The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (55 page)

The noun
stovepipe
is a vertical cylinder carrying a stove’s smoke up through the roof. As an adjective modifying
hat,
it describes the tall top hat that Lincoln wore. Now that business schools use the participle form,
stovepiping,
in derogation of managers who fail to look around, the question arises: what do rising managers call horizontal cooperation that avoids direction from the top?
Floorboarding
comes to mind.

Strip Search.
“Republican leaders are sure to fight hard to either defeat the bill or
strip out
parts,” wrote the
Orlando Sentinel
. The CNN correspondent Chris Huntington said, “If you
strip out
certain charges, they’re reporting a profit of 12 cents.”
Fortune
magazine quoted Andy Fastow, an Enron executive, as having said, “We
strip out
price risk; we
strip out
interest risk; we
strip out
all the risks.”

Gypsy Rose Lee, where are you?
Strips
is an acronym apparently coined by a bump-and-grind ecdysiast enthusiast at Treasury for “Separate Trading of Registered Interest and Principal of Securities.” To
strip
a bond is to remove its interest-paying coupons and sell the principal of the bond separately. What you have left is a zero-coupon bond and a separate bunch of coupons. “To
strip out,
” says Professor Robert Jarrow of Cornell, “is to infer the value of the zero-coupon bonds underlying the value of a coupon bond. It relates to Treasury Strips that the Federal Reserve Board trades.”

That specific financial meaning has been removed—
stripped out,
if you will—in the vogue use of the phrase by scandalmongers on the periphery of the Enron story. It now means “snatched away from, in the dead of night.”

Stuff.
Stuff
is hot. It began a few years ago, with
stuff-stuff-stuff
temporarily replacing “et cetera, all that jazz and on and on.” The word received a boost when Richard Carlson titled a series of books
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff,
an expression first popularized as a book title in 1988 by Michael Mantell. The word was applied to character by Tom Wolfe a decade before in his book about astronauts,
The Right Stuff
.

But those uses carried the meaning of “things” or “material.” In its latest vogue sense,
stuff
is racing through the lingo of the software industry as the word to denote all the extra goodies provided with the purchase of a computer, usually in the phrase “plus lotsa great
stuff
.” There may be a mocking quality to the use of the simple old word by the nerds of the newest technology, as if to say, “This is too complicated for me to explain to the likes of you in my space-time continuum.”

Vogue-Word Watchers will note that I did not observe that
stuff
was “in.”
In
is out—way out. (
Way,
in its adverbial sense of “exceedingly,” is
way
voguish.) As categories for cutting-edge terminology,
in
and
out
are as archaic as
U
and
Non-U,
as behind the times as
avant-garde
. Remember
edgy,
last year’s word for what you had to be? It’s in the graveyard of nonce words, behind the tomb of
state of the art
.

Those on the qui vive who need to flaunt their with-it-ness in the face of the stodgily au courant have turned to
hot,
with the extreme of “forwardly fashionable, at the center of attention” expressed as
way hot
or
hot-hot
. (In the nomenclature of the new, forget
cool,
which is no longer
hot
. Lists that used to classify people and places as In and Out are now labeled “What’s Hot and What’s Not.”)

In “Hot New York”—an assessment of the latest socialites, chefs, designers, “Web guys” and media bosses—the
New York Observer
’s editors observed that “heat is
hot
” and defined it as “the ethereal stuff that makes a man or woman in this town shine.” It is not power but notoriety—an especially transient or raffish aspect of celebrity—that determines the degree of heat: “As one of the largest shareholders of AOL-Time Warner, Ted Turner certainly is as powerful as most world leaders,” observed the temperature-takers, “but in terms of heat, he’s Mr. Freeze.”

This department is blessed with the Vogue-Word Watchers, shock troops of the Lexicographic Irregulars with eyes sharpened and ears cocked to catch the
hot-hot
in midflight. “What’s the sudden attraction to
traction,
” asks my
Times
colleague, the business reporter Tim Race, “in business and political contexts?” Example from a West Palm Beach Democrat during the recent Long Count: “If Gore gets any
traction,
you’ll see a special session.”
Traction
is a word originally meaning “the action of pulling” that came to mean “the adhesive friction of a vehicle on the ground” and has been extended further in politics to “the grip of a campaign on the public attention.” I have used it too often and stand corrected.

“We need something more than this
feckless,
photo-op foreign policy,” declared Senator John McCain on the stump in October. Vogue-Word Watcher Darren Gersh of Chevy Chase, Maryland, asks: “Often users of
feckless
seem to be looking for an SAT synonym for ‘clueless.’ Only a few seem to be aiming at the dictionary definition of ‘ineffective, or lacking purpose.’ By the way, if you are
feckless,
can you be feckful? And is having feck a good thing?”

You bet; the Scotticism comes from
effect,
rooted in the Latin
facere,
“to do.” If you’re
feckless,
you don’t do nuthin’. Good word; needs rest; try
feeble
. As for the archaic
feckful,
go with the modern
effective
or
efficient
.

“Can something be done about this word
robust
?” demands James MacGregor Burns, the great historian at Williams College in Massachusetts. The adjective has been married to
economy;
Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News, recently denounced it because “it means whatever you want it to mean. Do we mean growing demand, increasing demand? Then why don’t we say that?” Professor Burns’s theory is that “the word has risen with prosperity and will promptly decline if there is a recession.” (In the lexicon of the Old Economy, a roboom is followed by a robust.)

The vogue word rooted in the Latin
robur,
“strength,” is now hot in diplomacy, where even a demarche can be
robust,
and especially in the wide world ofWebese (forget the passé
cyberlingo
). The
Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media
(I was a pioneer in digital media, but it was then called “fingerpainting”) defines
robust
as describing “a system with the ability to recover gracefully from exceptional inputs and adverse situations. A robust system is almost bulletproof.” The word is rapidly becoming
feckless
.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” was very big in Northern California, specifically in Walnut Creek (just outside of Berkeley), at Del Valle High School, in 1963—well before 1988
.

There may have been some bigger connection to Big Events in the phrase: several of the members of Del Valle’s 1964 graduating class went on to participate in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the fall. And the rest, of course, is history
.

Kate Buford

Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

Summitese.
“A parley at the summit” was what Winston Churchill called for a half-century ago. He envisioned an intimate get-together of a few world leaders and not a paperbound conference “zealously contested by hordes of experts and officials drawn up in a vast cumbrous array.”

The summit in Moscow between Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton would not be to Churchill’s taste; hordes drawn up in a vast cumbrous array (what a mouth-filling derogation of staff) will be whispering in summiteers’ ears.

Whoops! In referring to the summit, I have transgressed. “As a noun,” reads the ordinarily sensible
New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, “summit
may designate the level or format of a meeting (the issue will go to the
summit
) but is jargon when used as a synonym for meeting (they held a
summit
).”

As they say in the Pentagon, I nonconcur. (
That’s
jargon.) The stylist’s resistance to linguistic change is laudable—new terms should have to fight their way into general acceptance over time—but players in the poker game that is language have to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.
Summit
is no longer merely an attributive noun modifying
meeting
or
conference;
usage over fifty years has turned the modifier into that top-level conclave itself. Cancel the
meeting
.

With that settled (at least in my mind), we can turn to the summit in Moscow and diplomacy’s fierce struggle of verbs about a controversial arms control treaty:
abrogate
versus
withdraw
.

In 1972, the general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, and President Richard Nixon signed a treaty to limit antiballistic missile systems. The ABM treaty, in its Article XV, says, “Each Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to
withdraw
from this Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events … have jeopardized its supreme interests.” Six months’ notice is to be given “prior to
withdrawal
.”

Hard-liners in the United States point to a new missile threat from rogue nations, learnedly mutter
rebus sic santibus
—“circumstances have changed”—and add that the Soviet signatory of 1972 no longer exists. Unless the Russians agree to let us build a limited missile defense against a terrorist attack (a defense not powerful enough to affect Russia’s deterring missile forces), then we should
withdraw
from the treaty.

Softer-liners counter that such unilateral action would undermine all arms control; instead, they hope Clinton in Moscow will seek minor amendments to the treaty to allow a limited U.S. defense that would not cause the Russians to worry that their missile force could be stopped. (I am being excruciatingly evenhanded here.) They warn of a worldwide reaction against us if the United States abrogates the treaty.

The choice of verbs—
withdraw
or
abrogate
—tips the reader to the point of view.
Abrogate
means “to cancel, annul, quash, void, to abolish authoritatively.” The word is harsh; in William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, we see the controversial “In that he sayth a new testament he hath
abrogat
the olde.”

Withdraw,
in contrast, means “to retract, to take back or away” or “to remove”; in another sense, it means “leave the room.” Robert Henryson, in his 1480
Testament of Cresseid,
came up with a gentle line still remembered fondly by copy editors afflicted with prolix writers: “
Withdraw
thy sentence, and be gracious.”

A
New York Times
editorial opined, “Mr. Bush would
withdraw
loans and credits to Russia over its crackdown in Chechnya and
abrogate
the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.” Though in the newspaper’s view both steps would be “dangerously confrontational,” its use of
withdraw
regarding loans and
abrogate
about the treaty suggests that it would find the latter step more troubling.

“
Abrogate
has a pejorative connotation,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, a revered professor of international law at Harvard, “in the sense that it means ‘to end the treaty not in accordance with the treaty’s terms.’ It suggests a much more active decision to end the treaty and is much closer to the term
breach
than the term
withdraw
.”

That’s what Senator Barry Goldwater had in mind when he took a case against President Jimmy Carter to the Supreme Court, claiming the president had unlawfully
abrogated
a treaty with Taiwan. In turning down his appeal, the Court avoided the hot verb and refused to intervene in what it called Carter’s
termination
of the treaty.