The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Netenclature. Let’s say you wanted to set up a Web site containing the complete works of William Shakespeare, or commenting on the use of bawdy language in his plays, or selling your closetfuls of souvenir Shakespeare busts.

  What would you name it? How about something simple and direct, like shakespeare.com? First you have to see if it has already been taken. Every name has to be registered with the Domain Name System, which translates names into the Internet protocol numbers that route all the computers in the world to a chosen address.

  You start by checking with Network Solutions Inc., registrar of more than eight million domain names, or one of its ninety or so rivals that have sprung up since competition was permitted in the past year. You discover that your proposed shakespeare.com is already taken by a dreary wordplay gamester and shakespeare.org is the site of a nice company of thespians in Lenox, Massachusetts. Also taken are thebard.org and stratford-upon-avon.com.

  Some seeming Shakespearean sites are not Bard-related: soundfury.com lays not on Macbeth but on music, and killalllawyers.com is not an analysis of a slanderous crack by a villain in Henry VI but a compilation of lawyer jokes. (Lawyers sensitive to this relentless spoofing find fun being made of other people on hardyharhar.com.)

  You will find that almost all famous names are already taken by people who were quicker than you. These name claimants either conduct business or educate the world under that domain name, unless they are cybersquat-ters, grabbing the most salable words and well-known names for sale to the highest bidder.

  One enterprising outfit, claiming it was merely protecting me from predatory types warehousing names for sale, “owned” williamsafire.com, and I had to pay to reclaim my identity. (Few others wanted my name, which was somewhat deflating but lucky for me.) Indeed, some 90 percent of the most common words in English are already claimed by the fast operators of “netenclature,” my unregistered appellation for the Internet-naming business or racket. For details on the way the naming system works, click on ICANNWatch.org, a private organization that keeps an eye on the government-sanctioned Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. (A domain name for fed-up television viewers or opponents of voyeurism would be ICANTwatch, surely not registered yet.)

  What’s in a name? As Shakespeare’s Juliet discovered, plenty. This department’s interest is in the more creative names now dotting the linguistic landscape. Some are thoughtful: a site dealing with general semantics, often illustrating the differentiation of words, is thisisnotthat.com. Others compress a readily understandable message into a new compound: bibliofind.com, for example, uses the Greek biblion, “book,” which bibliophiles know, with the English verb to find—you use this Web site to find old books.

  Most people who want access to official White House transcripts and pictures of the first family do not use the correct “top domain” (the suffix-like three letters after the dot). Instead of punching in whitehouse.gov, which would get them a smiling face of President Clinton, they mistakenly use whitehouse.com. This takes them to a site that a pornography distributor shrewdly glommed on to. (It was a commercial trick, not a GOP plot.)

  I have not checked this out because I am writing this on a New York Times computer at the office and can envision the oh-yeah smirk on the face of systems support when I sputter out an explanation that this search lasting several hours was only in furtherance of my scholarly duty.

  But Web criticism, especially self-criticism, is clearly labeled. Worstoftheweb.com competes with the more informal webpagesthatsuck.com. License-plate messaging has been adopted by domain namers: Ubid.com is an auction site; 4800numbers.com helps you find an 800-number; uex-press.com leads you to the free expressions of some columnists.

  Some names are registered by groups that want to protect their members from offense. There is a nigger.com registered, property of the NAACP, to keep the slur from being used by racists. In the same way, the Anti-Defamation League owns kike.com, as well as other top-domain endings. That shows foresight by organizations fighting bigotry. Taking a leaf from their book, political candidates this year have been preempting the names of sites that might be used to embarrass them. Though buddhisttemple is taken, bobjonesu remains available.

  Some names are inexplicable: amazon.com, originally a bookseller, has nothing directly to do with the South American river or the legendary tribe of dominatrixes. Jeff Bezos, creator of that successful site, named it after the river because it carries more water than any other. (The Nile, though longer, carries less water.) Monster.com is an employment finder, so named for no reason I can ascertain other than that is the way some people characterize bosses.

  Many of the best names are those that succinctly describe products. For example, johnnyglow.com sells fluorescent adhesive strips to put on the inside of toilet bowls to aid men who can’t find the light switch in the dark. (The slang term john is applied to men’s lavatories because it was once the most common male first name. I thought I would name my Web site tangent.com, but somebody with a wandering mind already did.)

  Names make not only news but also profits; and as Amelia Bloomer and Captain Boycott taught us, names also make words. We will watch the coming Internet battles over trademark and copyrights in its nomenclature, but just as important, we will keep our sticky eyeballs on the creativity that labels the most eminent domains.

  I enjoyed your reference to amazon.com. You may know this, but Jeff Bezos had originally decided to name his company cadabra.com (as in abra cadabra, it’s magic, I assume) but apparently, when he went to incorporate it, his lawyer pal said it would sound too much like “cadaver.com” and thus turn people off. So he opted for amazon instead.

  Sam Verhovek

  The New York Times

  New York, New York

  Netspionage.E-fraud solicitor is how Steven Philippsohn, a lawyer in London, describes his line of work. In a recent article in Communications World, he used a word that fills a void (once pronounced in Brooklyn as “a woid that fills a verd”): “Netspionage is already affecting computer contractors.”

  Netspionage is a blendword. (That is usually written as blend word, but in my view, its meaning of “mingling” all but forces the two words together.) It uses the net of Internet as a prefix, following Netiquette (for “Internet eti-quette”), Netsploitation movies (which exploit fears of the Internet) and Netspertise (which I don’t have).

  You’ll see plenty of other blendwords created with the net prefix. Forget cyber, from Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics: that was the last decade’s hot combining form. It’s now almost as outdated in the neologism dodge as the suffixes -arama and -aholic.

  Because inter- begins so many words, it is not a popular new combining form. Internesia means “inability to remember where on the Web you saw a particular bit of information,” and I presume a lesson plan to overcome this mental lapse is called an intercourse.

  But let us return to the subject of Netspionage. What new words are the real spooks speaking out there in the cold? A cleaning out of the usual dead drops takes us beyond the computer world and elint (electronic intelligence) into humint—a blendword formed by human and intelligence.

  Here’s one I heard rather than read: skiff, as in the sentence “Is there a skiff where we can talk?” At first, I thought it was a small boat, the word skiff derived from the Germanic schif, akin to ship. But it has nothing to do with naval information; thanks to Thomas Powers, author of Heisenberg’s War, I am informed that it is the sound of an acronym—SCIF—secret compartmented intelligence facility.

  “Secret compartmented intelligence,” says Powers, “is a level of classification for a class of intelligence that’s above top secret. A SCIF is a room that has been secured and sealed under very tight regulations, where classified information can be safely discussed, read and handled.”

  We used to call that a “clean room.” At Spaso House, our embassy in Moscow, I recall meeting other presidential aides in a soundproof, penetration-proof room built inside another
, less secure room, whose walls were suspected to have ears. Now such a room within a room is called a SCIF.

  Another relatively new term of the clandestine arts is perception management. David Wise, in his book Cassidy’s Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas, notes that this phrase means “the manipulation of the perceptions of the target country. But the latest term of art, like its predecessors, boiled down to the same thing—tricking an adversary into believing false information by persuading it that a source, actually under U.S. control, was selling America’s secrets.”

  I asked Wise if he had picked up any of the latest spookspeak from Yasenovo, the suburban Moscow headquarters of the KGB. (That agency now calls itself the SVR, but Americans still refer to it with the name by which it came to be known and feared.) Just as the CIA calls itself “the Company,” Wise reports, the KGB now refers to Yasenovo as Kontora, “the Office.” Fake passports are called, in Russian, “shoes” because the passport forgers are called “cobblers.” What we call a dead drop—often a tree in which secrets are left to be picked up by another agent—is dubok, or “little oak.”

  Because United States policy frowns on assassinations, the intelligence community needed a phrase to cover the idea of bombing the general area in which an unfriendly dictator or terrorist is likely to be resident. Such attacks are now enshrined in bureaucratese as regime lethal. U.S. News & World Report spotted the usage regarding Saddam Hussein in November 1998, defining it as “targeting the dictator and the powerful Revolutionary Guard units that keep him in power.”

  Ed Epstein, author of Dossier: The Secret Life ofArmand Hammer, reports that mole hunt now has a pejorative connotation, bottomed as it is on witch hunt. In that regard, sickthink, coined on the analogy of doublethink and groupthink, means “a predisposition to believe one’s own agents are controlled by the other side.” Sickthink is usually accompanied by intimations of paranoia and mutterings about counterspies who grow orchids.

  Deer park is defined by Epstein as “a diplomatic area, like the U.N., in which headhunters recruit agents.” (I am informed by the novelist Norman Mailer, who titled a 1955 book about a decadent Hollywood The DeerPark, that he dimly recollects taking that title from a passage in The PrivateLife of Louis XV in which Mouffle d’Angerville described le parc aux cerfs as a wooded area near the court of Versailles where stags—male courtiers—would seek out the does, courtesans selling sexual favors. Spymasters like such literary conceits.)

  In examining the new words of espionage, let us not neglect the secrets of an old word about secret dealings. Surreptitious means “taken by stealth; unauthorized; clandestine.” It comes from the Latin surreptitius, “obtained by surreption,” with the rep from rapere, “to quickly seize or snatch,” also the root of rapid and rape.

  You never heard the word surreption? Neither did I; the form the word takes is always the adjective, never the noun. But the Oxford English Dictionary says the obsolete term means “suppression of truth or fact for the purpose of obtaining something; fraudulent misrepresentation.” I’ll find a use for it when some politician clams up.

  Now about clam up, a 1916 Americanism that describes what a good spy does when caught. But how did a clam, known for its ability to shut itself tightly, clamping its shell, get its name? From the Teutonic klamb, “to press or squeeze together.” Before that, and perhaps unrelatedly, we have the Latin clam, “secretly, in private”; the m changed to n, which led to clandestinus, “secret, hidden”—and to the work of those who practice legal surreption in the clandestine service.

  Never Said It. “Let them eat cake.” Those words have come ringing down the centuries as the height of hauteur. Marie Antoinette was never able to live them down, even after the queen followed her husband, Louis XVI, to the guillotine after the French Revolution. To this day, whenever a hard-hearted trickle-downer suggests that a rising tide lifts all the boats, he or she is denounced for having “an arrogant let-them-eat-cake attitude,” unconcerned with the needs of the common people.

  She never said it. The source of this canard is the sixth book of The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, ‘Let them eat cake.’” (The words, in French, read “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”)

  However, these words were written in or about 1770, the same year the daughter of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire arrived in France to marry its crown prince. Rousseau was attributing that saying to some other “great princess.” The truth about Marie was just the opposite: she recognized the need for austerity at court and reduced the royal household staff, but in so doing offended snooty nobles, who proceeded to down-mouth her for posterity. I get incensed at this historical linguistic injustice every time I look up the phrase.

  Nor is that the only never-said-it. Who can forget “The Guard dies, but never surrenders” (“Le Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas”)? The Count Cambronne, the head of Napoleon’s most loyal troops at the battle ofWa-terloo, and to whom it was attributed, went to his grave wishing we would forget it, because he insisted that he never said it. A half-century after the battle, the writer Edouard Fournier credited a reporter named Rougemont with the creation of the ringing phrase. It may be counter-apocryphal, but some say the count’s battlefield response to a demand for surrender was the expletive “merde!”—a favorite Hemingway word for excrement and sometimes referred to in France as “le mot de Cambronne.”

  These belated corrections are made here today because of a response received after a correction of a more recent misconception: Richard Nixon’s never-said “I have a secret plan to end the war.” I challenged anyone to come up with a contemporary citation directly quoting the 1968 candidate saying it; nobody ever has.

  Because word got around the White House that great misattributions were being straightened out in this space, the following handwritten note came in from Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser: “Bill-Since you have asserted frequently that Bill Clinton is the ‘architect of the strategic partnership’ with Beijing, and because you are a stickler for the facts, I would like you to show me one instance in which the President describes the relationship as a strategic partnership.”

  Gee, could it be that Clinton is being unjustly saddled with a never-said-it? You can get hundreds of citation hits on the databases when you type in “strategic partnership” and “Clinton.” An article in Japan’s daily Yomiuri Shimbun in 1998: “Last year, Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited the United States, and this year, U.S. President Bill Clinton returned the visit. On both occasions, the two countries began using the term ‘strategic partnership’ between the two powers to describe their relationship.” Robyn Lim wrote recently in the International Herald Tribune, “Two years ago, Mr. Clinton announced a ‘strategic partnership’ with China.” And a vituperative right-wing New York Times columnist (albeit a stickler for the facts) has been writing frequently of “Clinton, architect of the discredited ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing.” Could we all be wrong?

  Berger goes on: “On many occasions we have said that we would hope to develop a strategic partnership, i.e., described it as an aspirational goal. But there is a big difference between describing an objective for the future and what exists today. I can provide you what the President actually said in Beijing.”

  And so, upon my eager request, he did. On July 3, 1998, the president (Times style, unlike White House style, is to lowercase the name of the office) said in Hong Kong, “My view is that the potential we have for a strategic partnership is quite strong.” This followed by five days Jiang Zemin’s usage: “progress in the direction of building a constructive strategic partnership.”

  In each case, and in a dozen other citations provided by the White House, the Clinton context is, as Berger asserts, “aspirational”—a hope for the future. If the future were the only context for the Clinton use of the phrase, then all of us who have been deriding the p
resident as “architect of the discredited policy of a strategic partnership”—as if it signified his notion of a present state of affairs—would surely owe him and his advisers abject apologies.

  And yet there is the problem of the Clinton statement to business leaders in Shanghai on July 1, 1998, dutifully provided by the White House. Discussing normal trade treatment for China, an issue then known as MFN (for “most favored nation”), Clinton warned what would happen if Congress did not respond to his plea to vote to renew the normal treatment.

  “Failure to renew that would sever our economic ties,” he said, “denying us the benefits of China’s growth, endangering the strategic partnership, turning our back on the world’s largest nation at a time when cooperation for peace and stability is more important and more productive than ever.”

  When Berger saw that citation, he must have uttered an American translation of le mot de Cambronne, but to his credit he did not remove it from the file. A close analysis of the structure of that sentence, especially its concluding “at a time” clause, indicates clearly that the president was speaking of the strategic partnership as something now in existence- a current relationship that would be endangered if Congress failed to act as he wished. Had he only put prospective, potential or hoped-for in front of the key phrase, the Berger hypothesis would have been unchallengeable.

  You could say in Clinton’s defense that he was ad-libbing and intended to follow the agreed-upon future formulation but just slipped into the present tense on a single occasion. And it is undeniable that the other Clinton and Jiang citations follow the prospective-relationship formula.

  What’s fair? We should recall the raw deals that loose historians have given the brioche-free Marie Antoinette, the die-hard count and the secretplan less Nixon. Unless other usages surface, accuracy-stickling Sino-phobes should limit themselves to castigating “the ‘strategic partnership’ that Clinton frequently hoped for and in one instance suggested his policy produced.”