Old-timers remember that word fondly from their spooning days. “Bundling was originally courting in bed,” noted an 1874 British slang dictionary, “the lovers being tied or bundled up to prevent undue familiarities. The practice still obtains in Wales.”
This 1781 term for an early form of what is now called “safe sex,” apparently pioneered by the prudent Welsh, was derived from the Old English bindan, “to bind together,” and was later applied to “men and women sleeping together, where the divisions of the house will not permit of better or more decent accommodation, with all their clothes on.”
Fast-forward to the Arizona legislature in 1956, which prohibited “bundling or combining various limited benefit insurance policies.” The pejorative connotation grew when the Justice Department in 1975 accused IBM of charging anticompetitive prices for bundling hardware and software services. The European Community repeated the complaint in 1981, and John Tagliabue defined the word in the New York Times: “the practice of what is called bundling—selling the elements of a computer system as a package to prevent competitors from supplying them at perhaps better conditions.”
Today the term obtains, to use the archaic verb, in the Microsoft case, as a federal judge ruled that the company illegally bundled its Web browser with its Windows operating system. In my legal-etymological interpretation, the company is appealing on the grounds that separate divisions wrapped up in bed together, fully clothed, are not making love.
Thus do old terms find new uses in the brave new wide Web world. For example, the trade name SPAM—created in 1937 by Hormel Foods out of the first and last letters of “spiced ham”—has, when uncapitalized, come to mean “junk e-mail,” with a second sense of “the random posting of advertisements on computer bulletin boards.”
A fanciful speculation about the metaphoric reason for the adoption of spamming by the computer world can be found in the excellent Newton’s Telecom Dictionary, sixteenth edition: “the term is derived from a brand of pink, canned meat that splatters messily when hurled.” (A spokesman for Hormel vociferously denies this, and tests run at the Safire Semantic Kitchens confirm that uncanned SPAM, when hurled against a wall at a normal speed, bounces rather than splatters.)
Cache, pronounced “cash,” from the French verb cacher, “to hide,” came to mean “a hiding place for valuables”; it was especially applied to holes dug to conceal provisions and ammunition. (One reason given by the Pentagon for the U.S. incursion into Cambodia in 1969 was to capture buried arms, causing the Nixon aide Len Garment to ask, “Can you check a cache?”)
In usage by the new lingo, information is cached by placing it closer to the user to make it more accessible, which also places less strain on limited computer and network resources. The meaning has changed from the sinister “hiding place” to a more positive “nearby holding place.”
A cookie originated as a small Dutch cake and became the term for a baked morsel to be passed around after the canapés have been devoured. The metaphoric origin of cookie in computerese is obscure, but its meaning is “a text file placed on a computer’s hard disk by an Internet server to track the client’s habits and tastes.” Marketers say it provides convenience and unexpected choices to clients; privacy guardians warn that a cookie can follow a customer’s movements around the Web to create an invasive profile. A cookie pusher was a term coined in World War II to be a derogation of diplomats who attended too many receptions; now it is an exponent of “targeted marketing.”
Attendant began as “one who waits upon or accompanies,” as in Milton’s “Lest sin Surprise thee, and her black attendant, Death.” After adoption by airlines of flight attendant when stewardess was taken as sexist, the word was snapped up by technologists and now has two meanings. The first is “an inexpensive computer that leans heavily on its connection to more sophisticated computers.” The second meaning bothers me. “An attendant is an operator of a phone system console,” lexicographer Harry Newton reports. “Typically, it’s the first person in a company to answer an incoming call. That person attends the phone system; when the company’s phone is answered by a machine, that’s an automated attendant.”
What’s the matter with operator? My mother was a telephone operator and proud of it. An operator suggests an active, purposeful, hands-on person engaging with a device or system; an attendant is more passive, sometimes just hanging around “in waiting.” The machine, or system, that is operated is secondary to the human in charge, but the phone system that is merely attended is the master.
Hello, Central?
Anent (ahem) your column on technological borrowings: I believe that in its cybersense, “cache” is pronounced with a long “a,” as in “case.”
Allan M. Siegal
The New York Times
New York, New York
Another current context for bundling is the device for getting around campaign contribution limits of $5,000 from a PAC or $1,000 from an individual. Emily’s List is the best-known liberal practitioner of collecting a bunch of checks for one candidate and handing them over all at once to show that you’re worth more than $1,000 or $5,000, but various corporate operatives do it, too.
Adam Clymer
The New York Times
Washington, D.C.
C
Can a Pig Fly? The modifier universally adopted by journalists and political figures to describe our aircraft was lumbering.
After one jingoistic New York Times columnist described the Aries as having been “lumbering along at about 350 mph,” another Times pundit sensitive to loaded words noted coolly that “U.S. sources have insisted that the Chinese fighter planes must have been at fault, because they are so much nimbler than our ‘lumbering’ surveillance plane.”
Lumbering soon achieved code status for “it couldn’t have been our fault.” “We had a slow, lumbering, relatively unmaneuverable aircraft,” said House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde; “they had a fighter plane.” Larry Eagleburger, the heavyset, slow-moving former secretary of state, asserted, “You know, our aircraft is a slow, lumbering thing.”
Origin is the Swedish lomra, “to resound,” and loma, “to walk heavily”; Middle English picked up the imitative word (like rumbling, crumbling, cumbrous, ponderous) in the 14th century as lomeren. A clip of the last syllable led to lumber, a collection of useless goods, like old wooden tables and chairs, that impede movement. British slang still uses lumbered to mean “laden, weighed down, encumbered.”
No wonder our unapologetic servicemembers call it “the flying pig.”
Cardinal Placement. A New Yorker editor wonders about “the westward title migration” of cardinals. “How come it always used to be Francis Cardinal Spellman and Richard Cardinal Cushing and now all of a sudden it’s Cardinal Edward M. Egan and Cardinal Bernard F. Law?”
This is the least of the church’s problems. The 1999 New York Times Manual of Style and Usage reports, “Church authorities no longer place Cardinal between given name and surname.” In a 1987 column in this space irreverently but respectfully titled “Long Time No See” (the archaic see is the “seat of power”), I quoted His Eminence Johannes Willebrands, who is today the chamberlain of the College of Cardinals, as cheerfully waving off the placement of the title between his first and last names with “We don’t do that anymore.”
But many still do: the archbishop of New York, identified by the Times, the Associated Press and most television reporters as “Cardinal Edward M. Egan,” last month signed his vigorous denunciation of the abuse of children with a traditional “Edward Cardinal Egan.” As with pronunciation and usage, it’s a matter heavily influenced by style.
Carpe Diem. Justifying his plans for transition planning during the vote-counting turmoil, Governor George W. Bush said that it was important “to show the American people that this administration will be ready to seize the moment.” Two weeks later, in his first speech as president-elect, he told the nation, “We must seize the moment and deliver.�
�
This is a case for PAW. The Poetic Allusion Watch is maintained in this space to call attention to the roots of our current metaphors that are expressed in flights of vaguely remembered poetry. Whether the Republican candidate knew it or not, he was alluding to a phrase in an ode by the Roman poet Horace: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, “Seize the day, put no trust in the future.”
At its first citation in English, Lord Byron in 1817 took the phrase to mean, in his words, “never anticipate.” That philosophical approach was akin to Robert Herrick’s 1648 “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” expressed much later in the song “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).” The literary critic Northrop Frye wrote in 1957 that Horace’s carpe diem was “based on a moment of pleasure in experience.”
But two strange things happened to Horace’s phrase on its way to political oratory. First, the day was radically shortened to an hour and finally to a moment. This may have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s promulgation of the Spanish phrase el momento de la verdad, “moment of truth.” More to the point, the meaning expressed by carpe diem shifted from the hedonistic “live it up while you have the chance” to an exhortation to be bold, recalling Shakespeare’s “tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” The two U.S. presidents who did most to fix the speeded-up phrase in the current political lexicon were Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In his State of the Union message in 1971, Nixon said, “If we act boldly—if we seize this moment,“ we could close great gaps, and he warned in 1972 that “if we failed to seize this moment, “ we would be untrue to generations yet unborn.
When asked why he named his 1992 book Seize the Moment rather than quote his own frequent use, Nixon said: “I quoted from a poem that Mao Zedong had written in which he said, ‘Seize the day, seize the hour, because many things urgently remain to be done.’ …We should seize the moment, not for Communism, but for the victory of freedom.”
Clinton became so enamored of the phrase that he used it eleven times on the final day of his 1996 campaign for re-election: “Will you seize the day tomorrow and help us expand family leave?” he asked voters in Cleveland. “Will you seize the day and help us balance the budget? … You’ve got to seize the day and help us reform health care. You’ve got to seize the day.”
In the years following that multiple seizure, Clinton went for the accelerated form adopted by Nixon. In the summer of 2000, he urged Republican senators to “seize this moment, to stop the delays.” Meanwhile, GOP Senator John McCain was reminding his Republican colleagues of their obligation “to seize this moment to help build a safer, freer and more prosperous world.” Democrats hastily snatched the phrase back: soon after Bill Bradley said “I feel an urgency to seize this moment,“ Al Gore asked voters in New York, “Will we seize this moment to extend prosperity and share it widely, or will we just lavish more on those who need it least?”
The phrase in the Horace ode, its meaning twisted from “live it up” to “be bold” in Mao’s accelerated corollary, is now enshrined in the book of golden political clichés. Because I did not want Bush’s repetition of it to go unnoticed, I thought the time ripe, the day upon us and the hour propitious to take this opportunity to …
I know you’ll get a lot of mail from Horace lovers on this. You mention the translation of carpe diem in English as “seize the day.” In fact, the original Latin verb carpere means “to pluck.” Rather than the fairly abrupt, “beat out the competition” feel of “seize the day,” the original more properly connotes a gentler, more thoughtful “harvest the day,” make the best of what time we have, etc. Caverley’s 1861 translation, for example, beautifully renders the end of the poem as, “Mistrust To-morrow, catch the blossom of To-day.”
Henry Martin
New York, New York
Carvilification. In his book Stickin’: The Case for Loyalty, James Carville seemed pleased that he had been called “Clinton’s gunsel“ by the columnist Richard Cohen. “I’m sure I am one,” the Clinton loyalist and henchman observed in a footnote. “I just don’t know what it is.”
Filling those voids in vocabulary is the scholarly public service demanded by readers of this column.
American moviegoers first became familiar with the word when spoken by Humphrey Bogart, playing Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled private detective, Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon. Bogie looked contemptuously at the young bodyguard played by Elisha Cook Jr. and told Sydney Green-street, “Keep that gunsel away from me.”
Most readers of Black Mask magazine in 1929, when the story first appeared, and moviegoers in the 1940s thought that gunsel was a variant of gunman. It is not; in a 1965 article, the mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner revealed why Hammett used it.
The editor of Black Mask, Joseph Shaw, was on guard against the use of vulgarisms by his writers. Hammett, eager to slip one by, had a character describe his activity as “on the gooseberry lay,” tramp lingo for “stealing clothes from clotheslines,” its connotation larcenous but not vulgar.
“Shaw wrote Hammett telling him that he was deleting the ‘gooseberry lay’ from the story,” Gardner recalled, “and that Black Mask would never publish anything like that. But he left the word gunsel because Hammett had used it so casually that Shaw took it for granted that the word pertained to a hired gunman. Actually, gunsel, or gonzel, is a very naughty word with no relation whatever to a bodyguard.”
The term in tramp slang is derived from the Yiddish gendzl, or “gosling”; the young goose symbolized a homosexual boy. An earlier use was defined in American Speech in 1933 as “Gonzel, Catamite” (a corruption of the name of Jupiter’s cupbearer, Ganymede).
“All the writers of the hard-boiled school of realism,” noted Gardner, “started talking about a gunsel as the equivalent of a gunman…. The aftereffects of that joke are still seen in American murder stories.”
And in columns by pundits who mean no such thing. And in books by impervious loyalists.
Celibate. A debate rages over whether sexual abuse is related to celibacy. On an Easter telecast of Meet the Press, the Reverend John McCloskey said the church was “looking for people who are capable of living the celibate life, who are capable of living a chaste life.” What’s the difference between celibacy and chastity?
Plenty; you can be one without being the other. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines celibacy as “the renunciation of marriage … for the more perfect observance of chastity.”
To be celibate is to be single, to be unmarried, the priestly purpose of which is to remain chaste. To be chaste, from the Latin casta, “morally pure,” is to deny all sexual intercourse. The goal of celibacy, not the state of celibacy, is chastity.
Now here comes the semantic problem. In many cases, people in all walks of life choose to be celibate because they do not like the notion of living all the time with people of the opposite sex, or with people of their own sex; they just prefer the single life. If, in so living, they abjure all sexual intercourse, they are both celibate and chaste. But if they fool around occasionally or even regularly, as millions do, they can rightly claim to be celibate without being chaste.
Thus, if the object of desire is asked, “Will you?” and replies, “I’m celibate, “ that is not a proper declination; it may only be an indication of housing condition. “I’m chaste,“ however, slams the door.
Unfortunately when you turned to “celibacy” and “chastity” you erred. In Roman Catholic moral theology, which is relevant here, these terms are not used in the way you say that they are. You tell us that one can be celibate without being chaste. Better you had turned this around: One can be chaste without being celibate. That is, to be celibate (which can be described independently of marriage) one must refrain from sexual intercourse. To be chaste one need not unless he is unmarried or widowed. In other words, for married couples their chastity—conjugal chastity—is expressed by affectionately achieving coitus. What makes a married person unchaste is committing a
n act such as adultery.
Ronald Colvin
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
I think you’re a bit too liberal in your view of what chaste means. It is quite possible to be unchaste in marriage—by excessive sexual indulgence, perpetual search for means to heighten pleasure, and anything like animal violence that disregards the partner in the act. I know that the current view of sex is unbridled recreation, but that fact is the very reason why the word chaste is quasi obsolete and often equated with marital infidelity.
Jacques Barzun
San Antonio, Texas
Surely, chastity does not require total abstinence from sexual intercourse. Among many examples, Emilia, bemoaning her mistress’ murder (Othello, Act V, Scene II), “Moor, she was chaste; she lov’d thee cruel Moor.” Don Juan, in Shaw’s Man and Superman, refers to the “chastity” of the much-married Doña Ana to make precisely this point, indeed. There is clearly a mode of morally sanctioned (positively) sexual intercourse which does not erase chastity. The removal, for obvious purpose, of the chastity belt by the husband did not make his lady unchaste.
M. H. Rodman, MD
Winchester, Massachusetts
Census 2000. Ten years ago this week, I received in the mail a census form that began, “Please use a black lead pencil only.” Naturally, I objected to the loose placement of the only, preferring “use only a black lead pencil” or the even more direct and simple “use a black lead pencil.”
This year, reflecting the leap forward in technology, the United States Census 2000 says, “Please use a black or blue pen.” I have a blue pen that writes with black ink; I suppose that’s OK. But I also have a black pen that writes with red ink; is that impermissible?
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 4