The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (49 page)

Years later, when a
New York Times
columnist attributed that direct quote to Nixon, a White House speechwriter challenged him to find the quote in anything taken down by pencil or recorder at the time. The pundit searched high and low and had to admit the supposed remark was unsourceable. (Look, the Nixon speechwriter was me and the columnist was later my colleague, Tony Lewis; I didn’t have to research this.)

During Ronald Reagan’s run for re-election in 1984, Democrats took a leaf from the Romney playbook and charged him with having a
secret plan
to raise taxes after the election. This forced Reagan to say defensively he would raise taxes only “as a last resort” and reminded politicians that the old
secret-plan
charge had legs.

Even Gore, a few weeks before he leveled the tried-and-true phrase at Bush, showed he was aware of its old-chestnuttiness. In a hilarious, deadpan, self-mocking speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington, he was widely reported to have said he had a
secret plan
to win the White House: he would claim credit for all the good stuff that had happened in the past eight years and dissociate himself from the bad stuff.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush has been using an attack word of his own to characterize the Gore approach to Social Security: “For eight years,” he wrote in a fund-raising letter, “Clinton/Gore has had history’s greatest opportunity to reform Social Security. They chose to
demagogue
the problem, not repair it.”

I kept this letter, sent to me by its recipient, Leila Hadley Luce of New York, to note the use of the beslashed singular subject
Clinton/Gore,
followed properly by the singular verb
has,
but then followed incorrectly by
they
.
Clinton/Gore
is a team and takes an
it
.

But Mrs. Luce’s covering note questioned the use of the “new verb,” to
demagogue
. Originally a noun, this was formed from the Greek
demos,
“people,” and
agogos,
“leading”; it meant “leader of the mob” and now has the derogatory meaning of “a politician who appeals to people’s emo-tions.” The noun can be used attributively to do the work of an adjective: Robert Southey in 1812 denounced “the venom and the virulence of the
demagogue
journalists.”

Governor Bush cannot be faulted for using
demagogue
as a verb. It was coined in that form by James Harrington in his 1656 utopian theory,
Commonwealth
of Oceana
. He picked up the noun coined five years earlier by Thomas Hobbes and wrote of a time “when that same ranting fellow Al-cibiades fell a
demagoging
for the Sicilian war.” In 1890, the
Cincinnati
Commercial Gazette
wrote of President Benjamin Harrison, “The president never thought of
demagoging
the matter.”

Note the lack of a
u
in those usages of what most of us would until recently spell as
demagoguing
. But we live in a non-U world; just as
catalogue
and
dialogue
have been dropping their
ue
endings, so too will
demagogue
soon enough be spelled
demagog,
with its gerund
demagoging
.

It’s a hard word for the mob to handle;
demagogic
is pronounced with the final
g
soft, rhyming with
logic,
but
demagoguery
has the final
g
hard, rhyming with
toggery
. (Get away from that e-mail key; there is such a word. It means “clothing.”)

Will Gore now assail Bush for harboring a
secret plan
to attack him for
demagoguery
? Will Bush lash back in a debate by demanding he spell it? Both sides are now armed.

See-Through Vogue Words.
Back when he was merely the Clinton administration’s treasury secretary, Harvard’s new president, Larry Summers, was asked by a vituperative columnist (me) how he planned to protect the privacy of bank depositors. “We’re more concerned with
transparency,
” he countered.

“You can’t turn around these days,” writes the
Washington Post
columnist Marjorie Williams, “without encountering the Bush administration’s favorite buzzword:
transparency
.”

She’s right; my dossier on this term is fattening. “Part of the problem in dealing with North Korea,” President Bush told South Korea’s president, Kim Dae-jung, is that “there’s not very much
transparency
.” Not to be outvogue worded, Kim later hoped that “the North Korean missile issue will be resolved with
transparency
.”

In Senate confirmation hearings for deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage fervently expressed his support for the five unassailable towers of political virtue: “democratization,
transparency,
open governance, women’s issues, empowerment.”

But perhaps pellucity’s pollution has peaked. “We have noticed a definite increase in the term
visibility,
” notes Sheri Prasso, editor of the section of
BusinessWeek
titled UpFront (one word, capital modishly in the middle, playing on the meanings of
up-front
as “honest, forthright” as well as “found in the opening pages of the magazine”). “The lack of
visibility
is cited by CEOs and other corporate types when they talk about earnings projections for the last half of the year.”

“
Visibility
is really poor for the back-end of the year,” said Timothy Koogle, the departing CEO of Yahoo, last month. (The year’s
back-end
is still referred to by the geriatric set as “fall” and “winter.” The noun
back-end
is a back-formation from
back-ended,
created by the need for an opposite to
front-ended,
a variant of
front-loaded
.)

In the struggle against the tenacity of opacity, will
visibility
overtake
transparency
? I don’t see it.

Sensual.
Maneuvering my shopping cart through the brassiere section of a Wal-Mart in Charles Town, West Virginia (on the way, I swear, to men’s ultrarelaxed jeans), I was struck by the brand name of a Hanes underwear product:
Sensuale
.

By adding an
e
to the word
sensual,
the manufacturer not only gives a frenchified twist to the term but also enables the “lightly lined underwire” to be trademarked. Nothing incorrect about that. But a close examination of the package reveals this selling pitch: “Sensuous styling that’s sure to allure.”

Which is it, then—
sensual
or
sensuous
? Is there a difference? Yes; just as in
underwire
and
underwear,
the distinction is worth preserving.

Sensual
has to do with the pleasurable gratification of the senses; for five centuries, it dealt with sexual appetites and carnal desires. “He loves,” sneered a disapproving prude in 1618, “as far as
sensual
love can go.” To this day, a
sensual
person is one more inclined to revel in physical pleasures than to get a charge out of moral rectitude.

The poet Milton was not blind to this connotation of lewdness. However, writing in 1641 about the difference between soul and body, he needed a neutral adjective to apply to the body that meant “pertaining to the senses” of touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing. So he dropped the
-al
from
sensual
and substituted
-ous,
writing, “The Soule … finding the ease she had from her visible, and
sensuous
colleague the body.”

The poet Coleridge announced in 1814 that he would reintroduce Milton’s word “to express in one word what belongs to the senses”; ever since, usagists have differentiated
sensual,
“indulgent in physical pleasure,” from
sensuous,
“descriptive of aesthetic appreciation.” You get a
sensual
kick out of watching an R-rated movie and a
sensuous
kick out of listening to music or sniffing the cookies in Grandma’s oven.

Shouldst Milton be living at this hour, he would surely take umbrage at the misuse of his uplifting adjective by the bra makers at Hanes. They are alluding to the luxurious feeling of their lightly lined Sensuale product, implying, as in the
OED
’s sense 3, “a luxurious yielding up of oneself to passive enjoyment.”

I noodled this around with Steven Pinker, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. He does not see the semantic difference to be holding up. “The distinction was blown to smithereens in the early 1970s,” he says, “when ‘J’ published
The Sensuous Woman,
which as I recall suggested some interesting new uses for Jell-O and Saran Wrap. Apparently
sensuous
as a synonym for ‘sensory’—pertaining to the senses in a clinical way, as in ‘sensory physiology’—but they have failed.”

Not with me, they haven’t. I like the distinction. It reminds me of the difference between
continual
and
continuous
.

Even Pinker, a descriptivist, goes along with me part way on that: “The most consistently respected meaning difference between
continual
and
continuous,
” he notes, “is that
continuous
can be used for spatial as well as temporal
continuity
(‘a
continuous
line of trees’), whereas
continual
can be used only for temporal
continuity
. We see this in the spatial adjective
discontinuous
(‘a
discontinuous
line’).”

Prescriptivists like me go all the way. We say
continual
means “repeat-edly,” like the plumber upstairs going bang, bang, bang when you’re trying to sleep. Pinker agrees that although
continuous
is nine times more common in writing,
continual
“is said to be used for iterated events.” (
Iterate
means “repeat, say again”; I think he treats
reiterate
as semiredundant.)

Continuous,
on the other hand, is like the steady whine of a buzz saw in operation.
Continuous
“is said to be used for a truly gapless state or condition, such as heat, war or illness. One can sense this in the contrast between ‘John is working
continuously
’ (without interruption) and ‘John is
continually
working late’ (every day).” Pinker has counterexamples, but I refuse to become confused.

Remember the difference between
-al
and
-ous
. Suffixes count. It’s fine being
imperial
(having an empire) but not being
imperious
(overbearing). Those who observe these distinctions are virtually virtuous.

Shall We Trance?
“Scott Henry packed the
trance
tent,” reported Kelefa Sanneh of the
Times,
“with a set built on simple melodies, pounding beats and dramatic contrasts.” The article was about an annual dance party held in New York as a kind of mall of music. “
Techno
and
trance
both eschew syncopation,” the writer explained. “The listener is tempted to imagine that the thumping will continue forever. By contrast, styles based on syncopation tend to produce shorter, more volatile tracks, often built around vocal performances—songs, in other words.” I like that sudden simplification of the pretentious “vocal performances” with “songs,” but the writer’s wry phrase “in other words” doesn’t work with the single word “songs.” You wouldn’t switch to the singular “in another word” because that would lose the easy, colloquial sense of “to put it in plain English.” I’d try “that is, ‘songs.’” (In this compulsive copyediting, am I being too picky? You should see my e-mail.)

Forget about
techno,
already being pushed aside by
electro
. Keep your ear on
trance
(in another word,
noise,
as the incognoscenti would mutter). Its meaning is not the same as the noun first used by Chaucer in the 14th century to mean “swoon, a suspension of consciousness.” But the author of
The Canterbury Tales
also used it as a verb to mean “to skip or prance; to tramp rapidly.”