The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (6 page)

But now let’s see where the sense of “small bit of paper” comes from. Merriam-Webster took a shot at it in the
Third Unabridged
as derived from the Scottish for “gravel,” but its current etymologists think that may have been guesswork. The
Century Dictionary,
published in 1889, reported this meaning: “A dry twig, same as
chat,
“ a variant of
chit,
which is both a seed and a bit of writing, and noted that
chat
potatoes were “small potatoes.” A related sense found in provincial English dialect was “dry, bushy fragments found among food,” construed as plural.

Thus we see how
chad, chit
and
chaff
are related in the sense of “small residue.” The frequency of usage of
chad
will plummet, but the word will be forever associated with the thirst for votes in the campaign of 2000.

Back in the days when teletype machines used yellow punched paper tape (I’m not sure what time period; ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, probably; any Western Electric survivor in Skokie, Illinois, could tell you), the little round circles of paper that were punched out and discarded were called “chat,” and the metal part that collected the chat and dropped it into a collection box was called a “chat chute.”

Jack E. Garrett

Jamesburg, New Jersey

Class Warfare.
After the Democratic presidential nominee posed the choice in the election as being between “the people” and “ the powerful,” he was chastised by GOP leaders as advocating
class warfare
.

“Al Gore launched out talking about populism,” charged Karl Rove, Governor Bush’s chief campaign strategist, “about
class warfare
.” The next day, on the stump, the GOP standard-bearer himself denounced his opponent as “a candidate who wants to wage
class warfare
to get ahead.” Unfortunately, much of the sting in the charge was lost because Bush was seen and heard on television pronouncing the phrase as “class war fore,” inviting derision.

Who coined the phrase? The
Oxford English Dictionary
spotted a heading of
class warfare
in George Bernard Shaw’s
Fabian Tract 41,
written in 1892; it was not picked up until 1927, when Aldous Huxley, in an essay in
Proper Studies,
wrote about “those who would interpret all social phenomena in terms of
class warfare
.”

However, a useful new database—the Making of America, a joint project of Cornell and the University of Michigan—permits detailed examination of 19th-century American texts. Assiduous research by Kathleen Miller, my research assistant, reveals a use of the phrase in London’s Aug. 17, 1867,
Spectator
. The editorialist urged “some grand effort to settle the Irish question” and put forward a conservative idea about land reform, noting that there was “no confiscation in this plan, no plea for raising that cry, no summons to
class warfare
.”

From that day to this, the charge of instigating
class warfare
has been used as an antidote to populist ideas.

Clean Your Clock.
At Super Bowl XXXVI, if history is a guide, one team will decisively defeat the other.

Fans (and advertisers) can hope for a
nail-biter,
defined as “a close contest that causes rooter tension,” as used in January 2002 by Elvis Grbac, the Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback: “Our games are just
nail-biters,
and they come down to whoever has the ball at the last second to win it.” This hyphenated word appears to have produced both
nail-nibbling,
“the action of nervously chewing on one’s fingernails,” and
ankle-biter,
“an annoying critic.”

Synonymous with
nail-biter
is the older
cliffhanger,
a 1937 coinage about unresolved plots. This was rooted in films presented in a series of episodes that always left the hero in a precarious situation, like hanging from the edge of a cliff with the villain stomping on his fingertips, thereby forcing moviegoers to return for the next installment.

A close game with high scores is also called a
barnburner,
a 1960s sports usage based on an old political epithet. In 1840, the radical antislavery wing of New York State’s Democratic Party, led by Martin Van Buren, was dubbed the
barnburners
by conservatives after “the Dutch farmer who burned down his barn to destroy the rats.”

The above-mentioned quarterback Grbac (a Croatian name pronounced “GER-bots,” which he pronounces “GER-back”) and his team lost in the playoffs to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 27-10. That loss was described by the
Washington Times
somewhat unkindly as a
rout,
a noun better applied that week to the 45-17 loss by the Green Bay Packers to the St. Louis Rams. Worse, the Ravens, last year’s Super Bowl champions, were derided by the headline writer as having been
defeathered,
a metaphoric fate to which Ravens fans would mutter “nevermore.”

However, if one team dominates (having come to play, in announcers’ jargon, against a team that is
flat,
a reference to carbonated water with the fizz gone), it will be said to have
romped,
an intransitive verb that has for three centuries meant “won easily.”

Gone are the mid-century days when the ring announcer in heavy-weight fights would offer a dignified version of “may the better man win.” Harry Balogh, after introducing the champion Joe Louis and the opponent often called “the bum of the month,” would say, “And may the superior pugilist emerge victorious.” No such ironic niceties anymore: today, the victor on the field of play will have
creamed, buried, mopped the floor with, shellacked, annihilated, humbled
or otherwise
embarrassed
the losing side.

The verb
to cream
in this destructive sense was first cited in a 1929
Princeton Alumni Weekly
—“Say, if he opens his mouth, I’ll
cream
him”—and then described as “an essential part of any toughie’s vocabulary.” Its metaphoric origin is either in “to pour cream over, thus humiliating” or in “to remove the cream from, thus leaving a thin milk” (today regarded as desirably low-fat, which is why the locution is on the decline).

The
New York Times
chose
whipped
over
creamed
in recounting the recent Green Bay defeat (
whip-cream
is not yet in use, but give it time), while other headline writers liked
drub,
probably from the Arabic
darb,
“to beat.”

But the most extreme—and to some, most mysterious—expression of such merry mayhem is
to clean their clocks
. “This phrase is being used by TV newscasters,” writes Stuart Zuckerman of New York, “to describe everything from a one-sided victory in sports to the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan. What’s the origin?”

Clock-cleaning
is indeed rampant. “If we try to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules,” said General Brent Scowcroft during the recent anti Taliban campaign, “we’re going to get our
clock cleaned
.” Mark Mednick, coach of California’s Irvine High girls’ volleyball team, told the
Orange
County Register
that in the battle with Torrance High, “in the third game, they
cleaned our clock,
but then Hillary Thomson had some clutch digs.”

Break the phrase apart for close study.
To clean
gained a sense of “to clean out” in 1812, applied to victims of thieves or gamblers. In a few years, a slang meaning of
clean
became “to drub, defeat, wipe out.”

Now take up
clock
in its verb form, as in “clock him one.” When I expressed puzzlement about this years ago, British readers pointed out that as a clock had a face, to
clock
someone was to hit him in the face or elsewhere on the head. That led to the slang term
fix one’s clock:
an O. Henry story in 1904 had the line “I reckon we’ll
fix your clock
for a while.”

In Latin,
clocca
means “bell.” (A
cloche
hat is bell-shaped.) The clock registered time by striking a bell, and that act of noisily striking or hitting was also expressed in the verb
to clock
. In baseball, “he really clocked it” refers to the hard-hit ball; in football, “he really clocked him” is said over the sprawled-out form of the well-tackled runner.

Thus was developed
to clean
(defeat, thrash, trounce)
one’s clock
(face, head, person). Earliest citation so far: In 1959, the novelist Sam Cochrell wrote this dialogue: “Don’t give me that guff. You’re not a corporal anymore.” “I don’t have to be a corporal to
clean your clock
.”

More specific usages abound, from the sexual (“to deliver complete satisfaction”) to the automotive (“to pass another vehicle at great speed”). In all, the essential meaning remains: “to whomp, clobber, slaughter, pulverize” and all the other evocations of thoroughness expressed in
clean your clock. “Ankle-biters” started out as an annoyed epithet for small neurotic dogs that attacked visitors and tradesmen and mailmen and paperboys by trying, literally, to get a bite or bites out of their ankles. If you had spent any time delivering papers (or mail, or magazines, or grocery store circulars), you would have met a number of ankle-biters during your career. There was also an occasional thigh-biter and crotch-biter and arm-biter among the larger dogs.

In cookery, isn’t there a role for “to cream,” meaning to puree until the product is as close as possible to the consistency of cream? Maybe a chef was the first one to threaten to “cream” an adversary, presumably, in such a hypothetical context, a cretin who had criticized his cooking or infringed on his domain.

John Strother

Princeton, New Jersey

I believe that in boxing circles—and other places too—the phrase is: “May the
best
man win.” You have grammarized it, for the sake of the children, I suppose.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

I was a tad surprised not to find “eat [someone’s] lunch” in your list. Oh
well, one cannot let the complete be the enemy of the excellent.

Saul Rosen

Rockville, Maryland

Clintonisms.
“Bill Clinton is a relic of another age,” the essayist Lance Morrow wrote in
Time
magazine, “like the 20s party boy F. Scott Fitzgerald stranded in the landscape of the Great Depression.”

I rise today to our immediate past president’s linguistic defense. Let me tell you about the very articulate. They are different from you and me. The Lexicographic Irregulars, asked in this space to choose the phrases that Bill Clinton would be remembered by, responded with words that evoke an era of intense controversy and vituperation. Respondents included his critics and his speechwriters, those nostalgic for the time of prosperity and peace as well as for the days of whine and nosiness.

The most memorable Clintonism or Clintonym (a coinage of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre) chosen by a plurality of entries was a sentence that thrilled every semanticist, grammarian and syntactician in the nation: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

The words that raised parsing to a fine art were spoken under oath to a grand jury. They were about a statement made by the president’s lawyer during a deposition about the relationship with a White House intern, in which the lawyer asserted, “There is absolutely no sex of any kind.” Clinton pointed out that because his attorney had been speaking only in the present tense, the statement was true: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he explained, adding, “Actually, in the present tense, that is a true statement.” That is indisputable: during the deposition, no sex of any kind was taking place between them.

What made the sentence so memorable? Part was the exquisite nature of the literal reading, taken by Clinton critics to be an infuriating example of legalistic slipperiness. Another part was the unique juxtaposition of the quoted
is
with the unquoted
is
. The sentence would not have had the same puissance—indeed, it might not be destined for the next edition of
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
—had it concluded with “the meaning of ‘is’ was.”

“I feel your pain,” an expression of compassion often associated with psychiatric jargon, was the runner-up in this sample (which has an accuracy estimated at plus or minus sixty points). The remark was ad-libbed at a March 26, 1992, campaign rally as part of a riposte to an AIDS activist who angrily accused the candidate of avoiding the issue. The candidate, who later became a champion of gay rights, came back with “I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally … go support somebody else for president.” He ameliorated that with “I know you’re hurting, but you won’t stop hurting by trying to hurt other people.”