The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (53 page)

Football metaphors are as mother’s milk to politicians: no etymologist has yet come up with the origin of
level playing field,
but football’s
game plan
was adopted by campaign strategists, and both politicians and quarterbacks relish the military metaphor of
throwing the bomb
.

Although coinage of
smashmouth
is often attributed to Mike Ditka, the former Chicago Bears tight end and coach, that CBS sportscaster vigorously, almost aggressively, denies being the originator. The word is a compound adjective, which calls for hyphenation; in current use, however, it is most often treated as one word, as if it were an attributive noun like
blood
in “blood sport.” It cannot properly be written as two words if used as a modifier.

The earliest citation on the databases (can a hacking baseball player slide into a database?) is a September 1984 usage by Jim Wacker, the Texas Christian University football coach, who told David Casstevens of the
Dallas
Morning News
that the “physical game” played by his TCU Horned Frogs was “
smash-mouth
football.”

Two months later, the columnist George Will praised Wacker for having “the finest sense of nuance in language since Flaubert, or at least since Woody Hayes,” and applied the coinage to politics: “As the clock—the merciful clock—runs out in this final quarter of what feels like a 27-quarter presidential game, Messrs. Mondale and Reagan are playing
smash-mouth
politics. Vigorous, they are.”

In 1994, the term was adopted as the name of a rock group, whose members told the
Wall Street Journal
reporter Stefan Fatsis that they liked the way the sportscaster John Madden used it. Above the topically etymological story (everybody wantsa get inna de act), a headline writer reviewed the progress of the locution in one of the
Journal
’s characteristically chatty subheads: “
Smash-Mouth:
Sick of the Term? Sorry, There’s No Stopping It—Blame the XFL If You’d Like, But It’s Old and Seems to Fit the Popular Culture Well.”

NBC’s Web site claims its XFL is “the type of ‘
smash mouth
’ [sic] football that fans crave … returning football to its tougher roots.” A league spokesman, Jeff Shapes, says: “It’s the type of football played in the National Football League in the ’60s and ’70s. Football fans breathe and drink
smashmouth
football.” He adds hastily, “Obviously, it doesn’t mean literally that anyone’s mouth is being smashed.”

Snippy.
“You mean to tell me, Mr. Vice President,” George W. Bush said incredulously to Al Gore on election night, “you’re
retracting
your conces-sion?”

“You don’t have to be
snippy
about it,” Gore responded.

This interchange on the most tumultuous night in the history of American politics was reported by aides who heard one side of the conversation, or might have been listening on telephone extensions; we do not yet know if the call was also surreptitiously recorded. Neither candidate disputed the accuracy of the above account by Kevin Sack and Frank Bruni in the
New
York Times
. The Associated Press report, almost but not exactly the same, had Bush saying, “Let me make sure I understand—you’re calling me back to
retract
your concession?” and Gore replying, “You don’t have to get
snippy
about this.”

In the interest of global public understanding and linguistic history, however, this department is obliged to unearth the origin and meaning of the Gore charge of
snippy
.

The earliest definition, in Nathaniel Bailey’s 1727 dictionary, is “parcimonious” (now spelled
parsimonious
and considered a bookish term for a cheapskate) and “niggardly” (now used less frequently because some confuse it with a racial slur). In John Bartlett’s 1848
Dictionary of Americanisms,
it is defined as a “woman’s word” for “finical,” probably rooted in the sense of
fine
as “small,” which has now become
finicky
and is a derogation meaning “excessively meticulous.”

That cannot be what Al Gore meant. Let’s go back to basics: to
snip,
from the German
snippen,
originally meant “to snatch quickly” and came to mean “to clip or cut off, often with a scissors.” (This produced a
snippet,
a tiny piece of a thing, later extended to a short bit of prose or, in Dryden’s use, “some small
snip
of gain.”) The action of clipping or cutting off small pieces led to
snippety,
“fragmentary, scrappy,” with a temporary detour to
sniptious,
and finally to
snippy,
metaphorically cutting off pieces, thereby seeming “curt, supercilious, fault-finding, airish,” its meaning influenced by the “irritable, tart, short-tempered” sense of
snappish
.

Snippy,
like
snappish,
begins with the sneaky “sn” sound, characteristic of
sniveling, snide
and
snarling
.

Earlier generations might have taken
snippy
to mean “brassy, cheeky, saucy”; now the wide-ranging senses are expressed as “touchy, flip, smartalecky, disrespectful, on your high horse, having an attitude.”

The American election results were “the fault of the American people,” a French broadcaster suggested. “They seem to have ignored their responsibilities to be clear on what and whom they want.” The
Washington Post
columnist Jim Hoagland’s riposte: “Now that is
snippy
.”

To
snip,
you wrote, comes from the German word, “snippen,” but there is no such word; what you meant is “schnippen.” That, however, does not mean “schneiden” in the sense of “cut,” but obviously stems from the noun “Schnupfen,” which is the German word for “cold,” but is more related to “snuff” and leads us straight to the meaning of your
snippy
and the German “schnippisch.” In the 16th century, exactly 1550, Hans Sachs—he of the
Meistersinger—
used it in the sense of “to breathe in air” by way of throwing your head back in a show of hauteur. There is your “disrespectful,” “smart-alecky” or even better “on your high horse.”

As a verb, “schnippen” is only used in the context of snapping your fingers. Whereas the
snip
in the sense of “cut” has a little “s” inserted after the “p”—and then it is down to one “p” only—as in “schnipseln” or “Schnipsel” (n.) (snippet)
.

Christine Brinck Joffee

Munich, Germany

Sorry.
I
regret
not having previously explored the etymology of
apology
. You’ll have to
excuse me,
but I refuse to say I’m
very sorry
.

We have just run the gamut of English words that the Bush administration used or refused to use in extricating from China twenty-four service-members in
detention
(suggesting a brief hold in custody, usually on political grounds),
internment
(longer denial of freedom without imputation of criminality) or
captivity
(longest, connoting punishment, synonymous with
imprisonment
).

Note the relatively new term
servicemember,
which alternated with the two words “crew members.” That was used because “members of the armed services” is a mouthful. Reporters could not use
servicemen
because that now-sexist term would not include three of the navy aircraft’s crew who are women; hence the Pentagon locution, not yet in most dictionaries,
servicemembers
. President Bush persisted in using “our servicemen and women.”

After the collision of the Chinese fighter plane and the American EP-3E Aries (Latin for “ram”) reconnaissance plane, Secretary of State Colin Powell, soon followed by President Bush, expressed
regret
at the apparent loss of life of the Chinese pilot. The root of
regret
is the Old English
grætan,
“to weep.” As a verb, it means “mourn, lament”; as a noun, it means “sorrow” but is not a form of contrition, admitting sin or guilt; rather,
regret
is condolence without culpability.

The Chinese demanded not merely
bao qian
(bow chen), as in “sorry I was late,” but the much graver
dao qian,
a phrase that begins a formal
apology
. The Greek
apologos,
“a full account,” led to the Latin
apologia,
“justification.”
Apology
began in English in 1533, meaning “a speech in defense” with the “
Apologie
of Syr Thomas More, Knyght.” That sense of vindication was soon replaced. In current use, to
apologize
means “to express regret at a mistake or wrongdoing; to accept responsibility for a misdeed.”

No deal, said the United States; an
apology
is not in order. Although Premier Jiang Zemin suggested, in English, that a mild
excuse me
might be acceptable, other authorities in China demanded the confession implicit in
apology
. On National Public Radio, Daniel Schorr jocularly suggested a so-lution:
apologrets
. Nice try; didn’t fly.

Resolution came in the form of linguistic ambiguity that allowed both sides to claim victory. In using the syllable
qian
in his translation of our letter referring to our unauthorized landing at a Chinese airfield, the American ambassador, Admiral Joseph Prueher, some scholars said, allowed the Chinese to infer an admission of wrongdoing. After our crew was released, Secretary Powell retorted, “We should not be fooled by Chinese propaganda that says they got an
apology
.”

The key word was
sorry,
later adverbially emphasized as
very sorry
. (Fortunately, it never came to
really, really sorry, no foolin’
.) It’s the informal alternative to
sorrowful,
based on
sorg,
which first appeared in
Beowulf
around 725, meaning “grief, sorrow, care.”
Sorry,
with its
-y
suffix—meaning “full of” but also used to form pet names—seems more colloquial than
regret
. It was seized upon by the Chinese as “a form of apology,” enabling them to claim satisfaction.

Then came the
-ident
controversy among American spokesmen. “It’s an
accident,
it’s a very regrettable
accident,
” said Richard Boucher, State Department spokesman, four days after the collision, “and we’re trying to resolve it … without blowing it into an international
incident
.”

The next day, Sun Yuxi, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, twice used
incident
to describe the episode, matter, subject or occurrence. Nor did hard-liners here like the State Department’s insistence on
accident;
in their judgment, the aggressive, reckless endangerment of American surveillance aircraft ordered by the Chinese high command for months was intended to create an
incident
. President Bush straddled, claiming we “did nothing to cause the
accident
” and in the same statement referring to “the kind of
incident
we have just been through.”

In diplolingo, an
incident
is no trivial happening; it is like the striking of a match, no conflagration in itself but an event that could inflame passions. Curiously, the word works as both dysphemism and euphemism: Americans were repelled in 1940 at the fictional account of lynching called
The Ox-Bow Incident,
but when Chinese Communist officials want to minimize what Westerners call “the massacre at Tiananmen Square,” they call that crushing of studentled protest “the
incident
of June 4, 1989” (in Chinese,
liu si,
“six four”). The lexicographer Eric Partridge wrote in 1960 that “if a businessman speaks of
incidents
when he means quarrels, he has been influenced by journalism.”

Sou.
If you were president of the United States, and someone asked you to describe—in one word—what kind of state the Union was in, what adjective would you select?