The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (58 page)

Fifteen years ago, I cited George Washington’s early use of this phrase in a 1797 letter and suggested that its vogue use in the ’80s was getting out of hand. After heaping ridicule on it as an affectation and a cliché, I concluded: “
At the end of the day
is hot. But you’ll see, when all is said and done …”

Evidently, this did not do the trick. Although the phrase is now banned at the DNC, it has become a staple of speakers determined to take a lofty, daylong view of what they consider to be other people’s feeding frenzies. Like
famously,
another vogue term savaged here six years ago, it marches on. A language maven finds this humbling.

Voguism III: Three Little Words.
Soon after Governor George W. Bush became the likely Republican nominee, Vice President Al Gore blasted his opponent’s proposed tax cut as a “
risky tax scheme
that would threaten our prosperity.” A few days later, he assailed the Bush plan “to blow the entire surplus on a
risky tax scheme
that would benefit the wealthy.” A database search shows Gore using that phrase 164 times in the past two years, 44 in the last month alone.

Its provenance can be found in the Democratic campaign of 1996. In his debate with GOP vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp, Gore zapped the tax-reduction plan put forward by Bob Dole as a “
risky tax scheme
that would blow a hole in the deficit.” Because Gore evidently believes this attack phrase to be effective, it is worth analyzing.

Risky,
an adjective coined in 1827 by the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, suggests danger without going so far as “dangerous, unsafe” or “perilous.” It suggests a knowledge of the hazard ahead that can be avoided by prudent action. Although the noun
risk
in a financial sense is acceptable, the adjective
risky
is intended to engender wariness or suspicion.

In American English,
scheme,
especially as a verb but also as a noun, suggests a crafty or secret plan to attain a sinister end. This is not the case in Britain, which treats the noun
scheme
as synonymous with “project, enterprise, plan.” However, the verb on both sides of the Atlantic has a larcenous tinge, as “to effect by contrivance or devise by underhanded means.” A long-ago cartoon showed an ambitious IBM employee setting aside the company’s slogan, “Think,” with another sign:
“Scheme.”
That sly sense of the verb has slopped over the noun in America.

Candidate Gore plans, or
schemes,
to keep
risky tax scheme
in his verbal arsenal. As Mr. Bush comes up with words equally effective, they will receive equal etymological treatment here.

Voguism IV: Bold Initiative.
Readers who enjoyed the exhaustive exegesis in this space of Al Gore’s use of
risky tax scheme
were promised a similar study of favored words of his opponent, George W. Bush.

We have an entry culled from a column by Gail Collins in the
New York Times,
wherein my colleague wondered “whether Mr. Gore is right in charging that the Bush tax plan is ‘risky,’ or Mr. Bush is more correct in dubbing it ‘
bold
.’”

As far back as 1997, the governor described his tax plan to the Texas legislature as “this complex,
bold,
aggressive plan.” The
Dallas Morning News
promptly hailed his “
bold
tax plan.” In a presidential primary debate in New Hampshire in late 1999, Bush described his tax proposal as “a good,
bold,
practical plan.” One of his early competitors, Senator Orrin Hatch, later saluted the Bush proposal to reduce taxes by $483 billion over five years as “
bold
but responsible.”

Hatch’s qualifier—“but responsible”—was intended to strip any possible riskiness out of the Bush plan (or, as Gore keeps deriding it,“scheme”). It indicates the senator’s subtle awareness of the adjective’s ability to trouble the easily daunted.

The word, of Teutonic origin and first spelled
bealde,
appeared in Old English about the end of the first millennium. Shakespeare, in 1593, felt it necessary to place it near a synonym: “when their brave hope,
bold
Hector, marched to field.” But even as the meaning of “brave” took firm hold, Shakespeare recognized that the word had acquired a different sense, of “overly audacious, too forward”: in his 1605
King Lear,
he wrote of “men so disordered, so deboshed and
bold
.”

Bold,
applied to a person, today connotes “pushy,” sometimes “fearless,” but on the edge of “reckless”; applied to an idea, however, the connotation is slightly stronger than audacious and just short of courageous. It’s better to have
bold
ideas than timid ones.

But watch out for cliché fusion: the Dow Jones database spits out 1,802 hits in the past decade on
bold initiative
. William Godwin coined
initiative
in 1793 to mean “the first step in some enterprise” and (prefiguring debate in the art world centuries later) wrote, “Sensation … possesses the
initiative.
” The overuse of
bold
to modify Godwin’s word vitiates its potency. An alternative to
initiative
is
undertaking,
but that may have fallen by the wayside as the managers of funerals became known as
undertakers
. (They now prefer
morticians
.)

Bold
suffered a decline in use for some years (
brave, undaunted,
and
intrepid
were preferred) but made a comeback in the great example of the split infinitive of our time: the
Star Trek
plan “to
boldly
go where no man has gone before.” In
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
the
man
was changed to
one;
that was a
bold
initiative.

W

Wave of the Wand.
Under “Enhanced Security Measures,” the White House Web site lists, among other items, “random
hand-wanding
of passengers at the gate.”

The
Toronto Star
wrote in 1989 about a “physical search which includes
hand-wanding
and X-raying.” When a guard at an inspection post at Kennedy Airport in New York failed to give a passenger a once-over with a handheld electronic search instrument, the terminal was evacuated. “The employee was conducting pat searches,” an airline spokesman told the
Daily News,
“but was not
wanding
passengers.”

Wand
is a noun meaning “stick,” its root in the verb
wend
or
wind,
connoting a slender, twisting rod. Since the 15th century,
wand
has evoked images of a magician or a fairy casting a spell.

No more. In 1979, the
Bookseller
reported on “the light pen, or
‘wand’
that could read machine-readable codes on books.” But it was a series of short jumps from handheld devices to bar-code scanners to electronic instruments that detect metal objects in a person’s clothing. Now you can’t board a plane without being
wanded
. (Those with beards or Middle Eastern looks are among the ten most wanded.)

The word
hand
is being dropped from
hand-wanded
because the essence of the search by the
wand
is personal: security people do not put whole human beings through the baggage-scanning machine. The
wand,
properly wielded, does not touch the person. The other verb, in which the body is searched by hand, is
frisk
. That sense goes back to Cockney rhyming slang, “to
frisk
a cly,” the allusion to which escapes me.

You referred to the expression
frisking a cly
as Cockney rhyming slang. Slang it is; rhyming it ain’t
.

Cly
is slang for seize or steal; a
clyfaker
is a pickpocket. So
frisking a cly
is searching a pickpocket
.

Graeme McLean

New York, New York

The Victorian pickpockets and cutpurses referred to their victims as their “clients.” Inevitably, the term “client” was shortened to
cly.
Sometimes pickpockets worked
on the fly
against a moving target, but they also worked
on the frisk.
When a crowd assembled to watch some public spectacle, a pickpocket would stand next to his victim and then he would (here comes the interesting verb)
fimble
him, using only his fingertips to probe surreptitiously until he located the victim’s note-case (as wallets were often called in those days). The subtle pat-down before the actual snatch was called
frisking the cly.

F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

New York, New York

Weapons-Grade.
Are you in favor of
same-sex
marriage? Have you recently gone through
wrong-site
surgery leading to a
near-death
experience? Do you search a
drop-down
menu to find a
with-it
shop so that you can look (to use a compound adverb)
drop-dead
gorgeous in your
bare-midriff
dress?

When the vogue for compound adjectives was just getting under way, the hyphenated terms were usually literal: a
white-collar
worker wore a white shirt to the office, and a
blue-collar
worker’s collar at the factory was often blue. The literal meaning is expressed today in
disco-inspired
tees (formerly T-shirts) and Gucci’s
under-the-breast
corset. But the hyphenations could also be metaphoric
: lace-curtain
Irish required some knowledge of social history, much as
baby-boom
generation does today. Early on, the precedent was established permitting the stringing-together of several words: the
going-out-of-business
sale of the Depression is matched in word number by
out-of-the-box
thinking today.

Now the hyphenation of modifiers rules the linguistic roost. This
rule-roosting
device—See? Nothing to it—satisfies the need for the new: “Hyphenation gives the impression,” says Frank Abate, former editor in chief of the U.S. Dictionaries program at Oxford University Press, “that the compound is novel, imaginative or requires some background knowledge.” He notes that some of these double-word modifiers grow out of adverbial phrases: in “technology at the cutting edge,” the adverbial phrase is swung around in front of the noun to become
cutting-edge
technology; in the same way, “you can track changes in real time” becomes
real-time
data.

The compression of modification suits headline writers and e-mail correspondents, whose shortness of space or haste in composition makes them the language’s leading squeezers. A statement like “a host is on duty at our Web site continuously” is whittled down to
24/7/365
-hosting. Some compound adjectives are dying:
push-button
convenience is passé, and
solid-state
electronics, which substitutes transistors for vacuum tubes, is not needed in an age that assumes
vacuum
to be a noun for a device that sucks up dirt.
State-of-the-art
anything died from overuse, and
world-class
is out of the competition, falling back into the nonce-word category. And parody has weakened
industrial-strength
.

I am not the only language maven to notice this. At Astrakhan State Pedagogical University, located in the Volga River delta, Maya Ryashchina has found three patterns: noun plus postpositive, as in
hands-on
manager and
heads-up
tennis; verb plus postpositive, as in
drive-by
killing; and a modal verb plus infinitive, as in
can-do
mentality,
must-have
wine and
must-see
film. (Go, Astrakhan S.P.U.!)

Euphemizers have reached out for compound adjectives. Adults of generous girth or a tendency toward obesity (whom the insensitive used to call “fat people”) wear
big-and-tall
clothes for men,
plus-size
for women.

The soul-satisfying impetus for our compound-modifying discourse …it’s getting to me … begin again. The biggest boost to the use of hyphenated adjectives in the way we write has come from the military. In that
target-rich
environment, we find the World War II use of
company-grade
and
field-grade
officers. In the 1960s,
zero-defect
quality control and
zero-tolerance
policies made their mark, promptly picked up by politicians. “An unfortunate inclusion in the U.S. legislation,” biologists observed at the Royal Society of London in 1967, “was the use of the term ‘zero tolerance,’ which implied a nil residue level.” (In the scandal affecting the Catholic Church today, a
zero-tolerance
policy toward pedophile priests is in the headlines.)

What single term epitomizes the triumph of the compound adjective? The hands-down winner (in the old days, I would have written, “The winner, hands down,” and come to think of it, that’s more emphatic) is
weapons-grade
.

This was coined in a 1952 policy statement by the Atomic Energy Commission calling for “nuclear plants which are economically independent of government commitments to purchase
weapons grade
plutonium.” It was not then hyphenated; that was done a year later by the scientist George L. Weil, the colleague of Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago who physically initiated the first nuclear chain reaction. Weil started a linguistic chain reaction as well: the meaning became “fissionable material of a quality for use in nuclear weapons,” and its serious meaning now applies to biological agents as well.

As with all horrific words, it was quickly absorbed into popular culture. Voted the “catch-all superlative” of last year by the American Dialect Society,
weapons-grade
has been used to modify everything from a Toyota’s torque output to Elvis Presley’s charisma. Allan Metcalf, the Dialect Society’s executive secretary, explains,
“Weapons-grade
salsa would mean really hot.”

The week preceding your article my ninth-grade classes and I had been reading
Julius Caesar
and noted Cicero’s observation that the night before Caesar’s assassination was a “strange-disposed time,” as well as Cassius’ comment that “certain of the noblest-minded Romans” had chosen to embark with him on “an enterprise / Of honorable-dangerous consequence.”

In the past week, we have completed Act II where troubled Brutus enviously looks at his sleeping servant Lucius and comments “enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber” and Caius Ligarius is willing to follow Brutus with a “heart new-fired.”

Apparently, not only did the Bard invent so much of our vocabulary, he also was the inventor of the compound-adjective!

Elyse Aronauer

Flushing, New York

Welcome Back, Rogue.
On June 19, 2000, a date that will live in euphemism, the diplomatic language was deliberately and suddenly attacked by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Speaking on public radio’s
Diane Rehm Show,
she abandoned the tried-and-true Kissingerism
rogue states,
preferring instead to refer to nations like Libya, Iraq and North Korea as
states of concern
.

Peppered with questions about this calculated change in nomenclature, a hard-pressed State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, replied, “We have different policies toward different places because the key issue here is not to categorize.” He was clearly uncomfortable with the linguistic shuffling.

Rogue
is a 16th-century English canting word, used by beggars and vagabonds, that is obscure in its origin, though it may be a variant of the name Roger (as in the limerick about the girl from Cape Cod that concludes, “’Twas Roger the Lodger, by God!”). As a noun,
rogue
is synonymous with, and carries the delicious old flavor of, “knave, scoundrel, villain.” As an adjective, it means “mean” or “uncontrollable.”

We have a rollback. In his budget address to a joint session of Congress, President George W. Bush denounced “
rogue
nations intent upon developing weapons of mass destruction.” Speaking at the dedication of the USS
Reagan
the following week, he made clear that the ringing locution or cliché is back in language’s good graces: “Our present dangers … come from
rogue
nations.”