The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (57 page)

Frank O’Donnell

Rockville Centre, New York

U

Unilateralist.
“I hope the notion of a
unilateral
approach died in some people’s minds here today,” President George W. Bush told a NATO news conference in Brussels, bridling at having been saddled with the dirty diplomatic word. “
Unilateralists
don’t come around the table to listen to others….
Unilateralists
don’t ask opinions of world leaders.” In case anybody didn’t get his point, he gave a definition: “A
unilateralist
is one that doesn’t understand the role of NATO.” Were it not for the ghost of the Nixonian “I am not a crook,” he would surely have added, “I am not a
unilateralist
.”

Why the revulsion at this word? Because the adjective means “undertaken by one,” which is diplomatically quite incorrect, or “one-sided,” which carries an overtone of arrogance. Born in botany to describe a cluster of flowers growing on one side of a stalk, it bloomed in diplolingo a half-century ago: “
Unilateralism,
to coin one more gobbledygook term,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1951 in its disparagement, “has become the new isolationism. Go it alone; meet force with maximum force; there is no substitute for victory … these are the tenets of the new faith.”

A year ago, Senator Joseph Biden, now the Democratic chairman of foreign relations, tagged the GOP ticket as “
unilateralists
if not isolationists.”

That was the theme that France’s prime minister, Lionel Jospin, picked up this spring: “This is not an isolationist administration as has been the case before in the Republican tradition,” he noted. “This is more like a
unilateralist
administration.”

Uni-
means “one”;
multi-
means “many.” A few years ago, Republicans were criticizing the Clinton administration for being too
multilateral,
following the lead of the U.N. and other groups of nations. Just as the
uni-
prefix implies arrogance,
multi-
implies meekness, requiring Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to come up with a toughening modifier: “assertive
multilateralism
.”

Rather than reaching for a softening qualifier (“acquiescent
unilateralism
” leaps to mind) and despite an opening offered by the European trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy (“One man’s
unilateralism
is another’s determined leadership”), the Bush team decided to deny it flatly. Its preferred self-description is neither isolationist nor interventionist, but
internationalist
.

As the smoothing-over was decided on, one word muscled its way into vogue:
emollient
. In the
New York Times
in December, R. W. Apple Jr. and Steven Erlanger separately wrote of “
emollient
words” used by Bush to soften hard lines. Last month, British analysts became entranced with the word: “At his first major meeting with skeptical European leaders,” wrote Anton La Guardia in the
Daily Telegraph,
“Mr. Bush struck an
emollient
note.” My colleague in columny, Anthony Lewis, who I suspect reads the British press, noted that “the
emollient
Bush words about loving the environment did not match the reality of the administration’s destructive actions.”

Get to know this soothing locution, both noun and adjective, which is not nearly as stinging as “astringent” and is the opposite of “abrasive.” The Latin
molli
is “soft”; Alexander Pope wrote in 1727 of poetry’s “
emollients
and opiates.” Pour it over your
unilateralism,
rub it in and cozy the world along.

V

Vapors.
When Hubert Védrine, France’s foreign minister, dismissed President Bush’s “axis of evil” metaphor as “simplistic,” Secretary of State Colin Powell retorted that his French counterpart was “getting the
vapors
and whatnot.”

Bush liked that response. At a news conference in Tokyo, asked to explain the foreign furor over the “axis of evil”—the most memorable phrase so far in his presidency—the president lobbed the ball to Powell: “You might want to ask him what he meant by ‘the
vapors
.’” The secretary was lexicographically prepared: “It’s a 19th-century Victorian term, if you wish to look it up…. It was meant to say, ‘Let’s not swoon.’”

An invitation to look anything up is my meat; I did, and one common meaning is substantially as Powell defined it: a sighing, wrist-to-forehead fainting away, historically done by a delicate flower of a woman. (To
swoon
is “to be overcome by rapture,” rooted in the Old English
geswogen,
“unconscious,” and popularized in descriptions of teenage girls at the early performances of Frank Sinatra at New York’s Paramount Theater.)

Ah, but the
vapors
has a variety of meanings and a long history. The
Century Dictionary
defined it a century ago as “a disease of nervous disability in which strange images seem to float hazily before the eyes, or appear as if real … the ‘blues’: a term much affected in the 18th century, but now rarely used.” Synonymy was provided by Henry Fielding in his novel
Amelia,
written in 1751: “Some call it the fever on the spirits, some a nervous fever, some the
vapours,
and some the hysterics.” In
Robinson Crusoe,
Daniel Defoe’s hero evoked the hallucinatory connotation: “These things fill’d my Head with new Imaginations, and gave me the
Vapours
again.” It is a manifestation of what was first called “melancholia”; in President Lincoln’s time, “the hypo,” and later “depression.”

Why
vapors,
which has to do with gaseous, misty or steamy exhalations? Because the mental state of low spirits was thought to originate in the stomach or spleen (in men), or the uterus (in women), for which the Greek word is
hystera,
bubbling up to the brain and causing morbidity. In a “discourse concerning chocolata,” Henry Stubbe wrote in 1662 that “by the eating of those Nuts, she feels the Hypochondriacal
vapours
… to be instantly allayed.” Though this belief that internal emanations were the basis for nervous disorders was rejected during the rise of psychiatry, the old idea that mental states are affected by chemical products of the body has made a comeback (as did the lay term “blues”).

In current use,
vapors
is a word used jocularly, not in allusion to depression but often to suggest mild hysteria or unmanly weepiness. When applied to men, it carries a feminine overtone: the writer Peggy Noonan told Maureen Dowd of the
New York Times
in 1991 of White House aides “who are utterly at the mercy of the lunar tides and utterly affected by the
vapors
and by an almost feline desire to look man to man at one’s enemy and scratch his little eyes out.” Two years later, Dowd returned to the expression in its evocation of the past no longer relevant: “In the old days, if a woman wished to escape a difficult encounter, she could plead a case of the
vapours
and retire to her Victorian fainting couch.”

That trivializing sense can also be applied to governments: writing about an abortive attempt by Iraqis in 1995 to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Claire Berlinski noted this month in the conservative
Weekly Standard,
“Moments before the plan was to be effected, the Clinton administration, seized by an attack of the
vapors,
changed its mind.”

Afterthought: In the medical lexicon, the names of ailments and diseases are often changed to get more formal or avoid the sort of kidding-around that became attached to the
vapors
. Thus,
grippe
is now “influenza,”
dropsy
is “edema” and
lumbago
is “lumbar pain.”

Apoplexy,
whose adjective form,
apoplectic,
came to mean “red-faced with rage,” is now called “stroke” (like
apoplexy,
from the Greek
plessien,
“to strike”) because this third largest killer in the United States was nothing to treat lightly.

The best example of the laugh associated with this abandoned term was Ethel Merman’s famous ad-lib when playing in Irving Berlin’s
Annie Get Your Gun:
Annie Oakley was to show her marksmanship by shooting a duck; the stage gun did not go off, but the duck fell on cue. Merman, never the sort to get the vapors over a show-biz mishap, walked over to the prop, held it up and said, “Whaddya know—
apoplexy
!”

Visit With.
“Vice President Cheney has a completely open door” to members of Congress, said the Bush counselor Karen Hughes last month on ABC’s
Nightline
. “He’s always available to visit with any member who’d like to
visit with
him.”

Press Secretary Ari Fleischer recalled the days when George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, would “drop by and
visit with
various legislators of both parties.”

John McCain’s recent get-together with the Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, was described in the
New York Times
as “Mr. Daschle’s highly publicized weekend
visit with
Senator John McCain.” Elizabeth Becker, a
Times
colleague, notes that “the political use of
visit with
is rampant. Not
visit to,
or just
visit,
and rarely
meet
—always
visit with
. Where is it from?”

The South. Lyndon Johnson used that venerable southern Americanism when he introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, telling a joint session of Congress he was grateful for the chance “to reason with my friends, to give them my views and to
visit with
my former colleagues.”

What does the preposition
with
do to the verb
visit
? It milks out most of the action, making the verb intransitive and changing its tone from purposeful to neighborly. “To say that John McCain
visited with
Tom Daschle,” says Leonard Zwilling, general editor at the
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE),
“implies a friendly exchange of views, as opposed to
met with,
which could just as well suggest that they had a flaming set-to.”

Visit
does not mean
visit with
. You can
visit
a place or a person, but you can
visit with
people only. In his 1927
We,
the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who had just visited France, wrote of “Perryville, Mo., where we
visited with
some of Klink’s friends.”

In his
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage,
E. Ward Gilman adds a nice distinction: “To say that you
‘visited with’
someone usually implies not only that you conversed, but that you went a bit out of your way for the sake of some friendly talk.” Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado sensed that distinction earlier this month, thanking Defense Department nominees “for taking time to drop by my office and
visit with
me personally.”

Let moguls continue to
take meetings;
let confrontationalists visit imprecations on one another; let trustees descend on colleges with stern
visitations,
and let Lady Macbeth fear “no compunctious
visitings
of nature,” but remember—today’s successful politicians sailed smoothly into the era of sweet, nonpartisan
visits with
.

Voguism I.
What’s with
voguism
? The reader will ask: “Is it a word? Why isn’t it in my dictionary?”

It is not synonymous with
nonce word,
which is “a term used once for some special occasion.” Rather,
voguism
is a not-so-new neologism that was created in this space in 1982. Though picked up and used once by
Newsweek,
the word has since languished, out of print and out of sorts. It is today getting another chance at linguistic life because it meets a need—not a “felt” need, but a real one—in an age when words and phrases come and go like overnight celebrities. (When was the last time you used the ’80s
state of the art
or the ’90s
at the end of the day
? There was a time you couldn’t get through a New York talk-show minute without them.)

We need a term that goes beyond
vogue word
to encompass whole phrases like
having said that
. In my personal lexicon,
voguism
means “a word or phrase in fashion, used by writers who are with-it and then repeated endlessly by politicians and public intellectuals unable to assert their relevance without it; a breeze-by bromide, a cliché without staying power.”

Dictionaries, limited to reporting words in use, need citations to trigger inclusion in future editions. At the end of the day, only adoption by other language mavens will determine how
voguism
fares.

Although it won’t affect your semantic analysis of
that (having been) said,
it might be useful to note that it appeared in British English a few decades before it surfaced in the U.S.

As for
voguism,
it would seem to be a voguism for
cliché.
You’ll find
vogue word
in the
OED,
and I suspect that
voguism
is to
vogue word
(or
expression
) as
Briticism
is to
British word
(or
expression
)
.

Laurence Urdang

Old Lyme, Connecticut

Voguism II: This Day Is Over.
“A few months ago,” writes Joan Swirsky from someplace (look, if you’re going to send me e-mail, it would help regional dialectologists if you said where you’re from), “it seemed that every talking head I saw on TV started using the expression
at the end of the day
. I thought of writing you about the derivation, but time went by. Then I saw Terry McAuliffe interviewed by Tim Russert. Without exaggeration, McAuliffe used that expression at least twenty times, like it was his tic!”

You are indeed exaggerating, Swirsky, wherever you are. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, used the phrase only seventeen times in the twelve minutes he spoke on the air: “
At the end of the day
we won on the issues”; “
At the end of the day
if all the votes were counted”; “There was no swap
at the end of the day
.” This off-putting tic, as Swirsky accurately described it, continued until the end of his appearance, distracting viewers from his earnest message.