The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Justice Antonin Scalia

  Supreme Court of the United States

  Washington, D.C.

  Philosophers have made the distinction you and Justice Scalia seemed to be striving for when you discussed whether “benevolent compassion” was tautologous. They differentiate between defining characteristics and accompanying characteristics. All elephants may be gray, but grayness is not a defining characteristic of an elephant, merely an accompanying one.

  David Kahn

  Great Neck, New York

  As you analyzed Antonin Scalia’s sentence, I kept waiting for you to attack his use of the word “it.” Justice Scalia was quoted as saying: “In my view today’s opinion exercises a benevolent compassion that the law does not place it within our power to impose.” That “it” seems incorrect to me—and also to my husband, the ex-English professor. If we’re right, why didn’t you dispute the usage? And if we’re wrong, we’ll just shut up.

  Gerry Muir

  Mamaroneck, New York

  Justice Scalia, wrong in so many other ways, was correct in using “was” rather than “were” in the sentence “(My use) of benevolent compassion can be absolved of redundancy only if I was differentiating (that) from some other kind of compassion,” because the event actually occurred. “Were” is hypothetical, suggesting that he might be contemplating some differentiating but hadn’t actually done it.

  Then to my shock and dismay, in regarding the opening line, “… the Supreme Court held … that the game of golf would not be fundamentally altered if a handicapped contestant … was allowed to ride in a golf cart,” I fear that you commit the error yourself. Here, “were” is clearly correct, because golfers were (supposedly) not riding in carts before the sentence was handed down.

  Eric Conger

  Weehawken, New Jersey

  Justice Scalia’s statement that “the very essence of ‘giftness’ … is being free” brings to mind a case in law school more than fifty years ago. The Mary Carter Paint Company had advertised buy two, get one free. The Supreme Court held that this was not false advertising, as in the context is meant only free of extra cost.

  For this matter, not every gift is really free. The gift of liberty, a performer’s gift, many others require sacrifice and diligence.

  Robert Obrecht

  Old Saybrook, Connecticut

  Justice Scalia referred to a past question, hence “was.” You, contrary to fact, prescribed “were.” But that is present subjunctive, cf “If I were you.” A pox on both your clauses. If I had been you (hard swallow) I would have suggested a past subjunctive form, “If only I had been differentiating …” Justice Scalia began his dissent with this sentence: “In my view today’s opinion exercises a benevolent compassion that the law does not place it within our power to impose.” Speaking of redundancy, what’s with that “it”?

  Carl d’Angio

  Mount Vernon, New York

  I don’t accept Justice Scalia’s argument as he has made it. There is a distinction between denotative meanings of words (what I think he must mean when he says “distinctive characteristic that the noun conveys”) and their connotations. Justice Scalia chooses admirable courage as his first example, remarking, “is courage ever not admirable?” It stereotypically is, which is why admirable courage is a cliché. But it is not redundant in the way that brave courage and intrepid courage are, even though the etymologies of the noun and both adjectives are quite distinct, because the meaning of courage denotes the qualities that brave and intrepid do.

  On a different tack, he chooses winter and spring, words that have gigantic semantic fields, with several denotational and connotational meanings, and countless metaphorical extensions. We can talk about winter in its astronomical sense and comment about both typical and atypical meteorological conditions associated with that period (warm versus cold New England winters); we can speak about winters in our souls and springs in our hearts without reference to temperature or colors because those words have been associated with a vast lexicon of metaphors for psychological states since literature began, if not conversation.

  But I am even more interested in Justice Scalia’s take on the word compassion itself. He paints a picture of “compassionate” persons who flee, shuddering, from those who are suffering because they fear the same will happen to themselves. He contrasts this with benevolent compassion, described as “social-outreach, maternalistic, (and) goo-goo …” Well, I think it’s now clear: the differentiation is not between malevolent compassion and benevolent compassion: it is between benevolent compassion and conservative compassion. Many of us have been wondering about this “conservative compassion” for a long time and will now be able to correct the inferences when we next hear it.

  One other point: You correctly point out that Justice Scalia failed to use the subjunctive (was rather than were differentiating). But what about your opening sentence? “… (I)f a handicapped contestant in a tournament was allowed to ride …” Why not were allowed ? They are precisely the same with respect to clause construction, and both require the subjunctive, playing by the old rules. (I quite agree that the English subjunctive has receded, at a galloping pace, out of our modern speech and taken its last refuge in the prose of literati well into their dotage. Alas.)

  Marcia Haag

  Assistant Professor of Linguistics

  University of Oklahoma

  Norman, Oklahoma

  I agree with Justice Scalia that compassion is not always benevolent. I think that Dido had sympathetic consciousness of another’s distress but she was, I believe, also saying to Aeneas who was in the harbor ready to leave her, “I’ll give you something to remember me by.” She then stabbed herself and jumped onto a burning pyre. Justice Scalia was, perhaps, making reference to Aristotle’s notions of the audience’s engagement at a tragic drama. The audience may be saying and feeling, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Or, “Better s/he than me.” This is where the catharsis of pity and terror is felt by the audience. Catharsis now carries the taint of scientism made fashionable by the Freud-bashers.

  The Justice was stressing the “social-outreach, maternalistic, goo-goo” character of the court’s decision. I could go back and read his original statement of “benevolent compassion” with a different ear. I can hear “be-NEV-olent” with the second syllable drawn out in a sticky sweet tone. This is much like the distinction between “LIGHThousekeeping” and “lightHOUSEkeeping.”

  Frank Kermode tells us that the language of Hamlet is dominated by doubles (as in sticky sweet) of all kinds. The figure of speech is hendiadys. This means, literally, one-through-two. Law and order, kith and kin, house and home are well known examples. Hamlet was preoccupied with questions of identity, sameness, and the union of separate selves—joined opposites. I think that the Justice was responding to the cry of redundancy the way Hamlet responded—with strain, stress, as if the parts were related in some not perfectly evident way. Justice Scalia was being very Aristotelian in referring to the essence of compassion. Aristotle differs from Plato in his belief that certain things in the natural world embody essences.

  Donald J. Coleman, MD

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  With reference to your exchange concerning possible redundancy in the phrase “benevolent compassion,” I thought you might be interested in an earlier exchange between a distinguished journalist (certainly no redundancy there) and a distinguished Supreme Court Justice (no redundancy even there) concerning a possible redundancy—and one particularly close to home (or the office) for Justice Scalia.

  In 1935 Herbert Bayard Swope wrote to Chief Justice Hughes, complaining about the legend “Equal Justice Under Law” on the new Supreme Court building. He accused Hughes of “having permitted tautology, verbosity, and redundancy, each of which is an abomination in good usage.” (I’m struggling to determine whether this passage violated his own rules.) Hughes wrote back on February 4:

  Immediate judgment. Indictment quashed.


  The distress that led to your complaint may be somewhat alleviated if for a moment you will free yourself from the tyranny of the blue pencil and consider the history of the law. “Equal Justice” is a time-honored phrase placing a strong emphasis upon impartiality—an emphasis which it is well to retain …

  The letters are in volume 5B of the Hughes papers, in the Library of Congress; the exchange is reported in Merlo Pusey’s biography of Hughes.

  I wonder whether Hughes was correct under Justice Scalia’s test. Equality in some sense is a characteristic that justice always possesses—that, at any rate, was Hughes’s point—but at least arguably it is not “the distinctive characteristic that [justice] conveys.” That strikes me as a close question, though. Certainly, the standard-of-justice icon, which has generated some scholarly interest, suggests that impartiality is in fact “[t]he essence of [justice].” I confess that I have difficulty applying this essentialist standard, which reminds me somewhat of the question whether walking is essential to golf.

  Richard D. Friedman

  University of Michigan Law School

  Ann Arbor, Michigan

  While discussing your thrusts and parries with Justice Scalia, both of you committed a no-no when you misused the word differentiate. Many style books warn about using differentiate instead of distinguish. One differentiates when doing calculus, a physician uses a differential diagnosis when comparing similar diseases, and an electronic circuit can be made to differentiate a train of pulses. Please cease and desist!

  Robert Schroeder

  Trenton, New Jersey

  Connect! Why did the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis, whose accuracy in writing about the framers of the Constitution remains unchallenged, tell his students fanciful fabrications about his supposed military service in Vietnam?

  Edmund Morris, a historian whose fictionalization of parts of his biography of Ronald Reagan drew critical fire, tried to explain in an op-ed article Ellis’s strange departure from the truth. “I am loath to speculate what private motives Professor Ellis may have had,” Morris began, and then speculated, “but as a fellow communicator, I can understand his urgent desire—Only connect!—to convey the divisiveness of the ’60s to a generation rendered comatose by MTV.”

  The literati immediately caught Morris’s allusion to E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End: “She would only point out the salvation that was latent … in the soul of every man. Only connect!” Forster’s exhortation is repeated later to emphasize the desperate need for communication among human beings: “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

  That extended meaning of connect goes far beyond the original “to conjoin, link, fasten together.” In the lexicon of reaching out, it has become the vogue term for “to establish rapport” and beyond that, “to feel a surge of mutual understanding,” sometimes all the way to “have a sensation of instant intimacy.”

  On Valentine’s Day, Jeff Wise of the American Dating Association told ABC’s Alison Stewart, “The No. 1 question-complaint that we get from people is ‘I went on a date, had a great time, we totally connected—but he never called me back again.’ “

  What does it mean to “totally connect“? A youthful source tells me: “The phrase can be used for friends or lovers. It implies not only a certain commonality but also a genuine comfort level. It’s when someone is easy to talk to or hang out with; there’s a certain flow or vibe. In the past, we called it ‘chemistry’ or ‘a spark of electricity.’ If a date didn’t work out, it’s not my fault or his fault, we just didn’t connect.”

  Source of the new sense, my young friend thinks, “is from something high-tech, like an Internet connection. We say, ‘How fast is your connection?’ To connect implies speed, immediacy, getting in touch globally—something you want to happen right away, that you want to feel without missing a beat. It causes a bit of pressure, this expectation to feel something right away.”

  The need for speed in the connection between individuals is influenced by the demand for fast action from computers. “For many young people, there are those moments of frustration when they start up their computers and have to wait to get online,” notes Christine Lindberg, managing editor of Oxford University Press’s American dictionaries. “Finally you’re satisfied, you’ve gone online, you’re connected, you’ve got friends out there in the ether waiting to connect with you. And anywhere they go, online or off, teenagers feel that potential of making an instant connection.”

  When young people take up with a word, can politicians fearing a disconnect be far behind? “A relationship was begun,” said Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois about the meeting between President George W. Bush and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “and that is critically important for those two leaders of Russia and the United States to connect.” Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, reported that “both men connected on a kind of sense of humor.” And for years, though not in a strictly interpersonal sense, candidates for office have been measured on their ability to “connect with the voters.”

  Before its intergenerational sense took over, the verb had a variety of meanings. Jonathan E. Lighter’s Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang lists the sports use, “to hit a baseball hard,” citing pitcher Christy Mathewson’s 1912 “When [Joe] Tinker … connects he hits ’em far.” Another informal sense is “to succeed,” as in the novelist James T. Farrell’s 1933 use, “My wife and I want a kid … but … I just can’t connect.” Best known is the underworld use, “to make a purchase of illicit goods, especially narcotics.” This was immortalized in noun form in the 1971 movie title The French Connection.

  These days, the verb’s popularity illustrates the need not to feel alone. That desire never to be out of touch is touching. “In teen-think,” reports Sheila Anne Feeney of New York’s Daily News, “owning a pager means you are so important you cannot be disconnected from the collective pulse of your peer group even for a moment. You Are Connected.”

  Control Freak. William Hague, leader of the Tory opposition in the House of Commons, rose to denounce the prime minister: “Tony Blair is the control freak who has lost control.” In an editorial about the devolution of power to Wales, Britain’s Daily Telegraph noted, “Tony Blair has acknowledged that he has occasionally acted like the control freak his opponents accuse him of being.”

  The charge has equal puissance on this side of the Atlantic. The Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, used the phrase to describe his Republican counterpart, Trent Lott. And during the recent presidential primary elections, the Austin American-Statesman quoted an unidentified aide to Governor Jane Dee Hull of Arizona as derogating Senator John McCain in these words: “The senator gets very heated about things. He’s a control freak.”

  The favored political attack phrase means “one obsessed by the need to dominate; a person driven by the urge to be in total command.” It is not as serious a blast as totalitarian and does not carry the sexual overtone of dominatrix, but—by suggesting the control is for control’s sake rather than for any rational purpose—imputes more neuroticism than micro-manager.

  That is because control as a noun has become a double-edged sword. To be out of control is to approach what used to be called “raving mad,” but at the other extreme is the grim-faced, white-knuckled control freak, with his obsession to extend untrammeled authority into every detail of others’ lives.

  Meanwhile, the meaning of the slang noun freak—first recorded in Finley Peter Dunne’s 1895 “Mr. Dooley” in the Chicago Evening Post as “the deluded ol’ freak“—has also been getting quirkier with the passage of time. A century ago, it meant “eccentric” or “abnormal,” as in the carnival freak show exploiting specimens of obesity or dwarfism, and later as an adjectival synonym for “aberrational,” “deviant” or “hard to imagine,” as in “freak accident.”

  In the 1960s, it was adopted in drug
lingo as a verb, to freak out, meaning “to rave under the influence of hallucinatory drugs.” It was then applied as a noun in speed freak and acid freak. In his 1977 book, Dispatches, Michael Herr, who had covered the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, applied the term control freak to “one of those people who always … had to know what was coming next.” The term became favored by Hollywood screenwriters and producers dealing with that war; it was repeated in the 1978 film The Deer Hunter and in 1979’s Apocalypse Now. By 1986, the meaning softened to “enthusiast, aficionado, maven,” and Steven Spielberg freely confessed to TV Guide, “I’m a control freak.” (In the same way, language mavens call themselves word freaks.)

  In current use, the meaning of the combination of control and freak has veered toward “neurotic.” In the Boston Globe in 1992, Matthew Gilbert noted how crowds prized the singer Madonna’s “control-freakishness.” Writing four years later about Barbra Streisand, the Sunday Times of London could not decide whether she was “America’s greatest female singer or a power-mad woman whose control-freakishness makes working with her all but impossible save from a kneeling position.”

  That latest interpretation of freakishness as “off the deep end” is why Senator Daschle, when asked about his use of control freak about Senator Lott, hastily backed off: “I say it in a light-hearted way. I don’t mean he is a freak. I’m just saying he’s a control nut.” In Senate rhetoric, evidently nut is far less pejorative than freak. That reflects general usage; to be nutty is to be mildly crackbrained and is often used in self-description of too-earnest advocacy: I readily call myself a “privacy nut,“ but would not flagellate myself as a “privacy freak.”

  A nut is a freak you kind of like. Loosey-goosey descriptive lexicographers, with their anything-goes passivity, deride prescriptive pop grammarians like me as control freaks, but I look bemusedly at those round-heeled dictionary writers as common-usage nuts.