A kind of linguistic full circle was reached when Arabs in the Middle East sought to reject the Jewish state in their midst by evoking the word so long associated with Israel: the PLO, in Article 1 of its national charter of 1968, stated, “Palestine is the national homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland.” (Later, a spokesman appropriated another Israeli phrase in demanding “a right of return.”)
Then, in 1997, the U.S. government got into the homeland act. In the Quadrennial Defense Review mandated by Congress, a defense panel was set up to rethink military strategy up to 2020. The panel foresaw a need to counter potential terrorism and other “transnational threats to the sovereign territory of the nation.” Its recommendation of an “increased emphasis on homeland defense” did not get much attention.
Almost one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States, the Bush administration established an Office of Homeland Security. Why was security substituted for defense? A rationale was set forward that security was the umbrella term, incorporating local and national public-health preparedness for attack, the defense of the nation offered by the armed services, plus the intelligence and internal security activities of the CIA, FBI and local police. (In fact, I’m told by secret nomenclature sources, security was chosen because the Defense Department did not want any jurisdictional confusion with the new White House organization.)
Americans have adopted homeland much as Russians chose motherland and Germans fatherland. An association exists with the World War II phrase the home front, which was a metaphor then (as opposed to war front) but is a reality now in light of September 11.
The British are different. “Home on the range, home of the brave, hometown boy,” wrote John Mullan in Britain’s Guardian. “Perhaps ‘home’ is an easier word for patriotic Americans than it would be for us. Homeliness is at a premium in such anxious times … a word was wanted that sounded reassuring but unaggressive. Americans have become more sensitive or more wary about the homeliness of their geopolitical talk.” In referring to their place of origin, speakers of British English prefer this country to homeland.
Mullan’s usage brings up a tangential point: Britons use homeliness for what we would call homeyness. To Americans, homely has unfortunately come to mean “almost ugly.” We still use the compound adjective downhome to mean “unpretentious, devoid of affectation,” and homeboy is black slang for a friend in or from the neighborhood, but the lovely homely is an insult. This shows a lack of appreciation for the boy or girl next door.
Contrariwise, the Yiddish haimish means “homely” but is a compliment, suggesting home cooking for food and a homebody for a person who does not long for dancing in nightclubs or trips to spas. Few Americans use homelike, which I apply warmly to residents of my homeland.
Hooking Up. “Only yesterday,” notes the copywriter for the Farrar, Straus & Giroux fall catalog, “boys and girls spoke of embracing and kissing (necking) as getting to first base. Second base was deep kissing, plus groping and fondling this and that.” No longer; first base is today deep kissing, also known as tonsil hockey. The writer then speeds up to date in orally touching second and rounding third base, which is now “going all the way,” and slides home with a surprise twist of the old sex-as-baseball metaphor: “Home plate is being introduced by name.”
The occasion for this recollection and updating of antediluvian teenage lingo is the promotion of a new book of essays and short fiction by Tom Wolfe titled Hooking Up. “How rarely our hooked-up boys and girls are introduced by name!” laments the promotion copy, which goes on to promise a chronicle of “everything from the sexual manners and mores of teenagers to fundamental changes in the way human beings now regard themselves, thanks to the new fields of genetics and neuroscience.”
Wolfe has a sensitivity to le mot juste in describing social phenomena. The title of his Right Stuff, a book about the early astronauts, has now become part of the language, as is his popularization of the mathematicians’ pushing the envelope. In selecting Hooking Up as his title, he is again on the cusp of usage.
When we hear a sultry seductress say to an aging Lothario, “We’ll hook up one of these days,” what does her promise mean? (A Lothario is a male deceiver, from a character in Nicholas Rowe’s 1703 play, The Fair Penitent. My need to point this out is what philologists call “coinage compulsion.”)
The compound noun hook-up (which the Times no longer hyphenates) was born in a political context in 1903, as “a hook-up with the reform bunch,” and meant a general linkage. In 1930, the term became specific, as “a national hook-up” came to denote a radio network.
As a verb, to hook up has for a century also meant “to marry,” a synonym of “to get hitched,” as a horse is to a wagon. But not until the 1980s did the meaning change to a less formal sexual involvement. It was first defined as “to pick someone up at a party” and then progressed to “become sexually involved with; to make out.”
The swinging sense mainstreamed in 1995. “A few women insist,” wrote USA Today, “they never go out with the intention of ‘hooking up’ or having sex,” while a CNN commentator noted, “The kids see shacking up and hooking up as the equivalent of marriage.” In 1997, the Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted a Brown University student as saying, “In a normal Brown relationship, you meet, get drunk, hook up and then either avoid eye contact the next day or find yourself in a relationship.” The scholarly reporter noted, “Depending on the context, a hook-up can mean anything from 20 minutes of strenuous kissing to spending the night together fully clothed to sexual intercourse.”
To be hooked, taken from the fishing vocabulary, is to be addicted to drugs; however, with the addition of up to make the compound, the term has no sinister narcotics meaning. In current usage, which may not last long and is probably already fading, it most often means “have a sexual relationship.” Nor is the “linking” verb limited to American English. An exasperated Liz Jones, editor of Marie Claire, wrote in the Sunday Times of London this year about men who are habitual sexual deceivers (Lotharios), “Are all men like this or is it just the ones I hook up with?”
Let’s go back to first base. Tonsil hockey, as used at Farrar, Straus & Giroux to mean “deep kissing,” is at least a decade old, having replaced tonsil boxing. A more recent variation is tongue sushi, which shows some metaphoric imagination: the Japanese sushi—cold rice rolled up with bits of raw fish and vegetables—is evoked to describe the mutual rolling-up of teenage linguae engaged in lubricious osculation.
Tonsil hockey goalies have, in a spasm of good taste, rejected the phrase, popular in the ’80s, to suck face. That undeniably vivid but odious locution seems to have been replaced in some localities with the almost euphemistic mess around. Its variants include mashing, macking (from smack, the sound of a kiss) and mugging, the senses of which run the semantic gamut from “flirting” to “foreplay with no intention of intercourse.” Those familiar with Old Slang would call it “taking a long lead off first base.”
Though hooking up seems a mediumistic metaphor for what used to be euphemized as “sleeping together,” it is more romantic than the phrase in current use on college campuses: parallel parking .
“Hooked up” and “hook up” have at least two meanings in auto racing. In drag racing or acceleration testing, a car hooks up when, after initial wheel-spin (one word in car magazines), the tires finally grab the pavement and the car takes off. In track racing, particularly but not exclusively NASCAR stock car racing, a car is said to be hooked up when it is handling ideally well and not incidentally is easy to drive fast enough to be a winner.
John Strother
Princeton, New Jersey
Hurr I. Your eyeglasses have been specked with dust or speckled with stains. Or, as in my case, a new Bernese Mountain puppy has besmeared my spectacles with the saliva dog lovers call “puppy lick.”
No source of moisture is near with which to clean the glasses. What do you do? The answer is
easy: you breathe heavily on the lenses to form a vapor on them, which you wipe off with a tissue.
Question: What is the verb to describe the action you take to moisturize the lens? There is no single correct answer, but in regional-dialect coinage, there are always some answers. Sitting next to me in our car with our puppy, Geneva, wriggling on her lap, my wife, Helene, said, “You’d better hurr on your glasses if you expect to see the road.”
That was onomatopoeia in action. The sound of deliberately expelling breath is hurr or huh or, in cases involving irate discovery, hah! In this instance, the sound created the verb first cited in a 1947 American Speech quarterly as “Huh-ing your glasses.”
I believe the new member of your household belongs to a breed properly known as the Bernese Mountain Dog. That makes her a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy. A Bernese Mountain puppy is a Swiss hill.
Patricia M. Sherwood
Editor, The Quotable Dog Lover
Windham, Connecticut
Hurr II. You want to clean your glasses. You are in the middle of a desert and no water is handy, so you breathe heavily on your spectacles to form a vapor on them. The question was posed here to the Lexicographic Irregulars: what is the verb to describe the action you take to moisturize the lenses?
The purpose of this scholarly endeavor is not merely to survey the different locutions for the same action in regional English (“different strokes for different folks,” as painters, lovers and the cardiologists say). More to the pedagogical point, this snapshot of varied usage is to illuminate the competition that precedes the acceptance of a neologism in the general language.
We began with hurr: “You’d better hurr on your glasses if you expect to see the road” was the sentence used to stimulate discussion, backed up with a 1947 citation for huh, sometimes pronounced hunh. “One of my daily chores when I was commissioned in the RAF during World War II,” writes Horace Hone of Palm Coast, Florida, “was to polish the brass buttons on my tunic. Occasionally we would pass muster by breathing on them and giving a brisk rub. This was known as huhing and preceded your citation by half a decade.”
Thirty-five percent of the innumerable participants in the survey chose some form of this onomatopoeic verb, from haar and haw to harf and hauch. The hauch form, three readers noted, is from the German hauchen, “to exhale.” (A related verb for the same action, according to Hans Van Wouw-Koeleman of Old Bennington, Vermont, is the Dutch ademen, derived from the Sanskrit atma, “spirit, breath.” People everywhere have been blowing on glass for a long time.)
An important subsection of the aspirate-h category is huff. The most famous use of this verb is in Joseph Jacobs’s 1890 English Fairy Tales, perhaps using the great 19th-century lexicographer James Halliwell as the source, when a wolf seeks to intimidate three little pigs with “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.”
The wolf was a fox in an 1813 version, whose house-blowing was foiled by three little goslings, and is not to be confused with an unrelated story about three little kittens who lost their mittens. The wolf was not characterized as big, bad until 1933. In a Disney Silly Symphony animated cartoon, the songwriters Frank Churchill and Ann Ronell enlivened the tale of the three little pigs with the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” To many Depression-era moviegoers, the wolf symbolized hard times, and the piglets’ triumphant defiance of the huffing and puffing was taken as an expression of resolute optimism, similar to “Happy Days Are Here Again.” (Even today, when stock market bears huff and puff their pessimism, some analysts reply, “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.”)
The fairy-tale marriage of huff and puff followed the pairing of the two rhyming verbs in John Phillips’s 1678 parody of Virgil’s Aeneid: “And puff and huff and toyl and moyl.” (I refrain from citing an earlier scatological pairing; the coolest guess at the origin of huff is the OED’s “imitative of the sound of a blast of air through an orifice.”)
Controversy rages among etymologists over the meaning of huff. “I believe the big, bad wolf huffed when he was inhaling,” e-mails Tim Gaston. This is based on logic; how can one puff out without first having huffed in? The century-old Century Dictionary defines the verb huff as “to swell; puff; distend,” but adds that puff does not mean “blow”; rather, it means “to puff up, inflate.”
Inhalation is also suggested by the phrase to be in a huff, or to be huffy; that is, to be swelled up with anger or arrogance. Many years ago, when I was building model airplanes with my cousin Bobby Siegmeister, we became happily cross-eyed from the smell of the glue; today, sniffing glue or aerosol gas, a dangerous activity, is known as huffing .
Therefore, I reject to huff as the preferred verb meaning “to blow on one’s glasses to moisten them with vapor.” Actors and orators will dispute this rejection, arguing heatedly that making the sound of the aspirate h, as in ha-ha-ha, engages the diaphragm and should be associated only with exhaling. Let ’em; prescriptive usagists ain’t cream puffs.
Other entries in the moisturization derby included blow, breathe, mist, steam, expire, phumph, yawn, whoo and pft-too .
And the winner is … (A digression. In the Academy Award presentations, we never heard the familiar phrase “And the winner is.” Instead, every celebrated presenter, marching in linguistic lockstep, said, “And the award goes to.” That is because the academy, ever sensitive to hurt feelings, decreed that there were to be no winners. Why? Because, as the MC, Steve Martin, noted, “God forbid anyone should think of this as a competition.” Use of winner would suggest that those nominees who did not receive the award were losers, and in Hollywood nobody is to be more reviled than a loser. In the enforced absence of the word winner, the tight-lipped or sobbing stars who were not called up to the stage are supposed to be considered nonawardees. They’re losers, he said huffily.)
And in the usage contest for “verb to describe the way water-deprived Magoos clean our glasses,” the winner is—
Hurr III. “The best way to clean a lens,” advised Time-Life’s 1970 Photographer’s Handbook, “is to blow away dust, then ‘fog’ the glass with your breath.” John P. Knight of Seattle sends that citation with “I remember my father showing me how to fog up my glasses when I was 11.” Jonathan Carleton of Santa Fe, New Mexico, thinks it is “on the analogy of physicians of a former day passing mirrors under comatose patients’ noses to see whether they ‘fogged the mirror,’ that is, were breathing.”
Fully 45 percent of the votes, or hotly aspirated assertions, were for fog or befog. Those of us who hurr, huh, breathe and spit are in a vanishing minority, but at least we can all see where we’re going.
Fog is fine, but I would put fog up into the same unnecessary pigeon-hole as listen up.
Victoria Matthews
Denver, Colorado
Hyper. Forget cyber; Norbert Wiener’s once-modernistic combining form is passé. And super is positively archaic, no longer the “soupa” used by teenagers munching subs. Get with the hot prefix of our times: hyper .
This El Supremo of prefixes has in the past generation become a term in itself: we have clipped hyperactive to the simple hyper, its meaning ranging from “excitable” to “keyed up” to “frantic.” More recently, this Greek word for “over, above, beyond” has gained mastery in the worlds of diplomacy and communication.
Though the United States seemed content with being the world’s only superpower, that word did not have a pejorative enough connotation for the French. In February 1999, France’s foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, called the U.S. a hyperpower, which he defined as “a country that is dominant or predominant in all categories … attitudes, concepts, language and modes of life.” He elaborated later that “the word superpower is no longer sufficient to describe the United States. That’s why I use the term hyperpower, which American media think is aggressive…. We cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyperpower .”
The diplomat probabl
y bottomed his coinage on hypermarché, in English hypermarket, which means “a large supermarket.” The French president, Jacques Chirac, aware that Védrine’s term implied American arrogance, assured Craig Whitney of the New York Times in December 1999 that “when Védrine said America was a hyperpower there was nothing pejorative about it.” Whitney noted that this was because Chirac “knew it sent American officials into overdrive.”
After Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began introducing herself to him as “hyperMadeleine,” Védrine adopted Chirac’s amelioration, insisting, “En français, ‘hyper’ n’est pas péjoratif.” The opposite is true; it is an accusation of hegemony, carrying what he admits is “la connotation pathologique.” Why did Védrine make it the essence of France’s attitude toward the U.S.? Only because, he claims, it’s a more original word than superpower: “Superpuissance, c’est banal .”
The old word text is apparently also considered banal or hackneyed in a world where the written word is only one part of the vast communications scheme. Hence the rise of hypertext .
Most of us think of a hypertext link as the letters that come up in blue on your computer screen, often preceded by www. (Whoops! As I just typed the three w’s followed by the instruction to the copy editor “unitalics,” the letters turned blue, as if suddenly deprived of oxygen. Why do I have to wrestle with my word-processing program for control of the color of my own text? Who owns which?) You click on the hypertext link and get shot to someplace else, which often offers other links inviting you to get lost in hyperspace.
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 17