It was also applied to the surrounding movement of an army: “No wearisomnesse of long siege & assault,” goes the translation of the Roman Titus Livius by Philemon Holland in 1600, “is able to raise the Roman armie from any towne once by them invested.” We are now into the siege mentality. To a military strategist, invest means “to surround, to besiege, to cut off escape”—but not to invade or occupy. That’s what Powell had in mind, giving him time to build an internal government, but—if all the scuttlebutt about the inner workings of the National Security Council is true—not what the Pentagon’s Donald Rumsfeld had in mind.
What about investigate? No etymological connection with “cover up,” except in its most modern sense. The ultimate Latin root is vestigium, “footprint,” which investigators track. Forget about it here; it will only lead to confusion. But the verb invest has also long meant “to employ for profitable use,” or at least does mean that in those times when the market has not fallen out of bed.
Those looking glumly at retirement investments know what vested means: “having a consummated right.” Those of us with a quarter-century at the Times are popping our vested buttons. The pejorative phrase vested interest, in regard to the privileged class, was coined by the economist Henry George, who died of a stroke while running for mayor of New York in 1897. In that regard, Aloysius (Just Call Me Vic) Meyers, lieutenant governor of the state of Washington a half-century ago, told voters, “Habitually I go without a vest so that I can’t be accused of standing for the vested interests.” Few caught his play on the original clothing sense of habitually.
In 1948 I covered the investiture of Queen Juliana in Amsterdam, and then the coronation of King Baudouin in Belgium. The Dutch explained to me that investiture is more democratic. The Dutch word, if I can remember some fifty years later, is Inhuldiging, which means something like ennoblement.
Daniel Schorr
National Public Radio
Washington, D.C.
Iron Fist. “They wanted this iron fist to command them.” That was the statement of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, about the need for discipline among the English troops sent to the Canadian frontier in the 1812 war with the United States. The victor over Napoleon at Waterloo became known as “the Iron Duke.”
Iron is hard. An iron hand is rule that is rigid, stubborn, severe, even cruel; iron-fisted has an additional connotation of “parsimonious, closefisted, niggardly.”
Thus it was surprising to read in several articles that an iron fist was in control of the Republican convention in Philadelphia in August 2000. The attribution, though not in direct quotation of a full sentence, was to George W. Bush himself in the week before he became his party’s nominee. In the New York Times, the prescient R. W. Apple Jr. wrote, “If there are abortion rights supporters at the podium this week, for example, they will talk about something else, thanks to what Mr. Bush calls his ‘iron fist’ control of the proceedings.”
That’s a curious phrase from a candidate who popularized the marriage of the adjective compassionate with the noun conservative. The decidedly noncompassionate phrase iron fist has not even the smooth qualifier that Thomas Carlyle reported in 1850 was used by the Iron Duke’s defeated rival: “Soft of speech and manner, yet with an inflexible rigour of command … ‘iron hand in a velvet glove,’ as Napoleon defined it.”
Strange that Bush should adopt that phrase; perhaps it was a slip under stress. Political figures from Austin are sensitive to the political meanings of words.
For example, Karl Rove (invariably described as “Bush’s chief strategist”; there is apparently nobody with the title “deputy strategist”) demonstrated a grasp of nuance in an interview on the New York Times/ABC News Web-cast at the GOP convention. His questioner had asked about the gap between the convention’s “moderate, inclusive message” of those chosen to speak and the notably conservative views of the delegates shown in polls.
“Let me correct,” Rove responded quickly. “You said ‘inclusive and moderate .’ What we’re saying is, it’s ‘inclusive and compassionately conservative .’”
What was the chief strategist’s chief strategy, while accepting the adjective inclusive, in going out of his way to reject the nearly synonymous adjective moderate ?
Rove knew that moderate, when used as a noun, causes political reverberations. From a conservative’s point of view, a moderate is the liberal’s way of avoiding the pejorative tag of liberal. From a liberal’s point of view, moderate is not only self-applicable but also a friendly way of describing a Republican who is not a hard-core, reactionary, troglodyte kook.
The word’s political sense was born in the Eisenhower administration. Minutes of the Nov. 4, 1954, cabinet meeting reported the president using the phrase “a policy of moderation.” Adlai Stevenson, a year later, told a fund-raising audience: “Moderation, yes! Stagnation, no!” At the same dinner, Averell Harriman, a potential opponent for the 1956 Democratic nomination, disagreed: “There is no such word as moderation in the Democratic vocabulary.”
The conservative columnist William F. Buckley wrote at that time, “I resist moderate because it is a base-stealing word for the benefit of GOP liberals.” The Nelson Rockefeller wing of the party at first accepted it in the early ’60s, but then supporters of Barry Goldwater used it in derision, to catch the centrist minority off the Republican political base. On July 14, 1963, Rockefeller denounced Goldwater “extremists” for a philosophy “wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principle.”
I recall dragging a large banner across the San Francisco Cow Palace floor at the 1964 convention that read “Stay in the Mainstream!” But as Francis Bacon pointed out in “On Faction,” written in 1597, “a few who are stiff do tire out a great number that are more moderate.” The Goldwaterite true believers scorned the electoral mainstream and lost in a landslide; four years later, Nixon steered toward it and narrowly won.
In 1968, Nixon and his writers shied from the noun moderate, still inflammatory to “real” Republicans, but embraced its euphemism mainstream. President Gerald Ford, after his 1976 defeat, called a meeting of the Republicans Ronald Reagan, John Connally and Nelson Rockefeller and used an older metaphor: “The Republican tent is big enough to encompass the four individuals who are here today.” As the big tent was replaced by mainstream, both were supplanted by “the politics of inclusion” in the 1980s.
That’s why the iron-fisted Bush chief strategist Karl Rove accepted inclusive and rejected moderate. General Colin Powell followed up with a convention speech hailing George W. Bush’s “passion for inclusion .”
In his acceptance speech to the GOP convention in Philadelphia, Governor Bush repeated compassionate conservatism, defining it in a plain sentence: “It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity.”
Where and when did the phrase (akin to Jack Kemp’s bleeding-heart conservative) originate? In his book, Compassionate Conservatism, Marvin Olasky, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin (and the Bush adviser who suggested the phrase to the Bush campaign), provides a lead. Olasky suggests coinage by Vernon Jordan, then head of the National Urban League, who said on July 22, 1981, in criticism of the Reagan administration, “I do challenge its failure to exhibit a compassionate conservatism .”
However, four months earlier—on March 13, 1981—in an article by Judith Miller of the New York Times, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, said: “I’m a conservative, and proud of it, but I’m a compassionate conservative. I’m not some kind of ultra-right-wing maniac, despite some portrayals in the press.” That remains the current political sense of the phrase.
Iron Triangle. On the eve of his victory in the South Carolina primary, recalling his stunning defeat in New Hampshire, George W. Bush said: “People may not think I’m tough enough, but I am. This is a process of steeling me to become president.”
Newsweek, repo
rting on the “hardening” of the candidate during the rough tactics of that southern campaign, commented, “Consider him steeled .”
The verb, in its sense of “to make hard or strong as steel,” is used in Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis, as Venus says: “Give me my heart … O give it me, lest thy hard heart do steel it, / And being steeled, soft sighs can never grave it.” Governor Bush, in subsequent interviews, repeated the verb; he evidently felt that being steeled is an admirable development in a candidate.
Senator John McCain is also partial to a metallic metaphor. “I’ve taken on the iron triangle: special interests, campaign finance and lobbying,” he said in mid-February 2000. A few weeks earlier, his definition was formulated slightly differently: “The establishment obviously is in a state of extreme distress, if not panic, because they know I have taken on the iron triangle of money, lobbyists and legislation.”
The origin is military. On United States Army maps during the Korean conflict of 1950-53, an area about thirty miles north of the 38th parallel with its apex at Pyonggang and its corners at Chorwon and Kumhwa was marked the Iron Triangle. This was the center anchor of the North Korean defense line and the hub of a communication and supply network. During the Vietnam War, an area of 125 square miles northwest of Saigon was called by the same name. Then the phrase was transferred to Europe and used for nations rather than small areas: in 1977, an editorial in the New York Times called East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia “the USSR’s iron triangle .”
Meanwhile, the military phrase was being used as a synonym for what Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell, called “the military-industrial complex”—that is, the military services, defense contractors and members of Congress busy at the pork barrel. In the ’70s, the term spread beyond the military to include the cozy relationship among federal agencies, congressional committees and lobbyists.
Ronald Reagan, as he was leaving office, substituted the media for the military in his triangulation. “A triangle of institutions—parts of Congress, the media and special-interest groups—is transforming and placing out of focus our constitutional balance,” Reagan warned. Modestly, he did not claim credit for the phrase: “Some have used the term iron triangle to describe what I’m talking about.”
McCain left the media out of his iron triangle, substituting “money,” so that his three corners are now “money, lobbyists and legislation.”
How did his opponent deal with the three-sided ferrous metaphor?
George W. Bush’s department of figure-of-speech ripostes did fairly well. Another sense of triangle is “an iron rod bent in a triangle with one angle open, used as a percussion instrument or bell when struck with another iron rod.”
After being asked frequently about McCain’s symbol, he was readied with a colorful reply. “If a man says, for example,” said Bush, undoubtedly alluding to the man as McCain, “that there’s an iron triangle in Washington, D.C., of lobbyists and special interests, and he’s ringing it like a dinner bell to raise money for his campaign, I think that I have a right to point out that he says one thing and does another.”
Although Bush’s triangle had only two sides, his word-image nicely brought to mind a picture of an iron triangle used sometimes on Texas ranches to call cowhands to dinner.
What is it about iron that attracts phrase makers? John C. Calhoun, vice president under Andrew Jackson, was nicknamed “the cast-iron man” by the English economist Harriet Martineau because he “looks as if he had never been born, and could never be extinguished.” Lou Gehrig, the “iron horse” (originally referring to the railroads), was followed by Cal Ripken, the “iron man,” who broke Gehrig’s endurance record of 2,130 consecutive games in 1995.
But there is a cruel connotation to the word-image. Blood and iron, in German Blut und Eisen, meant “military force as distinguished from diplomacy” and was associated in the 1870s with Prince Bismarck, “the iron chancellor.” Autocratic rule was governance with an iron hand. Churchill famously called the Soviet separation of the tyrannized East and the free West the iron curtain, after a fireproof curtain used in French and English theaters as early as the 18th century. (The Viscountess Snowden, after a visit to Russia soon after World War I, wrote, “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!”) In the United States, the undemonstrative first lady Rosalynn Carter was derogated (unfairly, in retrospect) as “the steel magnolia .” The iron rice bowl was Mao Zedong’s guarantee to China’s workers of a job for life under the Communist system, with cradle-to-grave benefits. President Bill Clinton, celebrating what he believed was the emergence of capitalism in China, said in 1998 that “restructuring state enterprises is critical to building a modern economy, but it is also disrupting settled patterns of life and work, cracking the iron rice bowl .”
Thus, McCain’s iron triangle has a built-in pejorative connotation. Even the triangle has dark memories, as its evocation in necromancy and in the military usages above indicates. There’s also the Bermuda Triangle, where boats disappear mysteriously, as well as the golden triangle, the area of Southeast Asia—Myanmar, Laos and Thailand—where opium is cultivated. (On the other hand, people in rejuvenated downtown Pittsburgh, and Texans in the Beaumont-Orange-Port Arthur area, are happy to call their neighborhoods the golden triangle .)
J
Judge Fights. “‘Borking’ is out. ‘Court packing’ is in.” So wrote E. J.
Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post, using two of the great politico-judicial attack phrases in rapid succession. Comes now the etymology to help readers rap their gavels when slanted words joust with each other.
The notion of court packing can be traced to Lincoln, who wanted a tenth justice on the Supreme Court, and before that to John Adams, whose nominations of “midnight judges” just before he left office caused a ruckus with his successor, Thomas Jefferson, who refused to swear them in.
The phrase packing the Court—always pejorative, imputing one-sidedness—burst on the scene in 1936 in criticism of President Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to appoint a new Supreme Court justice every time one of the “nine old men” (a phrase coined by the columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen) reached the age of seventy and refused to step down.
But the president was seen to have overreached, and his plan backfired; even on the verge of a landslide reelection, FDR was put on the defensive.
“If by that phrase ‘packing the Court’ it is charged,” he said, “that I wish to place on the bench spineless puppets who would disregard the law and would decide specific cases as I wished them to be decided, I make this answer: that no president fit for his office would appoint, and no Senate of honorable men fit for their office would confirm, that kind of appointee to the Supreme Court.”
FDR’s proposal, universally denounced as court packing, died in committee; however, the balance of power on the Court soon shifted to the liberals, causing one wag to note, “A switch in time saved nine.”
Turnabout is fair play. The phrase is now the rallying cry of Democrats worried that Bush nominees to the federal bench at all levels will make the court system more conservative. Said Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, “It sure looks like they are intent on building an ideologically driven court-packing machine.” Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale, writing in the Los Angeles Times, added a note of breathlessness: “We are on the brink of a court-packing crisis .”
Republicans are countering with the eponymous verb possibly first used in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Aug. 20, 1987: “Let’s just hope something enduring results for the justice-to-be, like a new verb: Borked. Dictionaries will say it’s synonymous with ‘maligned.’” This referred to the way Democrats savaged Ronald Reagan’s nominee, the Appeals Court judge Robert H. Bork, the year before.
“A concerted effort to ‘Bork’ John Ashcroft would not be well received,” said Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader, about George W. Bush’s nomination for attorney general. The newly nonc
onfrontational Ashcroft was not borked. (I use the lowercase b now that the verb is established, but then I lowercase draconian and stentorian, over the objections of the strict solon Draco and the Greek herald with the booming voice, Stentor.)
The columnist Fred Barnes went to the eponym himself for a definition. “What it means is to be attacked with a series of—not to put it too strongly—a series of lies and mischaracterizations,” Bork said. “And it is an effort at the politics of personal destruction.”
Debate rages over whether the confirmation criteria should be character and merit, or whether an otherwise estimable nominee should be rejected for holding views that some activists believe are outside the ideological mainstream. It may be that senators will vote on the basis of ideology without getting personal. But in coming months, Democrats will charge Bush with court packing; returning the fire, Bush will deplore borking.
K
Keep It Short. “The use of short words is an art,” writes Nat Bodian in the winter issue of Publishing Research Quarterly, published at Rutgers. “It takes a bit of time to think them up,” he tells us, “but once you learn how to make your thoughts known in short words and to write with them, you will find that they work well and, as a whole, they tend to make good sense.”
Why? “Short words are sharp, clear and to the point,” notes Nat. “They spark the thoughts of those who read them, and they urge them to read on. They let you say what you want, and they leave no doubt as to what you mean. So try to find ways to write in short words when you speak of or deal with books.”
His pick of best names for books? Gone With the Wind, The Joy of Sex, Live and Let Die, A House Is Not a Home, The Prince of Tides, The Way Things Ought to Be, The Cat in the Hat .
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 19