The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  John S. Wilkins

  Rosepine, Louisiana

  M

  M-commerce. Lord knows, this department tries to keep up. But no sooner is the letter e fixed firmly in my mind in all its permutations as the key to the new electronic world (e-commerce, e-mail, e-whatever) than along come the jargoneers of digitese with another letter to thrust it aside. Here comes m-commerce .

  M is not for the million things your mother gave you, as the old song went. Rather, it stands for mobile; as the Internet speeds up transactions, mobility is where it’s at. (And where it’s at is no longer where it’s at, either; I am on the lookout for the latest phrase for what the French still call au courant .)

  “M-commerce is e-commerce that’s done over mobile phones and other hand-held digital devices like personal digital assistants,” writes the Business Times of Singapore. “It covers buying and selling everything from stocks to flowers, using handphones and PDA’s.” (Just be careful of chewing gum while m-commercing on Lee Kwan Yew’s tight little island-you could wind up running from a cane.)

  Though a British outfit named Logica claims coinage in 1997, the locution is now coming on stream. “Just when the language has begun to absorb the letter ‘e’ as a prefix,” notes Katie Hafner in the New York Times, “comes the latest twist on electronic money and the language of the digital age: mobile commerce, or m-commerce, which promises to turn your cell phone or hand-held organizer into an electronic wallet.” She quotes Richard Siber of Andersen Consulting as foreseeing the day when “m-commerce will be bigger than e-commerce .”

  Dunno ’bout that. (That’s how impatient e-mail writers, rat-tat-tat justlike that, express “I am not so sure that linguistic prediction is well founded.” That may bring in a lot of m-mail, a locution coined right here and now.) Both phrases use commerce as the suffix; electronic, the source for the e-prefix, is a more general term than mobile and may subsume it. Thus we would have “mobile electronic commerce” as against stationary electronic commerce (the sort you’re involved with when ordering ki-wiburgers while parked), but that would bring us m-e commerce, too late for the “me generation.”

  The key to mobile electronic commerce, as I get it, is the ability to peddle while pedaling, or to buy on the fly. “Rather than stand in front of a soda machine fishing for a dollar bill that is neither too faded nor too wrinkled,” writes Hafner, “you may someday simply dial the phone number posted on the machine.”

  Here my with-it colleague has lapsed into an archaism. Dial, the noun, originally meant “the graduated face of a timepiece,” as in a sundial, rooted in the Latin for “day.” Some of us can remember when the verb to dial meant “to turn a disk with numbered finger holes.” This verb was generalized, as linguists like Sol Steinmetz say, into touching the numbers on a touch-tone phone that has no dial. (Another such new generalization is to bookmark, which meant “to place a marker in a book” but which has a newer sense of “to mark the address of a Web site.”)

  Will the archaism to dial persevere in a dial-free age? Will we long refer to digits on the broadcast spectrum as “on your radio dial”? Will marketers of the deodorant soap have to rename their product? My guess is the verb will be replaced not by punch, poke or jab, which suggest dialing in anger, but by key, press or tip, as in “fingertip.” We are likely to tip in rather than dial the numbers. (Where am I? Back to the future.)

  In a recent conversation in advanced digit-English with the Times’ new-media guru, Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of Times Company Digital, I was told that my column might someday, in audio or video form, be part of streaming media. That was satisfying; I like my prose to go with the flow. Writing in a 1995 Interactive Age (you were expecting maybe Intrapassive Era?), Richard Karpinski defined streaming media as delivering “audio and video on demand, rather than requiring a user to download a file off the Web and play it back from a local drive.” In that way, the simultaneous display and transfer of sound and image can be watched and heard as the data flows in.

  And now for some shovelware. A word association with streaming media leaps to mind: screaming meemies. This expression, origin obscure, was first defined in the New Republic in 1927 as a synonym for drunkenness. It soon came to mean “hysterics” like those in subsequent DTs, or delirium tremens. In World War II, allied soldiers applied it to the Nebelwerfer, a German multibarreled rocket mortar that went off with a series of high-pitched sounds.

  Shovelware, according to Eric Raymond’s Jargon File, is “a slipshod compilation of software dumped onto a CD-ROM without much care for organization or even usability.” Its source, I recall vividly, is the newspaper term “editing with a shovel,” applied to editors who fail to trim copy of extraneous paragraphs used by lazy writers who have a certain space to fill. It’s nice to see that the old “slug it ‘Slay’” lingo has found a place in the streaming, screaming media-meemie language of technology.

  Your poor old mother probably worked hard enough trying to make a nice person out of you already, without adding to her burden.

  If you are going to quote old tunes, get ’em right.

  “M” is for the many things she gave you. Not “million.” How busy couldshe have been? Nit nit nit nit nit nit nit nit nit nit. (Choose one.)

  Bill Richards

  Queensbury, New York

  Millenarian. On the subject of Greek coinage and the Espy playfulness: what shall we call a person who has lived in the second millennium?

  “Duomillenarian has wrong connotations,” replies Frederic G. Cassidy,* chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and “Greek is better in any case as more classical.” So with DARE’s classicist, George Goebel, the great lexicographer turned from Latin to Greek: deutero means “second” and chiliast refers to the biblical “kingdom of a thousand years.”

  Thus, deuterochiliast, “a person of, or anything characteristic of, the second millennium.” Drop this coinage in a conversation; see if it clanks.

  Mine Run. Writing for the majority in a Supreme Court decision early this year, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used a phrase about a Missouri judicial rule dealing with continuances: “like the mine run of procedural rules.” Steve Allen of Jersey City notes that mine run was used four times in recent years, three by Ginsburg, one by Chief Justice Rehnquist, and wonders, What does it mean?

  The lexicographer David Barnhart spotted a 1994 use in the American Lawyer Newspapers Group—“in the ‘mine run’ of cases”—and James A.

  Landau, a computer engineer who lives in Linwood, New Jersey, finds a recent citation of “ordinary, mine-run politicians” and adds, “You really ought to look up Robert E. Lee’s celebrated victory over the Union on Dec. 2, 1863.”

  This variant of run of the mill and run of the kiln came out of the bituminous coal industry.Mine run, like its cousins, is an extraordinary way of saying “ordinary.” The run means “normal course,” a metaphoric extension of “stream, running brook,” like Bull Run, or the stream west of Chancel-lorsville, Virginia, that is a tributary of the Rapidan, where Union forces under Maj. Gen. George Meade took a long look across Mine Run and decided not to launch an attack against the Confederates. Northerners characterize the “battle of Mine Run” as “inconclusive”; Southerners treat it as a victory.

  I suspect that mine run has gripped the legal profession because it is not as drearily ordinary as run of the mill.

  Mole. In pursuit of the nuances of spookspeak, the arcane language of the intelligence “community,” I have been in correspondence with Aldrich Ames. He was the classic mole: a CIA employee secretly in the pay of the Soviet Union. His spying for cash led to Moscow Central’s execution of a dozen American sources.

  “Mole is the best example of jargon created by literary or journalistic use,” Ames writes from his cell in the Allenwood Federal Penitentiary in White Deer, Pennsylvania. “Whether or not SIS [the Senior Intelligence Service] ever used it, it gradually entered use in the American community from John le Carré’s novels.”


  A few weeks ago, the FBI arrested another American espionage official and accused him of serving for nine years as a KGB mole in its ranks. In an affidavit supporting the arrest warrant for Robert Hanssen, the Feds included a glossary of intelligence terms; though the government lexicographers did not dare to deal with terms as colorful as mole, they subtly corrected a recent error in this space. I had defined SCIF as an acronym for “secret compartmented information facility,” a room sealed and secured from prying eyes and ears. Got the S wrong; change that “secret” to “sensitive.”

  An agent in place or recruitment in place, swears the FBI (an affidavit is, by definition, sworn; I swear by my definitions, too), is “a person who remains in a position while acting under the direction of a hostile intelligence service, so as to obtain current intelligence information.” The glossary differentiates this from an illegal, “who operates in a foreign country in the guise of a private person and is often present under false identity.”

  Hanssen is accused of being an agent in place, as Ames was, who utilized a dead drop, defined by the FBI as “a prearranged hidden location used for the clandestine exchange … which avoids the necessity of an intelligence officer and an agent being present at the same time.” (A dead drop is a noun phrase; drop-dead is a compound adjective and is not spookspeak unless in a formulation like “Mata Hari took the SCI document to her dead drop in a drop-dead dress.”) When the location is marked by a chalk mark or piece of tape, it is considered “loaded” with stolen data or payment for same and becomes a signal site .

  A double agent is said by the FBI to be an agent “engaged in clandestine activity for two or more intelligence services who provides information about one service to another.” In his letter from Allenwood, Rick Ames offered a subtler definition: “A double agent may be of two sorts: one who was a bona fide agent of an espionage service but who was turned, tumbled or recruited by another without the first service’s knowledge or one who falsely gains the trust of an espionage service in order to serve another. A dangle would be of the latter sort, one who volunteers, walks in or brings himself attractively to the attention of the target service.”

  I had asked Ames for the etymology of wet work. “This is a literal translation of the GRU/NKVD [former Soviet intelligence agencies] jargon for ‘killing’-assassination or elimination of people by murder. It’s never been used as CIA jargon, since no comparable operational programs existed. The closest to it would be executive action, under which assassination, physical violence of some sort or other extreme (and highly compartmented) action could be carried out.”

  What about the fearsome euphemism termination with extreme prejudice? “The phrase termination with prejudice has nothing to do with extreme actions (ditto for extreme prejudice),” he notes, “but merely with the discharge of an agent and a notation not to rehire.”

  There goes a nicely sinister phrase back into bureaucratic limbo.

  What about traces? “The idea here is the product of an inquiry to a database,” Ames writes, “traditionally a card index in which the cards contain information on persons or things and usually a cross-reference to documents and files from which the index cards were prepared. Trace as espionage jargon surely was adapted from similar usages in the wider world: skip trace, or lest we forget Mr. Keene, tracer of lost persons.”

  (Skip trace is the method of tracking down a missing person—one who has “skipped,” or run away—by checking credit-card and hotel registration records, as in “the girl in the drop-dead dress at the dead drop hired Mr. Keene to put in a skip trace to find the deadbeat dad.” My age group shares with Ames the memory of Mr. Keene, a radio character in the ’40s who came on between Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy and The Green Hornet.)

  And what of the linguistic workings of Hanssen’s mind, beyond the confines of spookspeak? If the file of correspondence between accused spy and Kremlin control is authentic, we have Hanssen writing to the KGB, “I have proven inveterately loyal.”

  Inveterate, its root the same as veteran’s, has a historical sense of “long-standing” but with a sinister connotation: Shakespeare’s Richard II was assured of “no inveterate malice,” and John Milton in 1645 questioned those who “grow inveterately wicked.” Even today, the synonyms are “obstinate, habitual, malignant, hardened.” Unless Hanssen was being exquisitely subtle about the evil empire for which he is charged with spying, he should not have modified loyal with inveterately .

  Worse, the accused spy is an inveterate mixer of metaphor. “So far,” reads his purported letter to the KGB, “my ship has successfully navigated the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The last seven words are from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, wholly out of sync with the navigation of a ship. Literate spooks saw a sea of troubles in that; Hanssen would more suitably have navigated Scylla and Charybdis.

  However, in sending a warning to his Moscow handlers about the FBI’s closing in on Felix Bloch, an American diplomat suspected of somewhat clumsily spying for the Russians, Hanssen wrote with dialectical accuracy, “Bloch was such a shnook… . I almost hated protecting him.”

  Synonymous with jerk or the more recent nerd, shnook is an Americanized Yiddishism probably derived from the German Schnucke, “a small or weak sheep.” (Hanssen, Leo Rosten and I all spell it without the c .)

  Shnook is not proper spookspeak and surely confused the KGB control in charge of the mole. Unless, of course, some skilled dialectologist in the KGB concocted the file in order to place Hanssen in our hands as a grand dangle, but that is what spookspeak calls sickthink .

  I do not believe you are correct in placing Mr. Keene between Jack Armstrong and the Green Hornet. When I grew up in the thirties, it was Jack Armstrong, Little Orphan Annie, and Superman that I listened to. Mr. Keene was for adults, and would have been post-dinner fare. However, since by the forties I was into baseball and disdaining of those kids’ shows and Mr. Keene, I have no proof you are wrong (hence my use of the word “believe” above).

  I also believe that you were stretching in describing Mata Hari as “going to a dead drop in a drop-dead dress.” Why would she want to attract the attentionof every slobbering agent in the country while she was doing her dirty work? Ordinary clothing would have been far more effective.

  George Gerson

  Westfield, New Jersey

  “SIS,” as used by Aldrich Ames and quoted in your column, does not standfor “Senior Intelligence Service.” It stands for “Secret Intelligence Service,”the British agency more widely known as “MI6.”

  In spook history, it also stands for (a) the Special Intelligence Service of theFBI, the WWII American overseas intelligence service in the Western Hemisphere; (b) the Signal Intelligence Service, the communications intelligence service of the United States Army; (c) Servizio Informazioni Segrete, the intelligence service of the Italian Navy.

  Thaddeus Holt

  Former Undersecretary of the Army

  Point Clear, Alabama

  A second column on spookspeak, and I’m happy to see my rather gray comments were of some use to you. And I’m sure you’re accustomed to your correspondents’ endless follow-ups!

  I didn’t spell out SIS, unfortunately, it’s Secret Intelligence Service. Over there, the “Senior Service” is the Royal Navy (and I can’t resist the echo of “Silent Service” for the submariners in the U.S. Navy).

  My handwriting is at fault at another point. You quote me on a double agent as “one who was turned, tumbled or recruited.” I meant my scribble to read “doubled.” But “tumbled” is very nice, indeed, a serendipitous discovery which would be a lively addition to the jargon. If you’re working on another spy novel, maybe you can help it along.

  Secret, special and sensitive are adjectives beloved of espionage bureaucrats. They allow boxes of organizational charts representing unmentionable functions to be given names. (Angleton’s CI staff [James J. Angleton and CIA counterintelligence] was a prolific user.) So when you see
the “S,” be careful.

  As I re-read my comments on “wet work,” I wonder if you’ve already heard protests about my phrase, “since no comparable operations [CIA] programs existed.” It’s my belief that the agency’s assassinations have always been ad hoc efforts, organized usually at the behest of policymakers above the agency—and usually unsuccessful. I suppose I would be a bit less shocked today were we to learn otherwise, than I was in the early ’70s by the ad hoc operations. I had been assured for years, secretly and solemnly by senior and working-level agency officers, that while accidents and violent political events can kill, the agency had not and would not embark on an assassination.

  The “in place” term is rather old-fashioned; we must remember that the FBI is a counterespionage service, and picks up espionage jargon only at second hand and often not quite with the same understanding (I should say that the FBI has a really fine and vivid jargon of its own). “In place” originated as a way of contrasting an agent with a defector. “Defector in place” or even “to defeat someone in place” was common usage in the late ’50s and into the ’60s, but is pretty much dead today. But the “in place” was attractive because it suggested that the agent was where the action was, inside an institutional target. “Penetration agent” is a good variant on this idea. But at this point I am trying your patience, so will close.

  Aldrich Ames

  White Deer, Pennsylvania

  The Yiddishism shnook is not derived from German Schnucke, “a small or weak sheep.” This derivation, from Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, is wrong, as Rosten himself acknowledged in his later book, Hooray for Yiddish! Yiddish shnuk means, “an elephant’s trunk, a snout.” And the transferred sense of “jerk” is a slangy American innovation.