The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Now history is over. However, over—as in “like, so over“—is a Valley Girl expression from the ’80s that has shown remarkable legs for what seemed to be a nonce term, outlasting both history and been there, done that. Toward the end of the second millennium, so 1999 had a brief run, and so second millennium surfaced briefly, but both were too tightly tied to a specific date to have staying power.

  The Yogi lesson drawn by dialectologists on both sides of the pond: over ain’t over till it’s over.

  In the, uh, rarified vernacular of the world of professional wrestling, “over” means “popular,” as in “The Rock is still amazingly over, while daring aerialist Essa Rios could pop the crowd in his hometown.”

  Rhonda Reddy

  Santa Monica, California

  Anticounter. Are we engaged in antiterrorism or counterterrorism?

  Antiterrorism, according to the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, is “defensive measures used to reduce the vulnerability of individuals and property to terrorist acts, to include limited response and containment by local military forces.”

  Counterterrorism is “offensive measures taken to prevent, deter and respond to terrorism.”

  How to respond to September 11? Doves prefer antiterrorism; hawks plump for counterterrorism.

  Arab street. Peppered by questions from senators about why the Bush administration supported a Saudi monarchy that oppressed political or religious dissenters, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a reply that struck many as puzzling: “Unto dust thou shalt return the day you stop representing the street.” He explained, “When you don’t have a free, democratic system, where the street is represented in the halls of the legislature and in the executive branches of those governments, then they”—the Saudi rulers—“have to be more concerned by the passions of the street.”

  Members of PAW—the Poetic Allusion Watch—instantly caught the secretary’s “unto dust” drift. The allusion was to Henry Wadsworth Long-fellow’s “Dust thou art to dust returnest, / Was not spoken of the soul.” The poet, in turn, was referring to the passage in Genesis 3:19, “Dust thou art, and into dust shalt thou return,” often cited on Ash Wednesday and at funerals.

  Powell’s message limited itself to the prayer’s “dust to dust” portion. His import was that if a Saudi monarch were to go against the Arab street, he would soon find himself dead.

  “Does this Arab street phrase refer to the person (or suicide bomber) in the street,” asks Bianca Carter of Slingerlands, New York, “or is there a broader meaning?”

  The street, from the Latin for “paved path,” has many metaphoric senses. Financiers use it to mean Wall Street, the home of the New York Stock Exchange; those thrown out of work use on the street to mean “unemployed” (and in a recession, many in the financial Street are on the street). To those in prison, the street means “outside,” the place to live in freedom. To those hunting for bargains, street becomes an attributive noun modifying price, meaning “what it actually is selling for, no matter what the price tag says.”

  In political usage, to get to the point, the street began in 1831 as “the man in the street,” or average person. In the 20th century, that meaning changed to “those demonstrating in the street.” That sense spread to a more general “popular opinion” but often still carries a connotation of “the incendiary emotions of the mob.”

  The first use of the Arab street I can find is in a December 1977 issue of American Political Science Review. “The existence of nuclear weapons in the region,” wrote Steven J. Rosen, “will induce moderation and a revolution of declining expectations in the Arab ‘street.’” Though it does not seem to be working out as Rosen hoped, the phrase he spotted caught on. A decade later, G. H. Jansen in the Los Angeles Times recalled that during the Suez crisis of 1956, “‘the Arab street’ in every Arab capital pulsated with popular demonstrations.” The quotation marks then disappeared as the phrase took hold in the language and gained complexity:

  “There was not one but many different Arab streets,“ wrote David Pollock in 1992. Professor Samer Shehata of Georgetown agrees: “The term Arab street, which is not used in the Arab world, divides countries into just two factions, but it’s much more complicated than the Arab street versus the authoritarian regime.”

  “The phrase used to be ‘the Arab masses,’” recalls a Middle East expert who prefers to remain anonymous because he is passing along only an impression. “With the eclipse of the Soviet Union, that phrase disappeared because Arab masses has too much of a Marxist-Soviet-Communist tilt to it, and it was replaced by the Arab street.”

  Does the Arab street reflect popular opinion in the Arab world or just the opinion of extremists carrying banners and burning flags? Is there a silent majority that is not in agreement with demonstrators, as there often is in the West? Nobody can say for sure, but the phrase, as used by Secretary Powell, means “the opinions of people governed by an autocratic regime and unable to express their views through elected representatives.”

  It should not be confused with street Arab, a derogatory term for “urban vagabond, homeless urchin,” as used in 1887 in Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes tale: “I therefore organized my street Arab detective corps,” which later evolved into fans styling themselves “the Baker Street Irregulars.”

  Asymmetry. “Asymmetric warfare,“ said Maj. Gen. Perry Smith, retired, “is the term of the day.” President Bush evidently agrees: “We need to rethink how we configure our military,” he told his first primetime news conference, “… so that we more effectively respond to asymmetrical responses from terrorist organizations.”

  The prime user is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. After noting recently, “We really are going to have to fashion a new vocabulary” to describe the new kind of warfare, he told reporters that he had long been talking of “asymmetrical threats” like “terrorism and ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, cyberattacks.” When Tim Russert of Meet the Press tried to pin him down further with “What are asymmetrical methods?” Rumsfeld came up with the same examples but not a definition.

  Let’s begin with symmetry, meaning “in balance; in proportionate arrangement,” often implying a beauty that flows from such regularity. The middle syllable is met, its root in the Greek metron, “measure,” which acts as a fulcrum in a nicely balanced word. William Blake used it most memorably in his 1794 poem “The Tyger,” concluding, “What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (Making the last syllable, which sounds like ee, rhyme with eye was poetic license.)

  Asymmetric (or asymmetrical, equally correct, so I use the shorter one) has the obvious dictionary definition of “not symmetric” and the slang meaning of “out of whack,” but a less pejorative sense is developing: “off-beat, intriguingly unbalanced.”

  Asymmetrical warfare is defined by the Defense Department as “countering an adversary’s strengths by focusing on its weaknesses.” Michael Krepon wrote in the May-June 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs that “asymmetrical warfare allows a weaker opponent to level the playing field by unorthodox means.”

  The earliest citation of the phrase I can find, and one that suggests earlier military use, is by Robert Fox, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, in 1991. He quoted a British commander, Lt. Col. Mike Vickery, who compared the coming allied attack on Iraq to an unconventional maneuver by the 14th Hussars in the Peninsular War, as the English under the future duke of Wellington drove the French out of Spain: “The regiment was detailed to move round the flanks, sneak round the back, you might say, to harry the rear and baggage train. It was what today we call asymmetric warfare.” (A trophy of that unconventional engagement in 1813 was a solid silver chamber pot given by Napoleon Bonaparte to his brother Joseph.)

  In the past decade, the phrase was applied to war that might be waged against a superpower. Clinton’s defense secretary William S. Cohen, in a farewell speech in January, defined it as “indirect, but highly lethal, attacks on
our forces and our citizens, not always from nations but from individuals and even independent groups.”

  Until recently, the meaning was limited to the application of surprise force by a terrorist against a stronger force’s vulnerability, but ever since the Sept. 11 attack, Pentagonians have been applying asymmetric warfare to the kind of commando and anti-guerrilla techniques, drawing heavily on intelligence data, to be used against Taliban forces in Afghanistan—using non-superpower strength to go after a weaker foe’s vulnerabilities. The idea is to fight asymmetry with asymmetry.

  Lopsidedness (from lop, “to sever”) is in fashion, too: “Only squares will be wearing straight hems next spring,” writes Holly Finn in the Financial Times, “but fear not. Done well, an asymmetrical hem looks sexier.”

  Attention All Alliterators. “Apt alliteration’s artful aid”—Charles Churchill’s famous foray was not wholly alliterative, since not all the first letters are pronounced the same way—is alive and well on the political scene.

  You need at least a triple to qualify as an apt alliterator. At a conference of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described his centrist alliance with a fellow centrist Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman, as “the Kosher-Cajun Caucus.”

  According to the man who taught me English in sophomore year at prep school, the Charles Churchill phrase you quote, with or without its flaws, would not represent alliteration. For alliteration, the initial letters have to be consonants. When the initial letters are vowels, the gimmick is called assonance.*

  John Strother

  Princeton, New Jersey

  B

  Baldfaced. As the 2000 campaigners practice their endgamesmanship, each side accuses the other of baldfaced lies. In some instances, the accusers prefer barefaced lies, and in a Virginia race, the mouth-filling modifier has come out sounding like boldfaced lies.

  Where does the truth lie? (Yes, in this instance, the truth does lie; unless your subject is a hen, lay must have an object.)

  It seems that the unadorned lie no longer has its old puissance. Time was, that word was so inflammatory as to need a euphemism: fib was the slang gentler, prevarication the bookish term. But to score as an emphatic charge, it now needs an adjective. “That’s a dirty lie” used to have a ring to it, but that adjective is now almost exclusively applied to jokes and lyrics. “Damned lie,” once popular, is too closely associated with statistics.

  The denunciator has a menu from which to choose: outright is forthright, blatant has a ring to it, flat is sharp (though it is often mistakenly replaced by flat-out, which lacks the disapproving connotation) and flagrant lends itself to mispronunciation by stumbling speakers as fragrant.

  What is a designated finger-pointer to do when this anti-dissembly line turns out no insightful inciting to outrage? Into vituperation’s void steps baldfaced, giving the lie to the new listlessness of the overused lie. At the request of Robert and Claudia Wasserman of Remsenburg, New York, let us deconstruct the campaigners’ favorite counterpunch intensifier.

  Shakespeare coined first barefaced and then boldfaced. The first referred to beardless youth: “Some of your French Crownes have no hair at all,” Quince tells Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as he casts a play, “and then you will play bare-faced.” The meaning of barefaced was clearly “without whiskers,” which led to senses of “unconcealed, open.” In time, this innocent lack of disguise took on the color of shamelessness. In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), we have, “See the barefaced villain, how he cheats, lies, perjures, robs, murders!” (This is the sense today’s political campaigners have in mind.)

  A year after his 1590 coinage of barefaced, Shakespeare, in Henry VI, Part 1, had Lord Talbot speak of “proud desire of bold-faced Victory” after he rescues his son, John, on the French battlefield; that meant “confident,” a sense that soon turned into “impudent,” as confidence so often does. Not until 1884 did the Italian printer Giambattista Bodoni use boldface to describe a darkly thick, or bold, typeface, which looks like this and is easily distinguished from lightface type.

  From bare and bold to bald: the etymology of baldfaced should interest angry animal rights advocates. All the early uses referred to animals: in 1648, “a bawld-facd heighfer”; in 1677, “a sorrel Mare … bald-faced”; and in 1861, “our bald-faced hornet.” And of course, the symbol of America was “the bald eagle.” In its original sense, bald did not mean “hairless, shiny-pated, cueball-like, suedeheaded.” It meant “white.” The top of our symbolic eagle’s head is not featherless; the last time I patted one, its head and neck were covered with smooth white feathers. In the 13th century, the balled coot was a water bird with a white mark on its forehead, lingering in the lingo today in the simile bald as a coot. Baldfaced whiskey was a 19th-century Americanism for pale, raw liquor, and a boiled, biled or bald-faced shirt was a cowboy’s go-to-meetin’ white shirt. The Celtic bal meant “a white mark,” and the Sanskrit bhala, “forehead,” from the Indo-European bhel, “white, shining.” Had enough? At bottom, it’s white. That’s why horses with white markings on their noses are often called Old Baldy, same as the snow-covered mountain.

  In current use, then, baldfaced lie is the most popular because it sounds most resounding; barefaced lie continues to run strong with no connotation of any pursuit of the hirsute; and boldfaced lie sounds like a printer’s error. In every case, kill the hyphen.

  Barnburner. “I know where the rats in the barn are,” shouted Al Gore on the stump in Muskegon, Michigan. “And you know what? The rats in the barn know that I know, and that’s why they’re coming out trying to stop us.”

  He repeated this lively rural phrase in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and it was broadcast far and wide in coverage of the Democratic campaign. (Perhaps it subliminally evoked the split-second use of the word rats in a GOP television spot.) It has the sound of an old Americanism, but is nowhere to be found in the dialect dictionaries.

  “Don’t ask Congress to rid your barn of rats,“ wrote William Raspberry in the Washington Post in 1993. This was the sinister meaning that Gore evoked, but when coupled with old, the phrase has another, almost affectionate, sense. “Once you … get to be an old rat in a barn,“ Representative Willis Brown of North Carolina told an Associated Press reporter asking about term limits, “you do not want to be dislodged.”

  The figure of speech was cornered again when Zell Miller of Georgia—this month elected a U.S. senator but in 1998 departing the Statehouse—said in an aw-shucks way that he and those governors who accompanied him into retirement were nothing but “old rats in a barn.”

  The invasive rodent has still another sense in its tail: to have a rat in the garret, according to the Century Dictionary, is “to be slightly crack-brained: same as ‘to have a bee in one’s bonnet.’ “

  How do you rid your barn of rats? One drastic approach is to burn the barn down. In a sermon in 1629, Thomas Adams said, “The empiric to cure the fever, destroys the patient; so the wise man, to burn the mice, sets fire to his barn.” This related metaphor was heard on MSNBC just before the election, as the anchor Brian Williams said: “By all accounts, we have a barnburner of a presidential election on our hands. That would make this barnburner eve.” That was a use of barnburner in one current sense: ripping along as excitingly as “a house afire” or some such spectacular event.

  A more traditional sense is “one who is uncompromising, rigidly principled”—who sees politics as the art of the impossible.

  The Barnburners in the early 1840s were the reformist, radical faction of New York State Democrats led by former President Martin Van Buren, who adamantly opposed slavery. They were given that derisive nickname by the Hunkers (so called because they “hunkered” or “hankered” after national office), who favored the annexation of Texas, which extended slavery westward.

  The Hunkers ridiculed Van Buren’s antislavery stand “in the manner of the Dutch farmer who burned his barn to destroy the rats.” In 1848, V
an Buren’s Barnburners bolted the Democratic Party to join the Free-Soilers, and Van Buren’s candidacy delivered election victory to the Whig Zachary Taylor. That uncompromising, abolitionist coalition later named itself Republican.

  In the recent contest, Ralph Nader, in rejecting Democratic compromises on issues central to many liberals, could be said to have been the barnburner. Some Democrats recalled Adlai Stevenson’s admonition in 1952 in a different context, warning of excess in combating subversion: “We must take care not to burn down the barn to kill the rats.”

  In 2000, Al Gore did not propose to burn down the barn, nor did he say precisely who the unwanted inhabitants were, but he did make it clear he knew where the metaphoric rats could be found.

  Bated Breath. “The people of Congo,” said Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, last month in his capital of Lusaka, “are waiting with baited breath for a positive outcome of the Sun City talks.” That’s how Agence France-Presse spelled the adjective modifying the noun breath.

  The same week, the Independent newspaper of London, recapping memorable quotations of Margaret Thatcher in a review of her new memoir, Statecraft, chose this famous 1980 example: “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catch phrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say:You turn if you want to—the lady’s not for turning.” (That was a rhyming reference to the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 play about a woman’s resistance to a witchcraft trial, The Lady’s Not for Burning.)

  Meanwhile, Reuters reported from Tokyo that “shares edged up by midday as investors waited with baited breath for a government package.”

  Which is correct in modifying breath-bated or baited? A search of the Dow Jones database covering the past twenty-five years shows 5,520 uses of bated and 1,289 uses of baited. In a world of toleration and permissiveness, both are thus correct, right? Wrong. A mistake is a mistake, and there is no i in bated. (Contrariwise, you cannot leave out the i in “baiting a hook,” from the Old Norse beita, “to cause to bite,” which will work on fish if you bait the hook properly.)