
“Nobody knows what the words mean,” goes the Web site advertising for an album titled
All for You,
by the pop singer Diana Krall, “but when Diana sings them, it isn’t hard to draw your own conclusions.” The album celebrates the songs popularized a half-century ago by Nat King Cole, and the reference is to the song “Frim Fram Sauce.”

The lyric reads: “I don’t want French fried potatoes, red ripe tomatoes / I’m never satisfied. / I want the frim fram sauce / With ussin-fay, with shafafa on the side.”

This is a job for the Deconstruction Workers Union.
Frim fram
is one of the oldest terms surviving as slang, cited in John Heywood’s 1546 book of proverbs: “she maketh earnest matters of every
flymflam,
” about a woman easily deceived.
Flimska
is “mockery” in Old Norse and
flim,
“a lampoon”; an attempt to fool the monarch in 1538 was described in England’s State Papers as “a
flim flawe
to stoppe the ymagination of the Kynge.”

Thus, as sung by Cole and then Krall a half-millennium later, “
frim fram
sauce” is the oleaginous goo of deceit poured over some unsuspecting dupe. (All dupes are unsuspecting, just as all goo is oleaginous; I’ll hear from the Squad Squad about those redundancies, but a mouth-filling phrase suspends the rule.)

Next:
Ussin-fay
is pig Latin for
fussin’
(just as
ixnay
conceals
nix
), which in turn has a slang sense of “playing about fretfully”; a whimpering infant is said to be
fussin’
. That locution seems out of place in a menu metaphor, but I can think of no other logical etymology of
ussin-fay
.

Shafafa
is a problem; it is too far a stretch from
alfalfa,
and no slang term or Old Norse derivation offers a clue. I called Diana Krall, the singer who resuscitated the word, and asked if she had any idea about what it meant or where it came from.

“It’s all about sex,” she replied innocently, though in the sultry tone that has become her musical signature.

Oh. That would explain the lyric’s “never satisfied,” as well as its sauce of deceit, and supply another entendre to the fretful whimpering of
fussin’
.

We have hummed through the hermeneutics of a single lyric to show that in pop music the sophisticated innuendo of the ’30s and ’40s is being newly appreciated by a generation not then born. That explains the comeback of Cole Porter (whose “Let’s Do It” was banned by some radio stations for its suggestiveness), as well as Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein and Johnny Mercer as interpreted by today’s balladeers. The intricate rhyming and occasional character development in their songs is received with respect from enthusiasts of
neo-soul
and
post-grunge
and
house music
. (Definitions for those are vamping until I’m ready.)

“There’s a return to personal storytelling,” Krall noted. She sang a little of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in the Frank Sinatra style and said: “Then we slowed it down, which made it more tragic. I like messing with tempo because it changes the story.”

Story is central in “Contemporary R&B,” the designation given the rhythm and blues sung by artists like Alicia Keys and India. Arie. Note the way Arie styles her name: like a dot-com, she uses a period in the middle rather than a space. This playing with normal style was pioneered by the poet Edward Estlin Cummings, who liked to use lowercase initials. It carries forward the corporate mid-capitalization craze begun with “TelePrompTer” in 1950 (a style the
New York Times
resisted) and taken up by “DaimlerChrysler,” “WorldCom” and many others. It will soon be followed by other punctuation marks by people and companies following the crowd that is straining to be distinctive. (Should I change my byline to “William!Safire”?)

Dot-Arie sings of an “Acoustic Soul.” After the 1950s civil rights revolution,
soul music
enjoyed great popularity. The intense, earthy outgrowth of gospel singing was an expression of black culture; the term took hold about the same time as
soul food
and was followed by political figures who were eager to be said to have
soul
. As the musical style was revived in our time in modified form, a new label was adopted:
neo-soul
.

Time
magazine’s Christopher John Farley defined the term in 1998 as combining “the classic soul of the 60s and 70s with a healthy appetite for 90s sonic experimentation and boundary crossing … lyrics are more oblique and yet more socially and emotionally relevant than those of gangsta rappers.” This month, reporting on the sweep of the Grammy awards by Alicia Keys,
U.S. News
said that Keys “sings classic soul-style melodies with a hip-hop flavor…. The music biz is praying that Keys … and other
neo-soulsters
will revive slumping record sales.”

In categories like the chanted patter of
hard-core rap,
the fast-faded, grubby-dingy
grunge,
the anguished, rock-influenced introspection of
post-grunge,
the offbeat, Jamaican
ska-punk
and the
British garage,
violent sex is still a seller. “In terms of language about sex and violence,” says Jim Steinblatt of ASCAP, “the gangsta-lifestyle music is still big, but as rap music has become more mainstream, the lyrics are not quite as explicit.” Two generations ago, the word
love
was even more frequently used in lyrics than
baby;
in the ’90s, as
baby
held its own, the use of
love
declined. But in Keys’s “Fallin’,” now the “Song of the Year,” the word
love
is used no fewer than six times.

Consider the toning-down of the above-mentioned
British garage
—the name taken from the Paradise Garage in New York—also known as
speed
garage
and
2-step
. (Strange name for a dance, “two-step”; even I can do it.) Born in the disco music of the ’70s and part of the genre labeled
electronica,
this art form combined digital
reggae,
or
ragga,
with “diva vocals”—high-pitched melodies sung at the top of the lungs to a 4-4 beat—and became known in the ’80s as
house music
. In the current decade, hoarse voices tell me, the garage outside the house has a quieter, “more soulful, sophisticated and organic feel.”
Organic
is a vogue word in modern music criticism, as it is among nutritionists (formerly dietitians) and now auto mobile advertisers. Its musical meaning varies widely but is never associated with a pipe organ or mouth organ.