The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  What’s the basis of bated, which we never hear in the present tense? It is a clip of abate, from the Old French abattre, “to beat down,” and now it means “to moderate, subside, reduce, ebb.” In connection with breathing, it means “shorten” or “hold.” When you abate your breath, you hold it in anticipation of some breathtaking event.

  The coiner was Shakespeare in his 1596 Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock says to Antonio, “Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, / With bated breath and whispering humbleness, / Say this: / ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last?’ ”

  Synonyms—more precisely, similar metaphors—for bated breath include butterflies in the stomach; the British get the wind up; the 17th-century on tenterhooks (the frame on which a tent’s cloth is stretched); have one’s heart in one’s mouth, from Homer’s Iliad; and on pins and needles, an 1810 coinage about the tingling sensation from sitting on them. In Yiddish, this feeling is expressed as shpilkes. The extreme is screaming meemies, which Picturesque Expressions by Laurence Urdang notes originated as a World War II nickname for German rocket shells and is now often confused with the phrase streaming media.

  In bated breath, we have a clear-cut case of widespread misspelling. It’s no controversy; forget baiting unless you’re fishing or taunting. And yet I anticipate mail on this item. A dozen or so readers, afflicted with raging e-mailitis, will ask: “How come President Mwanawasa’s first name is Levy? That doesn’t sound Zambian.” To get ahead of the querying curve, I called the Zambian Embassy. They haven’t called back. You can imagine in what state I’m waiting.

  Bravo for saying about bait/bate that the frequent, ignorant confusion is a mistake and not to be condoned.

  But I think that your list of equivalents to “bated breath” is too inclusive. It takes no account of motive. “Bated breath” results from deliberate purpose—wanting to remain hidden, hoping for a much-desired answer. Something makes us hold our breath; whereas “butterflies in the stomach” or “heart in one’s mouth” comes unbidden, and so does “getting the wind up” (as the passive sense of getting implies). As for “tenterhooks” and “pins and needles” they also are consequences of external events or others’ actions. Finally, “screaming meemies” require a great deal of breath and are the contrary of the bated supply.

  Jacques Barzun

  San Antonio, Texas

  Between Prexies. Here’s a word that pops up every four or eight years: interregnum. The Latin means “between reigns.” The interregnum, or interregencie, originally meant the interval when a throne or position of leadership was vacant, as between the death or removal of one sovereign and the accession of the next. This invited trouble, as in the Cromwell era. William Blackstone, in his 1765 Commentaries, held that in England “the king is made a corporation to prevent in general the possibility of an interregnum or vacancy of the throne.”

  The word now means “an intermission in the order of succession” and, more generally, “a breach of continuity.” Specifically, in the United States, it means “the period between the election of a new president and his inauguration.” But it is not limited to political power: the breakfast-table autocrat Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Between the last dandelion and violet … and the first spring blossom … there is a frozen interregnum in the vegetable world.”

  The word, lest we forget, is spelled with two r’s. It produced a spin-off during the transition from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, which wags called the interreaganum.

  Bialy. Thanks to Mel Brooks, creator of The Producers—one of the few smash-hit musicals without one popular song—the word bialy is rising on America’s horizon.

  His central character is Max Bialystock. That name gives a vaguely Eastern European flavor to the role of the unscrupulous impresario out to bilk investors by producing a surefire flop.

  That’s because there is a place named Bialystock. It is a city of about a quarter million residents located in northeast Poland; its most famous sons were the Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov and the microbiologist Albert Sabin. Its most famous product is known locally as the Bialystoker kuchen and to the hungry world as the bialy.

  A bialy is to a bagel what Bialystock is to Vladivostok—that is, a world apart. A bialy is a round, saucer-size pletzl, “flat bread” (rhymes with pretzel), that has its center mushed in to form a depression made delectable with bits of onion.

  The food critic Mimi Sheraton explored this mouthwatering subject last year in a book titled The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World. Although bialy means “white” in Slavic languages, the cakelike bread does not get its name from its dusting of white flour; rather, the Polish mountainside, or stok, is on what we would call the White River, which gives its name to the city. That city, in turn, gives its name to the fragrant roll and to the fictional Broadway producer.

  Sheraton describes the tenderly crusty roll as “characterized by an indented center well that is ringed by a softer, higher rim, all generously flecked with toasted onions and, at its most authentic, with a showering of poppy seeds.” It has, she adds with a certain reverence, “an affinity for sweet butter and fluffy cream cheese.”

  This department does not shrink from controversy: one should neither slice nor toast a bialy. Smear whatever you like over the onions in the well; bakeries these days use up their poppy seeds on bagels, which can be toasted, but the seeds mess up the toaster. If you like your breakfast bread hot, bake the center-depressed pletzl for five minutes or so until its edges look threatening. (I don’t know at what heat; this is a language column.) The newly popularized word is pronounced “bee-AH-lee.”

  Big Applesource. Controversy rages over who coined the Big Apple as a moniker for New York.

  The earliest citation is in Edward Martin’s 1909 book, The Wayfarer in New York. Martin, a founder of the Harvard Lampoon and first editor of the humor magazine Life, was writing about the attitude of the Midwest toward the metropolis: “Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city…. It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.”

  The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang notes an absence of capitalization or quotation marks in this citation and thinks it “probable that the 1909 quotation represents a metaphorical or perhaps proverbial usage, rather than a concrete example of the later slang term.” I dunno about that; capitalization is not necessary in coinage, and quotation marks only would suggest an earlier use.

  The etymologist Barry Popik, with fresh support from the phrase detectives Fred Shapiro and Gerald Cohen, has long been campaigning to give coinage honors to John J. Fitzgerald, a turf writer. He wrote in the New York Morning Telegraph on Feb. 18, 1924: “There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.” After Fitzgerald popularized the term, crediting it to African-American stable hands in New Orleans in 1920, the columnist Walter Winchell picked it up in 1927. A decade later it became the name of a Harlem nightclub and a dance.

  Popik makes a strong case, but I’d credit Martin with coinage and Fitzgerald with independent recoinage and early popularization. But you pays yer money and you takes yer cherce (from an 1846 cartoon in the British magazine Punch).

  Blip. “We don’t react to day-to-day blips,“ said James Gorman, a Merrill Lynch sales chief. On Wall Street Week, Louis Rukeyser dismissed “some renewed jitters in the wake of a blip in retail sales.”

  As a linguistic plunger, I invested heavily in blips two decades ago. “Blip has good upside potential,” it was noted in this space in 1982, when a White House spokesman shrugged off bad financial news with “We had one bad blip today.” Since then, the usage of this onomatopoeic word has soared as jargonauts in a variety of fields embrace it, and I remain bullish on blips because the word satisfies a need for “sudden, minor shock; meaningless interruption.”

  The earliest senses were “a quick blow, accompanied by a popping sound” and “a twitch.” The Dictionary of American Regional English exhumed its origins: “Brer Rabbi
t draw back wid his fis’, he did,” wrote Joel Chandler Harris in his 1880 Uncle Remus stories, “en blip he tuck ’er side er de head.” In 1894, Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer Abroad wrote, “We took him a blip in the back and knocked him off.”

  Dashiell Hammett kept that sinister sense in his 1929 Maltese Falcon, introducing a verb form: “You could have blipped them both.” In our electronic age, blip overtook pip to mean “a point of light on a radar screen to locate a searched-for object.” On television and later computer screens, the noun denoted any sudden surge of sound or light, often caused by an electrical interruption. When this was done deliberately to expunge an expletive, it was called a bleep.

  Because the spot of light or pop of sound was tiny, the word soon connoted smallness or insignificance as the metaphor was extended.

  In the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush used a vulgarity near an open mike, the Dallas Morning News noted the difference between a minor slip and a major blunder: “Analysts differ over whether it is a soon-to-be-forgotten blip or a blooper with staying power.” Electronic media that wanted to shield their listeners bleeped the blip.

  Do not sell this short word short, as it can be used to describe sudden, transitory moves in any direction. Diplomats have long found it a useful word to minimize troubling changes: commenting on reversals in peace negotiations in 1972, Henry Kissinger said there “may be blips up and down.” But dismissal as a blip can invite response from editorialists who deride attempts to play down major events. As Watergate scandals came to a head in 1974, the New York Times wrote about President Nixon, “Can he really be so uncomprehending that he considers it, to use his word, a mere ‘blip ’?”

  Though some language mavens cautiously rate blip as a market outperformer, I’ll still call it a buy.

  As for “bleep,” you failed to mention it lasts longer than a “blip,” which is only momentary (or, in the language of today, possibly “momentous”). Also, the Slang Dictionary’s “origin” is probably mere coincidence: “blip” is virtually onomatopoeic, and that is its most likely origin.

  Laurence Urdang

  Old Lyme, Connecticut

  I was a bit disappointed to see you perpetuate the misuse of the word “expletive.”

  While the word came into widespread use upon the publication of the Nixon tapes, which made “expletive deleted” a common term, it has been widely misused.

  There is nothing about an expletive, per se, that would require it to be deleted or “bleeped.” An expletive is merely an exclamation, which may be obscene, but “ain’t necessarily so!”

  fudge!” or “Gosh!”-those would be expletives, but would not be obscene and would not require deletion. If, however, I were to say, “Al Gore is a lying sack of [deleted],” the word in brackets would be an obscenity, but would not be an expletive!

  Misuse of a word, no matter how widespread, should not change its meaning. If you allow this to happen you are promoting the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” school of semantics. Look at what that attitude has already done to words like “infer,” “hopefully” and “fulsome.” It’s up to purists like you and me to resist it.

  Stuart Tarlowe

  Rosedale, Kansas

  Body Man. The political lexicon is suddenly being enriched. For years, the man has been the president, perhaps associated with main man, from Black English. Now the man has a man of his own with an official job title.

  “Here’s a new entry,” says Eric Schmitt, the New York Times reporter who covers Vice President Dick Cheney (sometimes referred to as “the P.M.,” or prime minister, or less reverently by President Bush as Big Time, recalling Cheney’s famous response to a joshing derogation of another of our journalistic colleagues). “It’s body man.”

  Cheney’s body man, reports Schmitt, is Brian McCormack, an earnest young guy from New Jersey who considers himself a jack-of-all-trades. He carries Big Time’s coat, passes him messages, “keeps him up to date and on time” and generally sticks close by to do whatever errand or task Cheney needs done.

  A Times reporter who covers the president, Frank Bruni, says that George W. Bush’s body man is Logan Walters, retained in that key post from the campaign. Walters jots down addresses for thank-you notes, declines gifts worth more than fifty dollars and holds the cell phone that keeps his boss reachable by his inner circle. (Sign of intimacy: a cow on the Bush ranch, born on the aide’s birthday, is named Logan.)

  The informal job title is not to be confused with the man with the briefcase, the ever-present carrier of the codes needed by the president to respond to a hostile missile launch. It is more specific and intimate than gofer, a term applied to any aide ready to “go fer” coffee or do other menial tasks.

  The earliest citation I can find after a quick rattling of the cages is from a 1988 article by Susan Trausch of the Boston Globe: “Every candidate has a body man, someone who fulfills a kind of mothering role on the trail. The body man makes sure the candidate’s tie is straight for the TV debate, keeps his mood up and makes sure he gets his favorite cereal for breakfast.” The columnist Chris Matthews, who used the phrase in print in 1989, recalls that JFK’s body man was David Powers.

  The phrase suggests that the aide does not deal with the president’s mind. However, the title was given more dignity recently by Mary McGrory in the Washington Post. “Thanks to The West Wing, the classy television series,” she wrote, “everyone knows what a ‘body man’ is. He’s the one who hovers over the Big Man, making sure his suit is pressed, his shoes are shined and his speech is stapled in order.” Then the columnist, aware of the power of access, gave the job a prestigious boost: “He’s also a press secretary without portfolio, a policy adviser and a diplomat who keeps the locals from pestering the boss.”

  The body in body man is an attributive noun, which means it does the job of an adjective—as in body suit, body blow and body snatcher.

  I thought that main man was merely an embellishment of man, which I have been led to believe became a black term of address in order to counteract the racist put-down, boy.

  Laurence Urdang

  Old Lyme, Connecticut

  Broadband. His necktie was defiantly ripped away. His old-fashioned mustache was shaved off. All but rocking on the soles of his feet and snapping his fingers to illustrate his with-it-ness, the new boss of AOL Time Warner Inc. announced to the world, “I am a broadband person.”

  As if that transmogrification were not enough, Gerald M. Levin—until now a fairly dignified executive—added plaintively, “I’m an interactive guy.” But interactive is yesterday’s word, for years meaning “acting upon each other” and then meaning “reciprocating by electronic means”; now used mainly by aging Wunderkinder straining to keep pace, it awaits the coinage of its opposite, interinactive, “a one-way flow of data.” Hip, connected e-lexies in this winter of our content provision focused on his broadband personhood.

  That word has a glorious history in the northern dialects of Britain. “The verie euill thoughts of the wicked,” wrote Zachary Boyd in Last Battell, his 1629 masterpiece, “in that day shalbe spread out and laide in broadband before the face of God.” James O. Halliwell, in his 1847 Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, reminded us that a band was a space twenty yards square, and broad-band was “corn laid out in the sheaf on the band, and spread out to dry after rain.”

  Over three centuries, the band evolved from a marked-out strip of land into “a range of radio frequencies or wavelengths.” In 1956, W. A. Heflin’s U.S. Air Force Dictionary defined broadband as “a band having a wide range of frequencies.” In our time, it morphed into a medium that not only transmits a wide range of radio, video and data signals, but also can carry other independent channels in their own bandwidths, or space on the band. (On these multiple spaces the communicators still seem to lay out wet corn.)

  Then metaphor began to beat the broadband. The adjective (sometimes hyphenated) is still used to describe multiplex communications networks, but in more
sweeping terms. “In a broad-band world,” wrote Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times, “even the distinctions among telephone wires, cables and satellites will be erased. There will be one cultural-economic tube.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote of “the broad-band war, the struggle over who will control the ability to deliver seamless streams of data to consumers.”

  And now, in an interinactive linguistic breakthrough, Mr. Levin has extended the metaphor from networks to human beings. “I am a broadband person” means more, in my view, than “I work in an industry characterized by simultaneous transmission of multiple channels.” It means that he sees himself as a person with broadband personal characteristics—able to think, speak, gesture, persuade, broadcast and data-disseminate in an unlimited way, while chewing gum at the same time.

  Look at yourself, dear reader. Are you a narrowband person, cribbed, cabin’d and confined in a strait gate—or are you the sort whose mind ranges far out over the amber waves of corn? By rejecting the “verie euill thoughts of the wicked,” you, too, can mega-merge yourself into a broadband person.

  If that’s your choice, move quickly to so identify yourself, because telecommuning lingo changes fast, and broadband is sure to be crowded out soon.

  Bundling. The great American counterspook, Paul Redmond, left a word-news tip in the dead drop that is my answering machine: “Check out bundling.”