The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (63 page)

George Gerson

Westfield, New Jersey

1/13/2002

“Uofallpeople” is the name of the file I must grimly address today. It contains the pointing of fingers by the Gotcha! Gang at the language maven for errors in my columns last year.

On biblical quotation:
Let me first get right with the Good Book. In a diatribe attacking senators who were giving John Ashcroft a hard time at his confirmation hearings (who knew?), I directed readers to Proverbs 1:15. My intention was to make the point that “a soft answer turneth away wrath.” Unfortunately, as several pious readers noted, my numbers were switched around and that observation is in 15:1. (However, 1:15 advises us not to associate with thieves: “do not set foot on their paths.” My quoted guidance, while not germane, wouldn’t land you in jail.)

On death and taxes:
In examining dysphemisms, I wrote: “When did the
inheritance tax
(a pro-taxing term) become the
estate tax
(a neutral term)? And who changed it to the
death tax,
which has a built-in antitax message?”

The Gotcha! Gangsters Robert Johnson and Harry Allan set me straight: an
estate tax
(federal or state) is imposed on the net value of the deceased person’s property; an
inheritance tax
(nonfederal, some states) is levied on the heir who receives that property. Both are
death taxes
.

On Stalin’s friend:
In warning President Bush about trusting Vladimir Putin, I recalled a previous president’s misplaced trust and quoted FDR as saying about Joseph Stalin, “I like old Joe.” Wrong president. It was Harry Truman, recalling the Potsdam Conference, who said on June 11, 1948: “I got very well acquainted with Joe Stalin, and I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow. But Joe is a prisoner of the Politburo.”

On comprise/compose/constitute:
I wrote of Yasir Arafat’s Force 17, his personal Tanzim militia, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad: “They
comprise
a terror coalition, supplying one another with arms, money and suicidal killers.”

Greg Walker of the International Association of Chiefs of Police blew the whistle on this one, suggesting that I should have written
constitute,
meaning “make up.” He’s right.

The rule is that the parts
compose
the whole, and the whole
comprises
the parts. That’s because
comprise
—from the Latin
comprehendere,
“to grasp all, to take in mentally”—means “include, contain, embrace” (as if from the outside in). Contrariwise,
compose
and
constitute
mean “to make up” (as if from the inside out).

Therefore, I should have written, “They
compose
(‘form, produce’) a terror coalition” or—equally correctly—“The terrorist coalition
comprises
(‘includes, contains, embraces, brings together’) not only Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah but also Arafat’s Force 17 and his personal Tanzim militia.”

Loosey-goosey usagists say that the distinction is all but erased, and some great writers have even used the misleading construction
is comprised of,
but I belong on the ramparts on this one.

On the stickiness of wickets:
I wrote about Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, “maneuvering his way through the
sticky wicket
of the Middle East.”

One neither navigates nor maneuvers
through
such a soggy metaphor. The wicket, as I am informed gleefully by Lee Child, Jack Kenny and Ben Werschkul, is the ground on which the baseball-like game of cricket is played. When it is sticky, not in the sense of “tacky” but in the sense of “wet, slippery,” the ball bounces on the ground in front of the batsman in unpredictable ways. This metaphor has been extended to a general meaning of “awkward, embarrassing, difficult,” but as Mr. Child notes, “the key point is that the batsman is on a sticky wicket; he is perforce immobile in front of it; the bowler, himself knowing that the wicket is sticky, will be bearing down on the batsman with a wolfish grin.” Therefore, it’s
on,
not
through,
the sticky wicket.

Those of us in language’s artful dodge who make a living correcting others must learn to strike a noble pose and take the gaff when we goof. Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected. As FDR said, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Wait—no. That was Harry Truman.

6/09/2002

I have been semantically
unchaste
. In describing the difference between
celibate
(“single, unmarried”) and
chaste,
I held that the latter meant “to deny all sexual intercourse.”

Not so. As a horde of irate and probably married readers thundered, a person who engages in sex within marriage is
chaste
. Only when the intercourse is premarital, extramarital or postmarital can one be charged with being
unchaste
.

This
chastening
(“purifying”) experience of being
chastised
(“punished”)—all rooted in the Latin
castus,
“pure, cut off from”—drags me into my annual exercise in self-flagellation. It provides a glorious if somewhat sadistic moment for the Gotcha! Gang.

In an article about intervention in the Middle East, I wrote, “That is why a
dovecote flutters
.” John Scanlon e-mails, “I can understand a dove fluttering, but wouldn’t a
dovecote
sway?” True; a
cote
is akin to a cottage, a place of abode; birds flutter, but their cages and nests do not.

And while dealing with the Middle East, I misidentified Aipac as “the American Israeli Political Action Committee.” Though this mistake can be found almost five hundred times on the Web, including on a United States Navy site, common misusage does not make it so. The name of the pro Israel group is “American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.” (Because political action committees are so often denounced, and so many people make this mistake, maybe Aipac should change its name; send your e-mail to [email protected], not to me.)

In my op-ed incarnation, I’ve been in a running battle with our intelligence agencies about their all-out campaign to discredit evidence of a visit to Saddam Hussein’s spymaster in Prague by the suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta. I called the torrent of self-protective leaks by CIA and FBI sotto voce spokesmen “a misdirection play,” and defined this as a move by an adept offensive lineman: “He blocks his man toward the center; as the defender pushes back hard, the misdirecting lineman gives way, seemingly overcome by the countercharge—as his running back scoots through the hole near the center left by the defender.”

Watch out for those sports metaphors. “What you described as a
misdirection play,
” e-mails an anonymous Sunday couch potato, “is really an
influence block
. A
misdirection play
is when running backs and sometimes linemen flow in one direction and the ball carrier, usually after a delay, runs in the opposite direction.”

I checked back with John Beake, VP of football operations at the NFL, who said, “It’s not exactly a
misdirection play;
it’s an
influence draw
.” A call to Bill Brink at the
Times
sports desk suggested that that could be an
influence block
or
draw
taking place within a
misdirection play,
and my usage required no correction.

When a spook friend then called to say my column was “about a boo-boo,” I said yeah, I know, some say it was an “influence block,” but that’s in dispute. No, my source said, the reason for all the CIA leaks to discredit the Atta-in-Prague story was “that the Company made a
boo-boo
in not passing on data about Atta to the FBI from Czech intelligence.”

I immediately wondered:What is the origin of
boo-boo,
“blunder, egregious error”? Why are our spies and counterspies, engaged in the most serious business, using a reduplication that sounds like baby talk?

The etymology of
boo-boo
is a subject of fierce debate among leading lexicographers. The
Oxford English Dictionary,
its earliest citation from a 1954 article by Bill Henry, who wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
that Defense Secretary “Engine Charley” Wilson’s “recent
boo-boo
… threatens to become historic,” speculates that it’s a reduplication of
boob,
meaning “fool” (and not in its sense of “breast,” a vulgarism to be hooted at). The
OED
holds that
boob
is a shortening of
booby,
“a lubber, a nincompoop,” from the Spanish
bobo,
“fool,” in turn from the Latin
balbus,
“stammering.” (I suppose that is the basis of
booby prize,
won for being especially stupid. It is a short linguistic leap from the ignorant
booby
to the erroneous
boo-boo
.)

Both
Merriam-Webster
and
American Heritage
take a different tack. They argue that
boo-boo
is an alteration of
boo-hoo,
“imitative of the sound of weeping.”
Webster’s New World
ducks any etymology and dismisses the second-order reduplication (changing the second letter to produce a rhyme) as an echoic colloquialism based in “baby talk.”

To an undisputed error: In a recent dissection of compound adjectives, I wrote that “the hyphenation of modifiers rules the linguistic roost. This
rule-roosting
device….” Neil Greenspan, a professor of pathology, e-mails, “You seem to have your new hyphenated entity backwards.” Betsey Walters of Lakeville, Massachusetts, in-chimes: “A
rule-rooster
would be a chicken balanced on a yardstick. A
roost-ruler
is a chicken in charge.”

Just as bad, I defined
24/7/365
hosting as “a host is on duty at our Web site continuously.” Gerald Dorman of Lindenhurst, New York, notes that “the Web server, or host, is not a person; it is a computer, serving out bits and bytes of data, not paté. What
24/7/365
means is that the server is up and running continuously.” Other members of the Gotcha! Gang argued that logic directs the new continuum to be fashioned
24/7/52,
meaning “24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year,” but in language, logic is not roost-ruling (got it).

Many members of the Nitpickers’ League who set me straight by writing to [email protected] (the server is on duty
24/7/nowandthen
) precede their corrections with a kindly “Homer nodded.” This is a loose translation of
dormitat Homerus,
“Homer nods,” a phrase by the Latin poet Horace, suggesting that even great poets have senior moments. (The phrase was popularized by the English poet Alexander Pope in 1709 as “Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, / Nor is it Homer nods, but that we dream.” I sometimes make a mistake on purpose, too, to demonstrate the power of my mail pull.)

As language changed,
Homer nods
became a mistake. Yesterday, to
nod
meant “to fall asleep momentarily, as the head falls forward,” based on “to move the head up and down as a signal of affirmation.” Today, to
nod
means only “yeah, OK, uh-huh.” The original meaning of “to drift into dreamland” requires an additional word: to
nod off
. And so to bed.

I had always thought that the word
boo-boo
originated as “bubo”—the infected, swollen lymph nodes that characterized bubonic plague. Childhood hurts and injuries are often referred to as boo-boos by parents who kiss and make them better. It is an easy jump from having a boo-boo to making a boo-boo—an error or mistake in judgment
.

Arlene Marin

Orangeburg, New York

You were indeed mistaken about
chaste,
but you were quite right about the fluttering
dovecote.
Like “the house was in an uproar,” it is a simple synecdoche, the container for the thing contained. No problem
.

Stephen Orgel

Department of English

Stanford University

Stanford, California

“Anybody can make a mistake.” This plain English observation lacks the classical elegance of “Homer nods.” It’s also less colorful than the Japanese equivalent,
Saru mo ki kara ochiru,
literally, “Even monkeys fall from trees [sometimes].”