The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Writing about the movie The Mummy Returns, the UPI Hollywood reporter Vernon Scott pulled out all the lingual stops: “While plots for mummy movies thicken and special effects provide more gaudy mayhem, the deep, primeval horror of the walking dead has been well, er, ah, deadened, so to speak.” The reader who did not appreciate that metaphoric play must be wrapped in gauze.

  The publication that led the way in the use of the arch pause is the Economist. In 1975, it wrote of the lawyers in the offices of Arab nations participating in the economic boycott of Israel: “Each office has the task of seeing that its country’s trade relations are strictly, er, kosher.” A year later, it wrote that “for Westminster to interfere with Edinburgh would be like, er, the House of Lords rejecting Commons legislation.” And in the same month, an article on industrial success was headlined, “Take a Bow, Britain (er,Wales).”

  In British English, the self-deprecating hesitation or Churchillian stutter is often used to draw attention to what follows; Rudyard Kipling in 1913 described life in smoking rooms as seen “through clouds of ‘Ers’ and ‘Ums.’” Americans tend to see it as expressive of indecision. I put that to Johnny Grimond, editor of the Economist’s style guide: “Probably when we’ve resorted to er or um, it’s not so much an indication of indecision,” he replied with authority, “but when one is led inexorably to a conclusion that is embarrassing or awkward or obvious.”

  Geoffrey Nunberg, who does a regular language feature on NPR’s Fresh Air, says he thinks that the use of the written er, um, uh, is an articulation of the dash, with which writers like Thackeray and Trollope indicated a rethinking of what went before. “In theory, in writing there should never be any false starts and pauses. When you use er or um, you are reproducing in a fictitious way the process of communication. It’s a specious sense of the writer letting you in on the business of composition.” Nunberg fears, as I do, that we’ll see much more of this reconstruction of the writer’s thought process in e-mail, which usually revels in the conversational and prefers the appearance of a work in progress.

  If the goal of the writer is to reflect a character’s sloppy spoken language or to set on paper some revealing oral self-correction, then the pauses signified by er and its ilk serve a communicative purpose. We all make sounds that show we are thinking before we speak, and a writer’s recording of them, though sometimes annoying, adds verisimilitude to dialogue.

  But that’s not the arch pause in narrative or commentary. My target today is not just the signifier for “Here comes one of my best zingers” but the one that says, “I ostentatiously hesitate to say this.” A good example of the latter is in a note that President George Bush the elder wrote to his wife, Barbara, after being told that his opponent, Michael Dukakis, was scoring points with voters by showing public affection for his wife, Kitty. “Sweetsie, please look at how Mike and Kitty do it,” Bush wrote. “Try to be closer in, more—well, er romantic—on camera.”

  I inveigh against the use of the written grunt because either it assumes the reader is an ignoramus or it needlessly apologizes for a writer’s attempt at wit. Do not presume that your reader is moving his lips as he reads your prose. Do not be afraid to deliver the nudes.

  Euphemism Watch. In Shakespeare’s time, they were called gravediggers. Then they got organized, raised prices and named themselves undertakers. When that acquired a too-gloomy connotation, they changed it to morticians. But now that caretakers have given way to caregivers, and even sharing has been overtaken by caring as the most pious participle, we have—trumpeted in a reverential, hushed ta-dah!—the deathcare industry.

  The other major euphemism to burst forth this year is the diplomatic replacement for rogue state. The earliest use I can find of this phrase was in a 1983 Wall Street Journal story noting that smokestack industries have “won Ohio a largely deserved reputation as a rogue state on the environment.” Two years later, the columnist William Pfaff first applied it in its current sense: “The Soviet Union had deliberately isolated itself. Its role was that of a rogue state, a revolutionary power that challenged all the others.”

  In recent years, the phrase has been applied to states like Libya, Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Sudan, Syria and North Korea that supported or condoned the presence of terrorists. Last month, however, on National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm Show, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright revealed an official smoothing-over: “We are now calling these states states of concern.” Asked about this new locution, State spokesman Richard Boucher said of Iraq, a hard-core rogue state in the earlier formulation, that it had become “a state previously known as rogue.”

  Problem solved; worry removed. Of course, if one of those states of concern gets hold of a nuclear or biological missile, it could be a bonanza for the deathcare industry.

  Eviscerate. A word with a fearsome and odious primary meaning has been adopted by our military to describe the effect of our air power on the enemy in Afghanistan.

  At a Pentagon briefing, Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold informed reporters that “the combat power of the Taliban has been eviscerated.” The vivid verb became the basis of a front-page headline in theWashington Post: “Pentagon: Taliban Forces ‘Eviscerated.’ ”

  Eviscerate has to do with the removal of the viscera, or “internal organs.” A visceral reaction is also called a gut reaction, because the noun gut means “intestine, entrails.” (Only in the plural, guts, does that word gain the meaning of “courage,” or “intestinal fortitude.”) Thus, the literal meaning of the verb eviscerate is “disembowel, gut.” It evokes the image of medieval combat with swords.

  But it gave rise to a figurative sense, less bloody-minded: “to deprive of essential parts, to remove the essence of.” Interviewed by Fox News the day after the Pentagon briefing, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel, said that in considering the possibility of a Palestinian state, air and water rights would have to be restricted: “You’ll eviscerate a lot of those powers that are normally associated with sovereignty.” Also using that figurative sense, Seth Waxman, solicitor general in the Clinton administration, wrote in the Boston Globe, “Statutory provisions that permit information-sharing relating to terrorism do not eviscerate constitutional freedom.”

  Headline writers have to be careful to apply the verb to a power, using the figurative sense, and not to military forces made up of people, seeming to take the original sense. Such disempowering, rather than disemboweling, is what the Pentagon general surely had in mind.

  Eviscerate is the removal of contents of a multiple-layered cavity or organ, according to our terminology. As an ophthalmologist, when I eviscerate an eye I remove its contents without removing the eyeball itself (i.e., the scleral shell).

  Heskel Haddad, MD

  New York, New York

  Eviscerate is the term preferred by feminists and other right-minded people to emasculate, as it is gender neutral and has the added advantage of not insulting those of us who are non-masculine by nature.

  Beverly S. Cohen

  New York, New York

  F

  Fall Fashionese. “For Fall,” headlined the Times’ fashion page, “Some Swash, Some Buckle and a Tougher Look.”

  To swash, as every swordsman knows, is to swing your blade violently so as to make a great clanging sound on the buckler, or shield, of your opponent. Your noisy blustering does not hurt anybody, but such intimidating braggadocio satisfies your urge to swagger, especially when it is difficult to see anything through your iron visor. Hence, the 1560 word swashbuckler, “a swaggering ruffian,” defined now as the 2001 woman with the tough high-fashion attitude.

  Vogue magazine’s September 2001 issue featured ten pages of a hard-eyed supermodel in thigh-high, flat-heeled boots wearing what appeared to me to be a chef ’s hat made of fur, as if created by a cook about to visit a walk-in meat refrigerator. One caption under a threatening pose by the usually delectable Nadja Auermann read, “She’ll lead you on with toques to die for.”

  Toque is a
French word for “cap,” most famous as toque blanche, the tall white hat originally worn by chefs in monasteries and now the phrase that adorns a thousand bistros. The word appeared early in English spelled toockes; perhaps because this might cause confusion among Seventh Avenue designers with its homonym in Yiddish, the French spelling and pronunciation are preferred. When trimmed with fox to go with the leathery equestrian dominatrix look, the toque has a Russian air. (If the czar only knew …)

  “So what gives with all this hard extravagance with the economy in a soft slump?” wrote my colleague Cathy Horyn in her sparkling analysis of the new toughness. (The phrase What gives?, first cited in John O’Hara’s 1940 novel, Pal Joey, is a direct translation of the German Was gibt’s?, an idiom meaning “What is happening?” Editors permit such informal, with-it usage on fashion, op-ed and sports pages, where au courant prose is encouraged.)

  I prevailed on Horyn to translate some of the words in her article. It seems that the peasant look adopted in Tom Ford’s collection for Yves Saint Laurent “consists of nothing more than a ruched blouse” with “nicely done ruching.”

  “Ruching, pronounced rooshing, is a common technique in dressmaking and curtain making for gathering fabric and making it pucker,” she informed me. “It is looser looking than smocking. Picture the neckline of a peasant blouse that might be worn off the shoulders. That look has turned up a lot in fashion for this fall.” (Further etymology takes the French word ruche to “beehive,” an allusion to the frills and plaits of a straw hive.)

  She wrote of women wearing “distressed leather or roughed-up shearling … jodhpurs and a blanket cape closed with a snaffle-bit buckle.” That compound adjective, more than four centuries old, describes a gentle form of bridle bit. “It’s a bit for a horse’s mouth, made up of two metal bars joined by a circular piece of metal,” Horyn said. “It’s a bit, typically for English-style riding, not western, and has long been a fashion detail. Gucci put a small snaffle bit on his loafer, and it’s been widely copied.” (This is useful information for Washington pundits: when I see a lobbyist on K Street’s “Gucci Gulch,” I’ll look down at his shoes and say, “Nice snaffle-bit buckle.”)

  “It remains to be seen,” goes the fashion forecast, “how many soufflé-size toques and capacious Elmer Fudd trapper hats will be worn.” What kind of hat? “It’s like a trapper hat with flaps on the ears—same idea but more generous in shape. The toque has always been a sort of elegant shape in fashion, but not the Elmer Fudd, which is now just everywhere.”

  Fudd is not a competitor of L.L. Bean. Further investigation reveals him to be the animated cartoon character created by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones in 1939 who quickly became the dupe of Bugs Bunny. “The root word for ‘befuddled’ is fudd,“ goes facetious ad copy on the Warner Brothers Web site, “and the prefix for fudd is Elmer.”

  He wears a tall cap without earflaps but with a distinctive visor, and when you see one on a glowering glamour girl or atop a mannequin in Bergdorf’s window, you’ll know what’s up, Doc. And was gibt’s, too.

  Toque is not French for cap, which is casquette. A toque is a type of hat that is cylindrical in shape and of which the top is several inches about the top of the head. It is worn by judges and tall toques by chefs.

  Toqué is colloquial for crazy—hence toquade, an infatuation with someone or something.

  Jacques Barzun

  San Antonio, Texas

  I have always heard that the term “Gucci Gulch” refers not to K Street, but to the hallway outside the Ways and Means Committee room in the Longworth Building.

  Roger M. Schwartz

  Princeton, New Jersey

  Farewell My Lovely Miss/Ms./Mrs. The Associated Press, reflecting the desire of the great majority of its newspaper members, has just dropped the use of the courtesy titles Miss, Mrs. and Ms. in its news reports.

  That means that the first reference to Emily Jones is her full name, and the second reference is merely Jones, the same way men are treated. Gee; after all the battling that went on years ago in this space to get the New York Times to adopt Ms., out it goes.

  Not completely; the Times, in the main news sections, will continue to use courtesy titles on second reference for both men and women. But, according to the stylebook, “The Times Magazine and the Book Review, edited in the more literary style of a weekend periodical, omit all courtesy titles.” I suppose it all has to do with the appearance of sexual equality. If you don’t use the Mr. instead of repeating the first name for men, equality demands the same treatment for women. And who would be so boldly old-fashioned and out of joint as to stand up for any form of inequality? Here goes. It’s not such a hot idea because it needlessly conceals information useful to the reader—specifically, the sex of the person being written about. I could understand the change if first names reflected sex as in olden times: “Emily Jones today was appointed commandant of the Marine Corps. Jones, who is 19, said …” In that article, the reader knows that a woman was appointed and needs no courtesy title in front of the second reference unless interested in the commandant’s marital status, which the reader knows is none of his or her business, and do you have a problem with that?

  The problem I have with that is that you can no longer tell the boys from the girls by their given names. A lineup of Alex, Chris, Pat, Brett, Ashley, Cameron, Meredith, Adrian and Leslie could be a bearded baseball team or a Miss America pageant (soon to be the America pageant, skip the honorific). Here’s the story: “Cameron Jones today bench-pressed 300 pounds in the Olympic trials. Jones, not even out of breath, said …” Is that a normal weight lifter’s story, or a breakthrough for the human spirit? How does an editor know, from the copy, whether to bury it or call for a picture to be emblazoned across the front page?

  Maybe the new AP rule is a space saver and will boost journalism’s profits. It doesn’t strike me as helpful to the reader, and in my nonliterary style I will resolutely continue to use the Ms. I fought for, but sometimes I feel as lonely as the guy who played the harp in Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl Orchestra.

  Federalism. Janus, the Roman god who was guardian of gates and doors, is depicted with his bearded face looking forward and backward at the same time; this helped him watch everybody. It is the metaphoric source of “Janus words,” those confusing terms that mean both one thing and its opposite, like cleave (“to split” and “to cling”) or sanction (“to approve” and “to punish”). Janus has now taken over the central word defining the American system of government. Federalism is suffering through a semantic crisis and needs our help.

  A headline in the New York Times over an article about a case that pitched states’ rights against the authority of the national government read: “Supreme Court, in Blow to Federalism, Shields States From Age Discrimination Suits.” Linda Greenhouse reported that the court, “continuing its march in the direction of states’ rights, ruled today that Congress lacked the authority to bind state governments to the federal law that bars discrimination against older workers.”

  That was surely a blow to the federal (by which we mean “national”) government in Washington, but was it a blow to federalism? The founding fathers (a paternalistic but accurate alliteration coined in 1918 by Senator Warren G. Harding) would say no. Not if you take the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of that word (coined in 1788 by Patrick Henry with his irate question, “Is this federalism?”). The OED answers his query with “that form of government in which two or more states constitute a political unity while remaining more or less independent with regard to their internal affairs.”

  Other lexicographers agree about the essence of the federalist idea, which is to divide power between a central authority and its constituent political units. But right from the start two centuries ago, confusion was built in; to George Washington, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, federalism accentuated the unity that only a strong central government could provide. To Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who formed a faction they called “r
epublican” but that was promptly labeled Anti-Federalist, federalism emphasized the diffusion of power to levels of government closest to the people and furthest from royalism—at that time, the states.

  When Jefferson defeated the Hamilton-Adams Federalists to become president, he famously said, “We are all Federalists,“ to absorb the defeated party. But the word’s meaning was no longer just “a power-sharing arrangement among national and regional sovereignties”; its primary sense had become “a strong central government.” These meanings, if not antithetical, are at least Janus-like in their difference.

  Some political scientists today are reverting to the power-sharing meaning. “While Federalists in 1787 advocated creation of a powerful central government,” reports Warren Richey in the Christian Science Monitor, “those advocating federalism today are seeking a resurgence of a federal-state balance as mandated in the Constitution.”

  This linguistic case is ripe for semantic decision; certiorari accepted. Federal (from foedus, “league”) is an adjective that has come to mean “characteristic of a national union” and not “of a confederation”; federalize, despite the powers denied the national government and reserved for the states and the people in the Tenth Amendment, is a verb meaning “to bring under central control.”

  However, the Supreme Court, even as it has recently been devolving power from the central government to the states, cleaves to the earliest meaning: Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a decision this month briefly departing from that decentralizing trend, said that a federal law protecting drivers’ privacy over South Carolina’s objections “did not run afoul of the federalism principles.” He was using federalism as Patrick Henry did, in the sense of “sharing power.”