The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (59 page)

Mary Ellen Countryman, the National Security Council spokeswoman with the most salutatory name in the new administration, told Al Kamen of the
Washington Post
that
rogue nation
was “a term that means something to people.”

Right. No longer will criminals fear being portrayed in a
states-of-concern’s gallery,
nor will vicious beasts driven out of the herd be called
states-of-concern elephants
. Nor, thanks to the Bush rollback, will tomorrow’s actors playing Hamlet begin a soliloquy, “O what a state of concern and peasant slave am I.”

Whatever It Takes.
I have long been of two minds about the word
ambivalent
. But the time has come to take an unequivocal stand on
ambiguity
.

As far back as 1982, an investment banker named Leo Dworsky wrote in the
Christian Science Monitor
that the Middle East could withstand “more downright
strategic ambiguity
.” In 1995, Joseph Nye, then a top Pentagon official, used the phrase in a speech to the Asia Society about the extent of America’s defense commitment to Taiwan. As long as Taiwan did not press for independence, any attack by China on the island would have “grave consequences”—which may or may not include use of United States forces. Two years later, James Baker, the former secretary of state, unambiguously defined the phrase at a Rice University conference as “We don’t tell anybody what we might do.”

House Republicans led by Representative Christopher Cox, however, said that
strategic ambiguity
“virtually invites conflict.” They recalled that when Dean Acheson left South Korea out of a list of countries the United States would defend, the Communists “miscalculated” and invaded. A Clinton assistant secretary of state, Winston Lord, was uncomfortable with the phrase, but said it was “like the Energizer Bunny—it keeps going and going.”

Then along came President Bush’s affirmative response to a question about defending Taiwan if attacked. “With the full force of American mili-tary?” Charles Gibson of ABC asked. Bush replied, “Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend itself.”

When a State Department spokesman said that this was no change in policy and Bush reiterated his expectation that Taiwan would not be provocative, the
New York Times
reported that this was “making it
ambiguous
whether the United States still holds to ‘
strategic ambiguity
.’” Hardliners countered that the best deterrent to war was clarity, not vagueness.

The Latin
ambigere
means “to be undecided”; synonyms of
ambiguity
include “uncertainty, doubtfulness, inexplicability.” The addition of
strategic
makes the uncertainty appear cunning, a deliberate policy of “keep ’em guessing.” But
strategic,
long a global intensifier in national security circles, lost puissance when “
strategic
partner,” as applied to China, fell into disfavor and was disavowed by Democrats.

Cool compromisers in Washington’s think tanks are suggesting on deep-six background that Bush geopolitical thinkers adopt a policy of “
tactical ambivalence
” in the framework of “
strategic
clarity.” Those adjectives and nouns can be switched around to fit changed circumstances caused by nuke-ular threats.

Willkie Lives.
After Al Gore denounced the
old guard
and other powerful interests, the relatively moderate Joe Lieberman was asked if the Democratic proposals would cause him to take a populist line. “Political rallies tend not to be places for extremely thoughtful argument,” he told the
Wall Street Journal
. Rather, he said that the Gore policy proposals were “quite moderate” and added, “You have some rhetorical flourishes.”

That reminded political-history buffs of Wendell Willkie, GOP nominee in 1940 against FDR, who warned in the campaign that “if the present administration is restored to power for a third term, our democratic system will not last another four years.” After his defeat, Willkie undertook a diplomatic mission for President Roosevelt and was asked how he could square his cooperation with his earlier charges. In testifying before Congress in a way that infuriated Republicans, Willkie grinned and let the cat out of the political bag: “It was just a bit of campaign oratory.”

Today, that’s called “rhetorical flourishes.”

Wired.
After Bill Clinton expressed contrition at a preconvention interview at a church gathering in Illinois, the Reverend Bill Hybels, one of his pastoral advisers, put his hand on the president’s shoulder and prayed with him, saying, “Thank you, God, that you
wired him up
the way you did.”

Wired
bids fair to be the most multisensed “hot” word on the American linguistic scene. No other old word has more new meanings. Up to 1980, according to a search engine that puff-puffs its way through all the libraries in the world, 61 books had
wired
in the title, but in the past twenty years, almost 400 more have been added. The noun began in the Latin
viere,
“to plait,” and the Greek
iris,
“rainbow.” The Old High German
wiara
meant “fine gold work.” As a verb, its early definitions—“fasten or strengthen with a metal tie” and “connect in an electrical circuit”—remain, but in our technological time the wound-together word has burst into a rainbow of senses.

Wired for sound,
applied in the ’50s to people wearing hearing aids, was the name of a 1986 song by Michael W. Smith and Wayne Kirkpatrick. This was in the Christian contemporary rock section of music stores, deploring the difficulty of studying the Word of God amid the cacophony of “a world that’s
wired for sound
.”

An entirely different meaning of
wired for sound
was emerging at the same time: “The joint is
wired
….” wrote J. D. MacDonald in a 1957 novel,
A Man of Affairs
. “The next step is cameras and infrared and tape recorders, I guess.” The single word
wire
stood for “electronic eavesdrop-ping.” A person fitted with a surreptitious recording device to help others spy on conversations is said to wear a
wire
. This was what Monica Lewin-sky refused to do for investigators for the independent counsel looking into her relationship with the president.

Meanwhile, beginning in 1969, another meaning was taking root: “high on amphetamine drugs; manic.” A mild precursor of this, reported by John Farmer in his 1890 slang dictionary, was “irritated; provoked.” The sense of its modern offshoot, not necessarily drug-related, ranges from “edgy, jumpy, uptight” to “pumped up, visibly nervous” to “feverishly excited.” It was the title of Bob Woodward’s 1984 book,
Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi
.

A sense also first cited in 1969 is from the computer world: “having circuits connected permanently and designed for an unchangeable function.”
Scientific American
noted in 1981 that “it is a rule of thumb in computer science that an operation can be executed fastest when it is
hard-wired
into the computer rather than specified as part of a program.” Why “hard”? Because that differentiates it strongly from the software, which is not part of the machine’s wiring.

This computer meaning was quickly transferred to neuroscience and applied to the workings of the brain. “These cells are
hard-wired
and ready for action,” wrote the
New Scientist
in 1971, “as soon as the kitten opens its eyes.” In a few years the professor of astronomy Carl Sagan was writing, “The brain is completely
hard-wired:
specific cognitive functions are localized in particular places in the brain,” an assertion since largely confirmed by imaging technology, though experience or accident can cause “rewiring” to take place. This year, the
New York Times
architectural critic Herbert Muschamp, writing about the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, noted that the Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman’s institute was “partly inspired by Dr. Edelman’s theory that the brain’s architecture is shaped by our experiences. Tell me what you like, and I will tell you how you’re
wired
.”

That sense was later applied to more general opinions or abilities. When Joseph Lieberman was chosen by Al Gore to be his running mate, Rabbi Avi Shafran told the
New York Times
that concern about Jewish visibility in politics was “sort of
hard-wired
into our system, for better or worse.” Similarly, a coach for the University of California Bears recently told the
San Francisco Chronicle
that he had high hopes for a young player because “he’s
wired
the right way for a quarterback”—that is, he had the stable temperament and quick reactions suited to that position.

As the Internet came into being, another new sense was applied: “adept at the use of the computer, tuned into the culture of the Internet.” In Paris, a group that had tried to launch a magazine called
Electric Word
was reaching for a new name for a magazine addressed to the cyberworld. Jane Met-calf said to John Rosetto, John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, “
Wired
.” George Shirk, editor of that successful publication’s independent offshoot,
Wired News,
sees their role as heralds of “the Virtual Class, people in technology, finance, marketing, media, law, politics and education who are driving the Digital Revolution.”

A related sense, beyond the specific Internet culture, is “part of a network of people with related interests; integrated into a social set or part of an informatrix.” A more pejorative side to this is “set up to take advantage of high-level contacts”: a deal that is rigged, its outcome arranged beforehand not on the basis of merit or fair competition, is subject to the charge of being
wired
.

Thus, the question “Is he
wired
?” can mean “Is he sure to get the job?” Or “Is he tense, excited, on ‘speed’?” Or “Is he au courant, with-it, where it’s at?” Or “Is his brain’s activity predetermined?” Or “Is he fitted with a secret microphone?” Or “Is he temperamentally disposed for this?” Or “Is he on the Net?”

How will this past participle of a short verb, in future permutations, further transform its meaning and vivify our tongue? Nobody, no matter how well connected, can tell which senses will prevail and which will pass into archaisms. Stay
wired
.

Wordplayers.
What do you call somebody who continually applies his nose to the grindstone, eschews the distractions of fun and games and otherwise occupies himself with those moneymaking endeavors that make Jack a dull boy?

A
workaholic,
of course. But what did we call that addiction to work—that obsessive attachment to long hours and briefcases voluntarily stuffed with homework—before Wayne E. Oates, in a burst of linguistic innovation in 1968, titled an article in a pastoral magazine, “On Being a ‘Workaholic’?”

We had no word for it. The language suffered from a gaping hole. Not until this Southern Baptist pastor from Louisville, Kentucky, came up with his coinage could English speakers succinctly express themselves. “I have dubbed this addiction of myself and my fellow ministers as
workaholism,
” Oates wrote, and later defined his term as “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly.”

He based it, obviously, on
alcoholic
. In so doing, the coiner made a new suffix out of
-oholic
. But the question of spelling arises: if the suffix is adopted from
alcoholic,
why did Oates not spell his word
workoholic
? That was the spelling of a parallel formulation adopted the same year to describe those bittersweet-toothed souls who cannot do without a chocolate fix:
chocoholic
. But
choco
lent itself to the
-oholic;
why did Oates prefer the
a
?

I cannot ask him because Wayne Oates was one of those who died in the past year, remembered in history not so much for his fifty-seven books and hundreds of published articles, but for his undisputed coinage of a necessary word. That’s the way it goes in the word dodge; if you coin a good one, it becomes the lead of your obituary no matter what else you did.

Same for Herbert Freudenberger, the eminent psychologist who died last month in New York. Was he noted for his work with people who lost self-esteem, became bored, discouraged and sloppy? Or for his free clinics for drug addicts, or for his court-ordered analysis of the murderous Charles Manson? No. The headline in the
New York Times
read “Herbert Freudenberger, 73, Coiner of ‘Burnout,’ Is Dead.”