The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  The clear intent is “use black or blue ink.” But if the Bureau of the Census, conscious of literal correctness, wrote those words, millions of people unfamiliar with the details of writing instruments would respond: “I don’t use ink; I use a ballpoint pen. Does this mean I have to fill this out with a fountain pen? There’ll be big inkblots all over the form. What do they want from my life?”

  Therefore, I give the census-form writers a little leeway. In return, they try not to make the same mistakes twice. The 1990 form concluded with the admonition “Make sure you have … filled this form completely,” and I complained that it was possible to fill in or fill out a form, but not to simply fill a form because a form is not a bucket. In the 2000 form, the error is averted by the adoption of the “Thank you for not smoking” trick: “Thank you for completing your official U.S. Census form.” It seems friendlier and is not subject to attack by nitpickers in this space.

  However, our intrepid people counters cannot be counted on for the correct use of commas. Turning to the first question in the long form, and aided by my fellow nitpicker Jeff McQuain, we read “people staying here on April 1, 2000 who have no other permanent place to stay …” If a date in mid sentence uses a comma, then another comma must follow the year: “on April 1, 2000, who …”

  Later, the form directs, “Start with the person, or one of the people living here who owns …” This cries out for a balancing comma: “person, or one of the people living here, who owns …” Better still, forget the commas in that sentence entirely: “Start with the person or one of the people living here who owns …” Use two commas to separate the phrase or no commas if it does not need separation.

  This comedy of commas continues with “What is this person’s age and what is this person’s date of birth?” The two independent clauses call for separation by a comma after age. (An even better fix is to obviate the need for a comma by shortening it to “What are this person’s age and date of birth?”)

  And the form writers are tensed up. Right at the start, the past tense is used in “How many people were living or staying in this house … on April 1, 2000?” Then the tense is switched to the present with instruction to include them “even if they have another place to live.” Gotta be this or that: are and have or were and had.

  The Parallel Construction Workers Union should file a grievance about the way a question about occupation is phrased: “patient care, directing hiring policies, supervising order clerks, repairing automobiles, reconciling financial records” are the examples given. The last four of those listed begin with gerunds; why, then, does “patient care” have no -ing? To be in proper parallel, it should be “caring for patients.”

  At least that was a series of examples not masquerading as a sentence; correctly, with no verb, no period was placed at the end. However, in what is called the ancestry question (more precisely the lineage question), we read “Italian, Jamaican, African Am., Cambodian, … Taiwanese, Ukrainian, and so on.” The “and so on” tries to make it all-inclusive, but there is no verb to make it a sentence—and yet in this instance a period is put at the end. No style is followed. And why, when no other group is followed by “Am.,” is “African” so designated—and without a hyphen to boot?

  Hats off to the writers for sticking to past practice in identifying aboriginal Americans as “American Indians” and not the confusing “Native Americans.” That last could mean anyone born in America, in contrast to “Naturalized Americans,” citizens born elsewhere. Past designations as Eskimo and Aleut are now lumped together as “Alaska Native.”

  Thus, the sensitive question of “What is this person’s race?” has three main categories: (1) the above “American Indian or Alaska Native,” which follows (2) “white” and three choices of names for (3) the other—“Black, African Am., or Negro.” The Census Bureau explains that the terminology changes with each generation and that “Negro” was put in so that older members of the group would not feel outdated. What about whites from South Africa? I presume the form presumes that they will choose to describe themselves as white. In a triumph of inclusive self-differentiation, eleven other racial groups are listed, from “Asian Indian” to “Samoan,” with blank space left for anyone to write in “Some other race.”

  Language has its limitations. In the question about relationships, the form includes, among others, “Husband/wife, Natural-born son/daughter, Adopted son/daughter.” That “Natural-born” seems awkward; obviously it is there to distinguish between what the Bible colorfully called “the fruit of one’s loins” and an adopted child. But with artificial insemination and test-tube babies in the mix, what is natural and what is not?

  The delicious bureaucratic euphemism POSSLQ is gone. “Persons of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters,” which appeared in the 1990 census, has been replaced by two categories: “Housemate/Roommate,” who shares living quarters “primarily to share expenses,” and the new “Unmarried Partner.” Says the bureau: “Mark the ‘Unmarried Partner’ box if the person is not related to Person 1, shares living quarters, and who [who should be dropped] has a close personal relationship with Person 1.”

  Prediction: In the 2010 census, this last category will be listed as “Lovers.” Also, the form writers will be warier about their use and abuse of commas.

  The main objection I found to the Census Form—the grammatico-usage-style matters aside—was that it asked about the people living in the house on April 1, 2000. So I held on to the form for mailing on or after the 1st, since, God knows, anything can happen in a week.

  Then publicity started appearing about how everyone had to send in the form BY April 1st. I don’t have at hand the birth and death rates in the U.S., but I assume the former outdoes the latter since things seem to be getting more and more crowded, but there surely must be a difference between the figures for, say, the 25th of March, when I completed the form, and the 1st of April.

  I am sure that the people at the Census Bureau are well-intentioned and trying very hard; but it is a pity that they really haven’t a clue as to what in hell they are doing or in the simple rudiments of communication.

  Laurence Urdang

  Old Lyme, Connecticut

  In counting the mistakes contained in the United States Census, you seem to have made one of your own. You use the phrase “obviate the need for …” This appears to me a redundancy, as the common meaning of obviate is “to make unnecessary.” To make a need unneeded is surplussage at its best. You have suggested many ways the Census could eliminate excess verbiage; so too could have you.

  Andrew J. Heimert

  Washington, D.C.

  If one wants to get the structure across, unforgettably, one would say, “use black pencil, only.” That is more demanding and retentive. A pause in the expression, if oral, and a comma before the last word achieves the result in the interim between instruction and performance.

  Judge Milton Pollack

  U.S. Senior District Judge

  U.S. District Court

  New York, New York

  Chad. The word of the year is chad. Its current sense is defined in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) as “the small bit of paper released when a ballot is punched or a paper punch is used.”

  This meaning of this single-syllable noun was a mystery to most when it first poked its head through the tape of language in the counting of ballots in Florida. But some Californians were familiar with it. In 1981, the Los Angeles Times reported, “What the city is trying to avoid is a repeat of April’s Great Chad Chore, when more than 40,000 ballots had to be recounted because their chads—the punched-out portions—failed to break loose.”

  At that time, one of DARE’s lexicographers noted that the word “is used only by people in the ballot-counting business, not by other users of computer cards, who seem to call the same bits of cardboard ‘confetti.’ ” But according to Peter Graham, now university librarian at Syracuse, who served early in his career as a keypunch operator, “We
had what we called a chad box underneath the key punch. We resisted calling it ‘confetti’ because the small bits of paper, when they caught on your clothes, would not dislodge.” Graham notes that the noun was then construed as plural, on the analogy of chaff, but today’s ballot counters are referring to chads, construing the word chad as singular.

  The first use in this sense is in the files of Merriam-Webster: “The small discs, called chads,“ noted the RCA Review in 1947, “… are perforated only sufficiently to permit the chads to rise like small hinged lids in response to the sensing pins of a transmitter.”

  A presidential election appeared to hinge on those hinges. Their near-infinite variety was listed by Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times: “Variants include dimpled chad (bulging but not pierced), pregnant chad (attached by all four corners to a ballot that is either bulging or pierced), hanging chad (attached by a single corner), swinging-door chad (attached by two corners) and tri chad (attached by three corners).” Bruce Rogow, an attorney for Florida election supervisors, explained with a straight face, “Pregnancy does not count in Palm Beach County, only penetration.”

  Other meanings exist. The oldest is from the Middle English ich hadde, pronounced shad or chad, meaning “I had” (and legitimizing the Wall Street Journal headline, “Chad Enough?”). According to the Venerable Bede, an especially humble priest became St. Chad (and his feast day is March 2, for those ballot counters who want to celebrate it). And the nation of Chad, formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, took its name from Lake Chad, from a word in the Nilo-Saharan language of Kanuri meaning “an expanse of water.” According to the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, traders stopped in what is now northeastern Nigeria to take on water.

  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 Ta
liban campaign, “we’re going to get our clock cleaned.” Mark Mednick, coach of California’s Irvine High girls’ volleyball team, told the OrangeCounty 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.