The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Coordinates. I was in a meeting with Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel laureate who has long been preeminent in biodefense. When asked by another scientist where he could be reached the following week, Lederberg passed along a card with a crisp “Here are my coordinates.”

  There’s a useful word for these times. Instead of saying, “Here’s my business address, along with e-mail address, private e-mail address, fax number, pager number, cell phone, office phone, home phone, pager-scheduler and the digital answering machine with caller ID next to my bed,” I can now lump together the whole modern communications litany with “my coordinates.” This locution will prove especially helpful to people whose business cards run three pages.

  The origin of the noun is in geometry. George Crabb in 1823 defined co-ordinates (now dropping its hyphen) as “a term applied to the absciss and ordinates when taken in connexion,” later better known as the magnitudes that determine the position of a point; geographers and navigators still later used coordinates to describe the use of longitude and latitude in locating a spot on the globe.

  People in the military, accustomed to map terminology, have taken to using the plural noun to mean “precisely where a person is.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, asked, “Do you have any better handle on where bin Laden is?” replied, “I have a handle, but I don’t have coordinates.” (This is not to be confused with the sense used in the fashion world, as “colors and materials that blend harmoniously and are intended to be worn together.” Rumsfeld wears suits and rarely appears in coordinates.)

  Recent citations in the extended sense of “how to reach me” are Canadian: checking on her Quebec “citizenship,” Arabella Bowen wrote in the Gazette in Montreal in 1999 that a voter-registration official looked at her documents and “confirmed my coordinates.” A year later, Rosa Harris Adler wrote in the Ottawa Citizen, “I walked into one of the dry cleaners in my new neighborhood … and gave the guy behind the counter my coordinates.”

  That sense of personal location has flashed around the world. In Moscow this year, at a news conference called to expose corruption in the Ministry for Atomic Energy, Ivan Blokov of Greenpeace charged that “pressure was put on all the members of that faction who voted against the amendment. I can give you the coordinates of people who can confirm this.” The Russian word used was koordinatu.

  The origin may be in satellite coordinates, the space equivalent of latitude and longitude, which news media need to get a “feed” from a satel-lite; the phrase is bandied about by White House press secretaries. An alternate theory: “Coordinates has been part of the Wired parlance since at least 1996,” reports William O. Goggins, deputy editor of the magazine Wired. “My gut read”—presumably his instinctive response—“is that an, if not the, origin of this locution is ‘Star Trek.’ Think transporter room.”

  The Russian word you mentioned is spelled koordinaty, not koordinatu. The former is the plural form, and the latter is the dative case of the singular.

  Russians have been using this word for a long time in the sense of “contact information.” When I was a kid in the ’70s, it was already an old people’s joke, so the usage is probably quite old. It certainly came about before the age of wireless communications. It probably comes from sailor’s parlance—one would ask a girl her coordinates to hint at one’s adventurous occupation. I would not be surprised to find that Russian borrowed the use of the word from another language, too. While borrowing a word is a relatively rare occurrence, borrowing another use of an existing word is much more common cross-fertilization of languages, and could be traced to some mistakes a nonnative speaker makes that native speakers find interesting.

  My coordinates:

  Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin

  Bowling Green State University

  Bowling Green, Ohio

  I think you missed the true origin of coordinates. It is a French import, which explains your tracing it to bilingual Canada. It has long been standard and common in French, and appears in any full-sized French dictionary, under the entry “coordonner.”

  And there is good reason. The notion of coordinates was invented by the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, the same fellow who thought that he was. When he turned his attention to the question of where he was, he came up with what we mathematicians call to this day the Cartesian coordinate system.

  Evans Harrell

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Cover Story. Within a week of the terrorist attack, George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington and said, “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.” In remarks to State Department employees on October 4, President Bush spoke warmly of “stories of Christian and Jewish women alike helping women of cover, Arab-American women, go shop because they’re afraid to leave their home.”

  At a televised news conference a week later, he reprised this ecumenical theme: “In many cities when Christian and Jewish women learned that Muslim women, women of cover, were afraid of going out of their homes alone … they went shopping with them … an act that shows the world the true nature of America.” He repeated that phrase, women of cover, calling “such an outpouring of compassion … such a wonderful example.”

  The cover is a veil that expresses Muslim piety. The hijab, meaning “cover, curtain,” can range from a floral kerchief that leaves the face exposed, to the niqab, abbaya or in Persian, chador, which covers the whole body except the face, to the burka, as worn in Afghanistan, which covers everything. “To have good hijab” is a general term meaning “to be properly covered.” Some Muslim women believe that the cover need not be worn outside the mosque. The linguistic question: in describing the wearers of the veil, is it women who cover, as the president first used it, or women of cover?

  Sue Obeidi, at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, uses women who cover, women who wear the scarf and women who wear hijab. She is unfamiliar with women of cover, and I cannot find it in databases.

  It’s possible that the president coined the phrase; if so, it was on the analogy of women of color, a description adopted by many nonwhites. (Though colored people is dated and almost a slur, people of color is not in the least offensive.) The substitution of who with of in the cover category introduces a nice parallel to the women of color phrase; we’ll see if it takes.

  Crying Woof! “We can sell all the woof tickets we want,” the Washington Wizards’ basketball forward Juwan Howard said, but “it’s about performance out there…. We’ve got to get it together.”

  “Any idea what Juwan Howard is talking about?” Joe Anderson of Arlington, Virginia, asks.

  As early as 1985, Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune defined selling woof tickets as “an invitation to fight.” In 1996, Jane Kennedy of the San Francisco Examiner called it “telling lies.” In the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Betty Parham and Gerrie Ferris wrote in 1992, “Although its origin is uncertain, ‘woof ticket’ is a somewhat dated phrase that refers to an outrageous or exaggerated boast meant to intimidate or impress the listener.” Woof is a Black English pronunciation of wolf. According to Geneva Smitherman’s 1994 Black Talk, a woof ticket is “a verbal threat, which one sells to somebody; may or may not be real. Often used as a strategy to make another person back down and surrender to what that person perceives as a superior power.”

  Tom McIntyre, professor of special education at Hunter College in New York, noted nearly a decade ago: “Woofing is especially effective against those who are unfamiliar with it and don’t realize that it is most often ‘all show and no go.’ … The menacing behavior can usually be defused and eliminated by informed, tactful action.” He advised teachers to “look secure and self-assured while you withdraw.”

  In the context of the basketball star Howard’s remarks, woof tickets are not to be bought; on the contrary, he uses the phrase to show that performance, and not intimidating attitude, is needed to “
get it together.”

  A woof ticket is a provocation: a threat, accusation, insult, or other statement that is sufficiently injurious to justify violent retaliation. It comes from the verb “to woof.” Thus a student who can no longer find his pencil might turn to a nearby kid and say, “’ey why you takin’ ma pencil, man?” The accused might reply, “You woofin’?” In white talk, “Do you want to make something of it?”

  The origin had nothing to do with “wolf.” The metaphor was of a barking watchdog (“woof, woof!”). It was assumed that the one doing the woofin’ expected his recipient (the woofee, as it were) to feel the same fear a person would have when confronted by an aggressive barking dog, and to back away from confrontation with the same prudent concern for self-preservation.

  The phrase “woof ticket” was most often heard in the context of the never-ending game of trading humorous insults, what sociologists call “the dozens” but we have always referred to as “rank-out sessions.” Speaker A might start off with, “Maaaan, in yo’ house, the roaches are so big the rats carry switch-blades!” Speaker B could return the volley with a comparable rank-out, such as “Ya’ll live in the only house I know where you can stand on the roof and get hit by a truck!” an amusingly oblique but recognizable reference to the ubiquitous urban structure more generally known as the sewer.

  A woof ticket need not lead to fight or flight, however. One who is truly skilled at the repartee of “ranking out,” or who correctly sizes up the woofer as having more bark than bite, could manage to keep things verbal rather than physical, for example with mockery: “He swear he bad! He rank you out so low you can play handball off the curb!” That is, “He thinks he’s tough; his insults are truly hurtful! He can really make a person feel small!”

  By the 1970s, “woof ticket” had disappeared from the speech of young black Americans, though it may still be remembered among those who are old enough. I can’t think of any other expression that I would consider its direct successor, though the practice of verbal provocation certainly survived both in life and art. In fact I recall a friend my age using the expression about 1973, and then remarking that he hadn’t heard anyone say it in a long time. I’ve since read that “woofin’ “ is still sometimes used among jazz musicians to describe the back-and-forth challenges between instrumental soloists. If it is true that “woof ticket” did not emerge into the mainstream print media until the 1980s and 1990s sources you cited, I would consider it a fascinating example of a short-lived slang locution entering written usage decades after it had achieved obsolescence in its original oral context.

  Peter Jeffery

  Princeton University

  Guilford, Connecticut

  D

  Dash It All. The stately colon, the confiding parenthesis and the gently pausing comma demand to know: What’s behind today’s big dash to the dash? Why has this lingua interruptus—expressing uncertainty, jerking the reader around, setting up startling conclusions, imitating patterns of speech—come to dominate our prose?

  In the preceding paragraph, I used a pair of dashes to interrupt a sentence and insert supplementary material that gave the question meaning or—to writers, at least—urgency. I could as easily have used a pair of parentheses, specifically designed for the purpose of graceful interjection of useful explication. In the sentence beginning this paragraph, I could again have used parentheses (“parens” to friends) or even commas to separate the mild interjection of “to writers, at least,” but I didn’t. Why not? Because I have fallen into the habit of trying too often to make writing read like speaking.

  The spoken sentence is filled with uttered second thoughts, changes of direction, lurches off on tangents and similar twists. That’s because we say what we think as we think it, and thoughts have a way of tumbling over one another, and we stick them in our flow of words as each notion comes to us. In this age of raw transcription, art strains to imitate life, and artful writers feel the pressure to mirror the speech patterns of yammering people by imitating their higgledy-piggledy outpouring of unedited thoughts.

  That transcribed-speech technique is fine for writers of fiction and is especially apt for playwrights and screenwriters who reveal the characters’ characters realistically through their speech. Some characters blurt their thoughts, showing honesty; others weasel their words, showing duplicity; yet others expostulate grammatically but endlessly, showing off. Writers of drama must write speech, not writing, because real people do not speak writing. Hence we have pauses, delays—you get my drift?—half-stops, restarts, stammering and exclamatory grunts (ugh!) and drifting off into pre-dot-com ellipses … To put this speech in written form—that is, to transcribe it—we have seen the powerful punch—pow! right in the kisser—of illustrative punctuation.

  Good dramatic writers are in favor of whatever turns the reader on. In an 1863 poem, Emily Dickinson, writing in the halting voice of a woman dying, used the dash to signify gasping for breath: “I am alive—I guess—/ The Branches on my Hand / Are full of Morning Glory—/ And at my finger’s end—/ The Carmine—tingles warm—/ And if I hold a Glass / Across my Mouth—it blurs it—/ Physician’s—proof of Breath—/ I am alive …”

  In our time, the writing of Tom Wolfe has made stylish use of the dash; he combines it with italics and the mid-sentence exclamation point to indicate herky-jerkiness or panic in thinking. In an article in the current Harper’s deriding the critics of American “triumphalism,” the iconoclastic Wolfe steps into their shoes to write, “After the Soviet archives were opened up—I mean, damn!—it looks like Hiss and the Rosenbergs actually were Soviet agents—and even the Witch Hunt, which was one of the bedrocks of our beliefs—damn again!—…” That’s the use of fictional internal monologue in a nonfiction article, and the dash does its job of chopping up the speech.

  But writers of narrative and exposition, as well as those who present fiction in the third person, choose to use the language in the voice of the writer and not of a character. The written sentence, which is not to be confused with the spoken sentence that has been transcribed, gives its creator a chance to rethink the ideas that have come off the top of the head, to reassemble them in an orderly series, to snip off the stupidities and shoot the strays, thereby to marshal a cogent argument or paint a striking image.

  On Punctuation Highway, the writer-as-speaker is a dasher, only half-braking at every stop sign; the writer-as-writer measures every pause, uses a comma for the speed bump and a semicolon to proceed with caution at the balancing of closely related complete thoughts, as in this sentence. The colon, a strict setter-up of things to follow, is like an arrow that says “Now watch this” to the reader, but it is too often replaced by the do-anything dash.

  Professor Richard Veit of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington disagrees with me about the danger of the em, which is the typographer’s term for the length of the dash: it’s as long as the letter Min the same font. “Technically, no function of the em couldn’t be handled by other punctuation—comma, colon, semicolon, period or parentheses,” he notes. “The impact of the em is not syntactic but visual. Its shape and length demand a pause and impart drama. It sets up a punch line in a way a colon cannot. Arthur Wallace Calhoun put a code of the Old South into words in 1918: ‘A woman’s name should appear in print but twice—when she marries and when she dies.’ “ That was then; now, just as women appear in print a lot, the dash appears too often. I acknowledge that dashes can be useful—say, to add an example—and are surely more emphatic than parentheses (without the sly sharing of confidence with the reader). And the dash is indispensible for surrounding a list that already contains commas—weakly beginning a sentence with a conjunction, misspelling indispensable, and incorrectly using a comma before the and preceding the final item in a series—but undiluted dashiness has become the mark of the slapdash writer who fails to take the trouble to differentiate among the pauses of punctuation.

  Writing is different from speaking. Organize your written thoughts s
o that you don’t have to stud your sentences with asides, sudden additions, curses or last-minute entries. Limit your use of the dash to its indisp—to those functions where it beats the other punctuation pauses—or else.

  I very much enjoyed—as usual—your witty, learned, and enlightening discourse on the subtle properties of the dash in modern punctuation. Your keen analysis displayed a good deal of dash-not to put too fine a point on it—and you doubtless did not dash it off in a jiffy, as it were. Nonetheless, your resident Latin censor—dash it all—must have been dozing when he allowed a certain lapsus calami (aka “slip of the pen”) to pass his watchful eye. You will probably receive a sack full of mail from all your faithful admirers who finished a semester of Latin, so my humble contribution will by now be merely old hash—no rhyme intended.

  I am, of course, referring to your allusion concerning “lingua interruptus,” which, I am almost tempted to suspect, you might have dangled before your eager readers as a tempting bait. As you see, I am one of the innocents who fell for your ruse.

  By now, I have no doubt, you have been lectured ad nauseam about this petty point, so I shall just briefly confirm what you already know; i.e., that the term in question ought to be either “lingua interrupta”—or, stylistically more preferable—“oratia interrupta,” or, if you insist on “interruptus”—and who would not under such circumstance—the noun ought to be “sermo,” which is masculine, and thus in agreement with the adjective. For in Latin, which has three grammatical genders, nouns and adjectives must agree, to make a proper, if not dashing impression.

  Hoping you will not look askance at this punctilious observation on behalf of what is, after all, a dead lingua.