The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (44 page)

However, eight syllables are a mouthful; how about
opticonductor,
or shorter still, crossing the
opticon
? You don’t have to understand this stuff to name it.

Proteomics very soon will be over, and superseded by metabolomics, name-dropped by a colleague here. Proteins are, after all, only a subset of all the chemicals that bounce and diffuse around the inside of a cell. These metabolites, for example, sugars and lipids, are the products, substrates, stimulants and repressors of proteins and genes
.

And when metabolomics is over, we’ll go back to good ol’ cell biology
.

Doug Yu

School for Biological Sciences

University of East Anglia

Norwich, United Kingdom

I am a lowly college student with only a couple of semesters of Greek, but I may be able to offer a good reason why the “omics” suffix is most comfortable following an “n.” My understanding is that the suffix is actually “nomics,” coming from the Greek “nomos,” meaning custom or law
.

Ross O’Connell

Amherst, Massachusetts

You of all people! Nothing is faster than light, so an optical semiconductor is based on light,
than
which nothing is faster, not
of
which
.

Gerald M. Levitis, MD

New York, New York

When you write that nothing is faster than light, haven’t you impaled yourself on the horns of a Lurking Amphiboly? It is like saying that nothing is better than mom’s cooking, a terrible indictment of the old lady’s cuisine. Fill my tank with nothing! It is faster than light and a good deal cheaper
.

J. J. Kilpatrick

Washington, D.C.

Proteomic Fix.
I wrote, “An optical semiconductor is based on light, of which nothing is faster.” Fourteen members of the Gotcha! Gang, including James J. Kilpatrick, journalism’s master philologist, noted that “nothing is faster
of
light” is meaningless, and that if I meant “nothing is faster
than
light,” I should have written, “light,
than
which nothing is faster.” They are correct. Some days never end.

Push-Back.
Douglas Feith, a high-level Pentagon official, took me aside at a reception and whispered a single noun in my ear: “
Push-back
.” I felt like Dustin Hoffman getting the one-word advice about plastics in
The Graduate
.

He’s right; the noun
push-back
is everywhere. The vogue began with the verb form among secretaries of state: Henry Kissinger often spoke of seeking “to
push back
the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.” In 1998, Madeleine Albright spoke of “one of the major reasons to
push back
on Saddam,” and in May of this year, Colin Powell said, “I have to
push back
a little when you say America is not willing to give its lives.”

The Pentagon has now nounified it. Asked if he realized the uproar that would be caused when the public learned that the army was buying its black berets from China, the army’s chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, gulped and said, “I think we expected there would be some
push-back
.” It spread quickly. Asked if she spoke her mind about environmental affairs to the president, Christie Todd Whitman said: “He wants strong people. He wants
push-back
.” Senator Tom Daschle explained the Democrats’ failure to stop the Bush tax reduction with “We did our level best … in providing as much
push-back
as we could.”

The old word
resistance
has put up no resistance. Not even
opposition
will oppose the hot new word shoving everybody around the capital. If ever France is again overwhelmed by an enemy, we can expect its courageous partisans to go underground and organize
le Push-back
.

Q

Quote Unquote.
Like it or not, you are going to learn something today.

Period
.

That written sentence fragment,
period,
is another way of signaling “And that’s that” or “So there.” Writing the word
period
at the end of a sentence uses the name of a punctuation mark to emphasize the work of a punctuation mark; in this case, writing
period
stresses finality or inescapa-bility.

Now take that trick a step further: Say the punctuation mark aloud. By using the mark in speech, you not only call attention to your oral emphasis, but you also make it possible to transcribe the word for that symbol to paper or to your computer screen, and lo! You have the “quote-unquote” phenomenon. The word for the thing becomes the thing itself. (The semanticist Korzybski would flip.)

Here’s how it works. The NBC host Matt Lauer asks a guest, “What do people in Great Britain think about this journalist, or
quote-unquote,
journalist?” Or Representative Bill Thomas of California tells a television interviewer, “There are other ways to get tax relief, not just within,
quote-unquote,
the president’s plan.” These usages of verbalized punctuation are sometimes accompanied by “air quotes,” a visual signal of wiggling two fingers on each hand (recalling to some geezers the victory sign of a departed president).

The meaning of the spoken or written
quote-unquote
(wiggle, wiggle) is “so-called,” casting aspersion on the word or phrase that follows. In American English, however,
so-called
is falling into disuse; it has the flavor of usage by speakers whose English is a second language.
Quote-unquote
—as a complete phrase, not separated by the words quoted—is now our primary derogator. A sneer is built in.

The joyously anticapital poet Edward Estlin Cummings (who styled himself e. e. cummings, “with up so floating many bells down”) pioneered the use of the verbalized mark in 1935. Few students of the third-person singular of the state of being will forget his stunning “The Isful ubiquitous wasless&-shallbeless quote scrotumtightening unquote omnivorously eternal” etc. Were that being written today, e.e.’s poetic formulation, if he thought it scanned, would be “
quote-unquote
scrotumtightening.”

The
Times’
recording room has rules for those of us who have to phone in our copy when modems fail. “Say ‘period,’ ‘comma’ and all other punctuation,” Chris Campbell instructs. “Never say ‘
quote-unquote
’ unless that’s exactly what you want transcribed. Say ‘open quote’ before the quoted material and ‘close quote’ after it. At the end of a paragraph, say ‘graf ’ or ‘new graf.’” Thus, I would dictate the Bible’s opening as “Cap I In the beginning no comma cap G God created the heaven and the earth period new graf cap A And the earth was without form comma and void semicolon and darkness begin itals was unitals upon the face of the deep period.” (I don’t know why the second
was
is in italics, but that’s how the King James Version has it.)

In the heyday of network radio (comma? Yes, after two prepositional phrases) the two words were fused to be used before the quotation. “In the 1940s, the words
quote
and
unquote
were used frequently on the radio,” the lexicographer David Guralnik told me long ago.
^*
“There had to be some method of separating the words of the announcer and the person quoted. The problem came with short quotations: ‘The president said,
quote,
Nuts,
unquote
.’ It worked much better to say, ‘The president said,
quote-unquote,
Nuts.’”

Ronald Reagan popularized that device in his speeches in the ’80s, deriding “
quote-unquote
tax reforms.” But copy editors soon began adopting a variant:
quote-endquote,
hyphenated and with the
un
changed to
end
and sometimes placed after the quoted term. Georgia’s Democratic senator, Zell Miller, was quoted in the
New York Times
a month ago saying, “I was hurt and mad at some longtime friends,
quote-endquote,
who had been so loud and harsh and vehement in their criticism about my doing the tax cut and Ashcroft.”

Some users are going all the way to
quotes
before the quotation, leaving out the
un
or
end
and relying on speech inflection to indicate the quotation’s end. This won’t work in print. As my editor says,
quotes,
it’s confusing and I’d better not do it and at this point you don’t know whether I’m quoting him or me.

My solution: for plain quotation with no sneer intended, go back to “he said,
quote,
those were the days,
unquote
.” Specifically for casting aspersion—heaping ridicule on what follows—it’s OK in informal use to write or say “what some pluralizing people like to call
quote-unquote
aspersions.”

As a pastor, I think I can help you! As I understand it, any time that you see a word (like “was”) in italics in the KJV, it indicates that there is no corresponding word in the original Hebrew or Greek text, but that an English word is required to complete the sense of the sentence. The literal Hebrew words would be more accurately rendered “The earth without form and void,” but the word “was” is then added in order to make the sentence grammatically correct in the English
.

Robert Stutes

Humble, Texas

I would like to offer a plausible reason for the second “was” in Genesis being italicized
.

In the original Hebrew, the first
was
is explicit; the actual past tense of the verb
to be
(
haytah,
in Hebrew) is used. This is not the case in the second use of the verb. The word “was” is only implicit there, and a strict interpretation of the Hebrew would render “and darkness upon the face of the deep.” The translator of the King James Version apparently used the italics here to indicate his quote-unquote itals alteration unitals of the original
.

Sol Kanarek

Flushing, New York

R

Ramp Up.
Among verbs you might have thought had growth potential,
increase
is diminishing.
Accelerate
is slowing down.
Augment
has been subtracted from our vocabulary.
Grow
itself, especially in its use about the economy, has been stunted.

The vibrant new verb climbing over the backs of its ever-feebler synonyms is
ramp up
.

“With the advent of Bush II,” wrote Hendrik Hertzberg in the
New
Yorker,
“… the push was on for SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative]—renamed National Missile Defense, or NMD—to be, in Pentagon jargon,
‘ramped up
.’”

Not just Pentagon jargon. The homeland security aide Tom Ridge, explaining why he issued another nationwide terrorism alert, explained, “This information is related to Al Qaeda or bin Laden, or else we wouldn’t have
ramped
it
up.”

Journalism, too, has seized on the term. The
Wall Street Journal
noted that “the Justice Department is
ramping up
to investigate Enron as Congress is also mounting major investigations.” Brian Duffy, when he took over as editor of
U.S. News,
said, “We’re hoping to
ramp up
the investigative stuff and enterprise stuff.”

Stuffily, the Internet has spread the word throughout the software sphere. “Getting
ramped up
to sell Keywords … is imperative,” said the boss of RealNames, Keith Teare (presumably the moniker he was born with). In Bangalore, India, Irfan Ali, the president of CommWorks (when I create a program to jam together words with a capital in the middle, I’ll name it RunOn), announced proudly that his “staff will be
ramped up
to 100 in the next couple of years.”

Usage in the opposite direction lies dormant. In 1981, the Reagan energy secretary John Edwards said his department “should be streamlined,
ramped down
.” In February 2002, a conservative Republican senator from Oklahoma, Don Nickles, took that different direction. He looked at income tax rates and asked aloud, “How fast can we
ramp
those
down
?”

Who is there to restrain this kudzulike growth of
ramp, up
and
down
? A myriad of readers (including those who prefer the adjective form, as in “myriad readers”) have urged this department to take to the ramparts. In Old French,
ramper
was “to creep or crawl.” Its first appearance in English was in a 1390 poem: “A litel Serpent on the ground / Which
rampeth
al aboute round.” Three centuries later, John Milton contributed to its meaning of crawling upward: “Surely the Prelates would have Saint Pauls words
rampe one over
another, as they use to clime into their Livings and Bish-opricks.” Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson used it to lead off the couplet that has become the epitome of realism: “
Ramp up
my genius, be not retrograde; / But boldly nominate a spade a spade.”

In its upward crawl,
ramp
sent out a tendril that became
romp,
“to frolic.” Another, fiercer offshoot was first cited in Spenser’s “He
rampt
upon him with his ravenous pawes.” This meaning led to the stylized figure of the lion on many emblems being called
rampant
and was the root of the noun and verb
rampage
. In English slang, to
ramp
was to swindle or rob.

Meanwhile, the noun form was climbing the semantic ladder in fortifications, as a slope connecting ascending levels and making attackers vulnerable to arrows. This led to a meaning of “passageway enabling passengers to board a ship,” later applied to airplanes and the slip roads leading on or off highways. The noun meaning influenced the meaning of the verb (to
ramp
is no longer “to play the slut”); the eager adoption in the computer world may have been associated with
ramp
function in electronics, “an electrical waveform in which the voltage increases linearly with time,” as they like to say at CommWorks in Bangalore.

Will today’s laserly focus on a vogue verb
ramp down
its usage? Or will its frequency continue to rise in a creepy, crawly climb? I am
amped
about this, without the
r,
which brings us to
amped up.

A
Times
colleague, Clyde Haberman, who has been an assiduous
ramp-up
watcher, also notes the use of a similar-sounding expression,
amp up,
its past tense (very tense)
amped
.

The gutsy American Olympic skier Picabo Street did not win her third medal at Salt Lake City. She told reporters after her final run, “I was really
amped
as I waited,” but had turned lethargic; another reporter said she had been
amped up
.

The speed skater Kip Carpenter, who placed third in his race, told the
Boston Globe,
“I was
superamped
and superpumped.” Writing in
Sports Illustrated
about Olympic snowboarding, Austin Murphy noted that one participant was “
amped
on adrenaline.”

In basketball on the same day, far from the Olympics, Kaitlin Bergen of the Bogota (N.J.) Bucs was telling the
Bergen
(no kin)
Record:
“In the first half I came out real sloppy. I think I got myself too
amped
to play” before coming back to help her team win.

The expression is synonymous with
hyped, wired, charged, pumped,
all of which also can take an
up
. “The roots may lie in amplified music,” speculates Haberman.

Maybe.
Amp
has an electric connotation, both from “amplitude modulation” (AM radio) and from
ampere,
the measurement (named in 1881 after the scientist André-Marie Ampère) of steady current produced by one volt applied across a resistance of one ohm. More likely, it is rooted in drug lingo: a 1972 warning to addicts defined
amped
as “high on stimulants, usually amphetamines.” But the first syllable of that word is pronounced “
amf,
” not “
amp
”; another possibility is a shortening of
ampul,
a sealed container of a drug to be injected.

As often happens, the sinister derivation is forgotten as the word gains general usage:
amped
now most often means “excited, frenetic,” and has probably been influenced by what is to many youths the thrilling noise of the amplifier. This is good, as the expression appears to be ramping up.

You seem to have a congenital unwillingness to accept the possibility that electrical engineers and their lingo can be the source of the new words and usages. When I told you years ago, with documentation, where “in the loop” came from-feedback theory-you scoffed. You give tepid acknowledgment today of the remote possibility that ramp functions in electrical system analysis may have led to the broader use of “ramped up” and “ramped down.” If you had been an electrical engineer or any other knowledgeable participant in the military and space technology explosion of the past half century, you would have no doubt of the validity of that explanation
.

You quote Clyde Haberman’s timid speculation that “amped” might have some connection to amplified music. Well, it did. Rock guitarists and garage bands of the ’50s and ’60s enamored à la Tim Taylor for “more power,” kept buying bigger and bigger amplifiers—“amps” for short—and speakers for their instruments (and vocal microphones), leading to the inevitable appreciative professional judgments of “Man, he’s really amped,” when each new level of building shake and cochlea rape was attained
.

We may be nerds, but we are not out of the loop. Or, more accurately in my case, have not always been out of the loop
.

John Strother

Princeton, New Jersey

Recuse.
“Chairman Pitt should
recuse
himself from any role in the Enron debacle,” said Scott Harshbarger, president of Common Cause, about Harvey Pitt, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, because he had once represented Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, as an attorney. This verb is in frequent use by officials and judges eager to disqualify themselves from taking action in areas that may present a conflict of interest.

The ancient verb, from the Latin
recusare,
“to reject,” is listed in the
OED
as “rare,” in an entry written a century ago. Oxford editors, revising it today, are citing a use in a Louisiana court in 1829 and will report that the reflexive form (
recuse
yourself) is now in active use in America and South Africa, though not in Britain. The reflexive use was resuscitated in 1949 by the
New Republic,
with this advice to Democratic representatives: “If you go to a caucus, and they try to hogtie you on something too strong to gulp down,
recuse
yourself…. To
recuse
is to refuse to follow, to reject…. It’s there for your protection.”

During the Carter presidency,when I noted with satisfaction that Attorney General Griffin Bell had
recused
himself on some matter affecting his boss, a typographical error caused the reflexive verb to be changed to “rescued,” and Bell waved the clipping before a cabinet meeting: “It says here I
rescued
myself, and come to think of it, that’s what I did.”

Redefinitions I.
The
Houston Chronicle
in 1994 was first to publish a word that captivated playful theologians:
Frisbeetarian,
one who believes that when you die your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

This was followed four years later by a contest in the
Washington Post
asking readers for “redefinitions” of words. Some of my favorites:

coffee
(n.), a person who is coughed upon.

asterisk
(v.), to inquire about danger.

esplanade
(verb form of the noun), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

negligent
(adj.), a condition in which a woman absentmindedly answers the door in her nightie.

abdicate
(v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

Word games teach in tricky ways. Language mavens who peruse this space were long ago advised to let a simile be their umbrella. In tense times, lighten up.

Redefinitions II.
We’ve had a gratifying early turnout to the appeal for redefinitions. Here are some fresh meanings for stale words: