The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (48 page)

True; according to
Merriam-Webster, conflicted
came into use by psychotherapists in 1967 to describe a condition of clashing emotional impulses. By 1980, it was applied to senses ranging from “indecisive” to “at sixes and sevens” to “paralyzed by an internal tug of war.”

In the Oscar-winning 1981 film
Chariots of Fire,
recounting the triumph of British track stars of the 1924 Olympics, one of the heroes rails at the prejudice that prevails in the
corridors of power
.

“It’s a ringing phrase that sets off a thrilling scene,” notes Richard Beebe of Middlebury, Connecticut, “but
corridors of power
didn’t come into common usage until forty years after the movie’s setting, when it was coined by C. P. Snow as the title for his 1964 novel of British politics.” (Actually, it was coined in the BBC’s magazine, the
Listener,
in 1962, but popularized by Snow’s title two years later.)

Writers of television miniseries are included in this glorious game of Gotcha! Charles Kluepfel, a Timecop patrolling the sets of Bloomfield, New Jersey, notes an anachronism in CBS’s
Sally Hemings: An American Scandal,
a drama loosely based on Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with one of his slaves: “Jefferson starts showing some children various specimens of bones, and the teleplay writer has him say, ‘This is a skull fragment of the
humongous
mastodon.’ But the word
humongous
was coined during my lifetime, and
Random House Unabridged
gives the times of first usage as 1965-70.”

Back to the movies. In the 1993 version of
Tombstone,
about the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, the dying Doc Holliday croaks to Wyatt Earp that he should grab the girl and not look back, and Earp replies sadly, “Thanks for always
being there,
Doc.”

Barbara Arnstein of Whitestone, New York, suggests that the gunfight venue’s name might be the “I’m OK, You’re OK Corral.” The locution to
be there for you,
meaning “capable, reliable, to be depended upon,” reached the general lingo in the 1920s, and its most recent sense of “to be nurturing, comforting” began with a religious overtone in 1981. Both senses came along years after Holliday joined Sheriff Earp to gun down the Clanton Brothers gang, who were, in a more sinister sense, there for him.

Say What? III.
Beware the urge to be ultracorrect.

Most power-writers know that the phrase
corridors of power
is identified with C. P. Snow, author of the 1964 novel of that name. In a recent article, I noted this, but after looking into the
OED,
added, “Actually, it was coined in the BBC’s magazine, the
Listener,
in 1962, but popularized by Snow’s title two years later.”

Comes now Mary DeForest of Denver to set me straight. In a 1956 novel,
Homecoming,
Snow wrote, “The official world, the
corridors of power,
the dilemmas of conscience and egotism—she disliked them all.”

In his preface to
Corridors of Power,
Snow explained: “By some fluke, the title of this novel seems to have passed into circulation during the time the book itself was being written. I have watched the phenomenon with mild consternation.

“The phrase was first used, so far as I know, in ‘Homecoming.’ … Mr. Rayner Heppenstall noticed it, and adopted it as a title for an article about my work. If he had not done this, I doubt if I should have remembered the phrase myself; but when I saw it in Mr. Heppenstall’s hands, so to speak, it seemed the appropriate name for this present novel.”

Snow knew it had become a cliché, but all must share the burden. As he put it, “I console myself with the reflection that, if a man hasn’t the right to his own cliché, who has?”

Scandalexicon.
Every scandal has its own vocabulary. Today’s column is not about scandal; it reports and judges only the vocabulary. In the current anger and agony roiling the Catholic Church, here are some of the words that should be used and pronounced with care:

Pedophile
is central and is usually mispronounced. If you were like me until this was written, you would have pronounced the vowel sound in the first syllable as
eh
as in “pedal” or “pedometer.” Why are we mistaken? Because the Greek word
pæd,
pronounced to rhyme with the fourth syllable of “encyclopaedia,” means
child,
the abuse of whom the word is about. The Latin word
ped,
rhyming with “head,” means “foot.” But what’s at issue here is not a foot fetish. Thus, the first syllable of
pedophile
should—and for decades after its 1951 coinage, did—take a long
e,
as in “pediatrician,” not a short
eh,
as in “pedicure.”

So it is correctly pronounced “PEE-duh-file,” right? Only if you’re a purist. San Diego’s Charles H. Elster, a leading pronunciator, informs me that “the rules haven’t changed, but usage has”; doctors in the 1960s began switching to the schwa, and now general dictionaries are split:
Merriam-Webster
sticks with the
ee,
while
Webster’s New World
and
American Heritage Dictionary
list both, with the more recent
eh
preferred. Elster is going with the flow to “PEH-duh-file”; I’ll hang tough with “PEE-duh-file,” because it’s etymologically sound and I like to correct people.

The Greek word
pedophilia
literally means “child love.” It is a sexual abnormality in which the preferred object of the potential predator is a child, though the
pedophile
or less frequently used
pedophiliac
is not required to act on that perversion. (Psychiatrists call it an abnormality, moralists a perversion.)

Is the
pedophile
’s object (or as moralists would say, victim) a male child or a female? Although the original meaning of
pæd
or
paid,
“child,” covers both, notes a Princeton professor, Joshua Katz, “in English there’s been an extension: the critical thing is the youth, not the sex of the youth. A
pederast
is the Greek-based word for an adult male who desires boys only.” (This synonym for
sodomist
has long been pronounced “PEH-duh-rast”; there’s an irritating inconsistency here, which is why it is hard for me to rail at “PEH-duh-file” as a mistake.)

If the lust of both
pedophile
and the outdated
pederast
is directed at children, what about an adult’s desire for teenagers? Until 1988, this was a void in our vocabulary; it was filled by Tariq Rahman, professor of linguistics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, with
ephebophilia
. He noticed its 1980 citation in a paper in French about the ancient Greek treatment of postpubescent boys written by Félix Buffière: “les
ephèbophiles,
comme certains les nomment”—as certain people have named them. An
ephebos
was an Athenian youth of eighteen or so in training for citizenship; the new word is pronounced “ef-FEE-bo-file.” No dictionary I’ve seen has it, but the 1999
Merck Manual
defines
ephebophilia
as “attraction to youths” who are “postpubescent.”

That’s almost the way the Reverend Donald Cozzens pronounced its application to priestly predators last month on
Meet the Press
. Speaking of the abuse of minors not limited to prepuberty or to boys, he clipped the “ef.” The moderator Tim Russert seized on the new locution, clipping it as well, and so
pheebofile
was born—because Tim is linguistically infallible. Another formation of this noun is
pheebophilia,
which I define as “the desire by an adult for an adolescent” with no sex of luster or lustee specified and spelled with two
e
’s (as did the NBC transcript) so that sloppy pronouncers cannot do to it what they have done to
pedophile
.

You refer to alternate pronunciations of the first vowel sound in the noun
pedophile.
You label one lone
e,
and the other
eh.
You name the second pronunciation schwa. The sound is actually a mid front lax vowel, [
]. Schwa is the reduced vowel sound in the second syllable, which you represent as “uh,” and which phonologists represent as e
.

Ellen Measday

Livingston, New Jersey

Thank you for pointing out the difference between a pedophile and an ephebophile. Distinguishing between the two is important, morally, legally and psychologically
.

Ronald Colvin

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

This is my first foray as a member of the Gotcha! Gang. You referred to the vowel in the first syllable of the “PEH-duh-file” pronunciation as being a schwa, but the schwa is a sound that occurs only in unaccented syllables, like the first syllable of “about.” The dictionary says the schwa symbol is sometimes used for the related stressed vowel that occurs in “cup,” but it would never be used for the short “e” of “bed” or “pedophile.”

Sandra Wilde

Portland, Oregon

Secret Plan.
In a rousing speech to an AFL-CIO convention in New Jersey, Vice President Gore used the attack word
secret
seven times. It is now his favorite adjective, having temporarily replaced
risky
(as in the phrase, pronounced as one word,
riskytaxscheme
).

He was blazing away at Governor Bush’s proposal, not yet detailed, to allow individuals to divert a portion of their Social Security taxes into the stock market. Gore charged that Bush believed “it would be best not to let you, the voters of this country, in on the
secret plan
before the election…. He is suppressing the details of how his plan would work and refusing to divulge what his
secret plan
really is.” At a subsequent news conference, he evidently felt that
secret
was not pejorative enough and added, redundantly, a “private
secret plan
.”

That sinister phrase—
secret plan
—has resonance to veteran rhetoricians and students of presidential campaigns. In the 1968 primaries, candidate Richard Nixon was searching for a way to promise he would extricate the United States from its increasingly unpopular involvement in Vietnam. The key verb to be used was
end,
though it would be nice to get the verb
win
in some proximity to it.

One speechwriter came up with the formulation that “new leadership will
end
the war and
win
the peace in the Pacific.” Nixon made it part of his stump speech, and the juxtaposition of
end
and
win
—though it did not claim to intend to
win
the war, but only the peace—drove his major opponent for the GOP nomination, Governor George Romney of Michigan, up the wall.

When a UPI reporter pressed Nixon for specifics, the candidate demurred; the reporter wrote that it seemed Nixon was determined to keep his plan
secret,
though he did not quote Nixon as having said either
secret
or
plan
. But this gave Romney a chance to slam back at his opponent’s promise. In what became the centerpiece of his stump speech in the snows of New Hampshire, Romney demanded to know, “Where is your
secret
plan
?” That question skillfully presupposed an assertion of not just a general promise but also a detailed plan, and soon it became widely accepted that Nixon had said, “I have a
secret plan
to end the war.”