The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  No Child Behind. Democrats are somewhat irked at the adoption by President Bush of a phrase that belonged to education reformers: to leave no child behind.

  “If schools do not teach and will not change,” he told a campaign rally in October 2000, “instead of accepting the status quo, we will give parents better options, different choices. We’ll leave no child behind in America.”

  When President Bush’s first budget proposed reductions in some childcare programs, the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote: “He hijacked the copyrighted slogan of the liberal Children’s Defense Fund and then repeated the slogan like a mantra, telling anyone who would listen that his administration would ‘leave no child behind.’ Mr. Bush has only been president two months, and already he’s leaving the children behind.”

  Who coined the powerful phrase? Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, in 1993 credited “the black community,” but further research tracked it more specifically to Barbara Sabol, in November 1991 a member of the CDF’s Black Community Crusade for Children. One year earlier, on Nov. 15, 1990, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, reported that Dave Armstrong, a Jefferson County judge, in asking a juvenile-justice commission for better community care for children, said, “We can leave no child behind.”

  Seven years before that, at a White House reception on July 28, 1983, President Ronald Reagan told the National Council of Negro Women that he had “begun to outline an agenda for excellence in education that will leave no child behind. Mari Maseng Will, who worked on that speech, says, “President Reagan has not, to my knowledge, been credited with the phrase.”

  Until now. And until someone comes up with an earlier citation, the Gipper’s the coiner.

  Nomenclature Wars. When did the inheritance tax (a pro-taxing term) become the estate tax (a neutral term)? And who changed it to the death tax, which has a built-in anti-tax message?

  In the same way, who abolished most favored nation? MFN, as it used to be initialized, was a trade status equal to that of the most favored nation—which was denied to certain countries, often for human rights reasons. But the phrase made it seem as if China, for example, would become the most favored nation—and most people did not favor that. So the name was changed to nondiscriminatory trade practices—and who was in favor of discrimination? The name was changed further to normal trade relations, leaving opponents to espouse abnormal relations, a loser. The name changes helped change the policy.

  The classic example was pro-life, adopted by those who were anti-abortion. This not only put the case in positive terms (which anti-abortion did not) but also suggested that the opposition was pro-death. In their defense, people who opposed restrictions on abortion adopted the term pro-choice. Thus a right to abort was presented in the more favorable light of a right to choose.

  In the war of words in the Middle East, the Palestinians won. Israel referred to the land gained after it repelled invasions as Judea and Samaria, the ancient names of the land. The Arab world preferred the West Bank, situated on the west bank of the Jordan River in what had been Transjordan. For a time, the Israelis fell back to the administered territories and later to the disputed territories, but almost all the media adopted West Bank as distinct from Israel proper, and any traditionalist reference to Judea and Samaria is now considered quaint or slanted.

  Remember when global warming was a hotly disputed phrase? At the sudden order of the Great Namechanger, global warming was iced and global climate change took its place. No explanation; no argument; the order came down, and multitudes on both sides of that argument marched off in lockstep.

  “The latest semantic fashion in Congress,” reports the Hill, Martin Tolchin’s lively Washington weekly, “is renaming fast track trade authority as trade promotion authority, or TPA.” Fast track apparently reminds too many Republicans of the Clinton era.

  Representative David Dreier, a California Republican, requires his staff to put a dollar in a jar every time one of them uses the taboo term fast track. It’s the same jar he used to coerce his minions into using normal trade relations when they blurted out most favored nation.

  No More Patients. How do you get rid of mental patients in one fell swoop? Put in a more caring way, how do you make the mentally ill feel better about whatever ails them? Call them mental-health consumers.

  Here’s the idea: A patient is one being cared for; in a “doctor-patient re-lationship,” the doctor has the power. But in a “merchant-consumer rela-tionship,” the consumer is supposedly king. When you think of health care as a commodity, to be sold by medical professionals and bought by ailing purchasers of such therapies, then the patient is a consumer, the boss.

  “It’s a respect thing,” says Frank McMyne, a board member of the Pennsylvania affiliate of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. “It changes the relationship. If we are merely patients, it diminishes our ability to question the kind of treatment we are receiving.”

  Dr. Karen Shore, president of the Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, is more conflicted. “I call my patients patients. But to a lot of people who are consumer advocates, patient sounds pejorative.” Her associate Sheri Laribee adds: “What consumer stands for is ‘someone on a health care plan.’ If I am paying for the managed health care plan, I am the consumer buying insurance. The managed-care organizations call people consumers so that they don’t have to think of them as patients.”

  I have a quibble or two with your use of the phrase, in one fell swoop.

  Quibble one: The phrase is from Shakespeare and is actually “at one fell swoop,” although the corrupted form does appear quite frequently these days. It is uttered when Macduff has been told that his wife and his children have all been murdered at Macbeth’s command, and is an analogy to a hawk striking its prey.

  Quibble two: The phrase has a literal connotation of both suddenness—which you wanted to convey—and evil—which I presume you didn’t. I recognize that many people use the phrase simply to mean accomplishing something swiftly and completely, whether the object was good or bad. However, this often leads to unintentionally humorous statements such as, “After years of suffering, the medicine cured her in one fell swoop.”

  You might be interested in what [Bergen] Evans & [Cornelia] Evans had to say about it in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage ([Random House] 1957):

  The word fell in the phrase means fierce, savage, cruel and ruthless. It is akin not to the past of fall but to felon and has connotations of wickedness and bitter savagery. It is, plainly, exactly the word that Macduff wanted and, fortunately, Shakespeare was right there to provide it to him.

  But the phrase is now worn smooth of meaning and feeling. Anyone who uses it deserves to be required to explain publicly just what he thinks it means.

  Gil Haselberger

  Bellevue, Washington

  Normalcy. “I was taught that normalcy was a nonword,” writes Floyd Norris, chief financial correspondent of the New York Times, “a poor substitute for normality invented by one of our worst presidents, and that educated people avoided the word. So I have been surprised to see it used so frequently in the Times since the September 11 attack. When did President Harding win the language battle? Or were my mother and my teachers wrong all along?”

  They were. Norris is a colleague whose sober market advice we all should have taken throughout the recent irrational exuberance, but he was swept up by a previous generation’s Harding-hooting. Last week the economics columnist of the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson, used the word that is out-usaging normality 3 to 1: “We are now slowly returning to ‘normalcy,’ though we don’t know what that means—and can’t know.”

  I know. It means the same as normality, coined by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848. Nine years later a couple of mathematicians used an equally logical extension of normal, preferring -cy to -ity. The two forms competed, normality in the lead, until Harding made the alliterator’s hall of fame in 1920 with “not h
eroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment” and (my favorite) “not experiment but equipoise.”

  When mocked by users of -ity, the president told his critics to look it up in the dictionary—and there it was, in Merriam-Webster’s. The populace was bullish on normalcy. Which leads to another miscorrection:

  The Defense Department junked the name Operation Infinite Justice for its campaign against terrorism. New title: Operation Enduring Freedom. “Enduring suggests that this is not a quick fix,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. President Bush embraced the phrase in a pep talk to the CIA: “We are on a mission to make sure that freedom is enduring.”

  “There is a double meaning to ‘Enduring Freedom,’” objected Franz Allina of the Bronx in a letter to the Times. “Enduring means ‘tolerating’ as well as ‘persevering.’” Other e-mail and faxes flew in to make the same point.

  Not so. “He’s taking the root meaning of the verb,” replies Fred Mish, editor in chief of Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate, “and transferring it to the participial adjective. A verb can have many meanings, but they don’t all carry over to the adjective.” The intransitive verb endure, rooted in the Latin durus, “hard,” has many senses: “to last,” or “to remain firm under adversity,” but a different meaning when transferring action: “to suffer, tolerate, countenance.”

  Does that difference carry over when the verb endure adds an -ing and becomes a participial adjective? No. Enduring is almost always used to mean “lasting, permanent,” as in “enduring friendship”; occasionally it means “durable,” as in “an enduring substance”; only once in a blue moon does it mean “tolerating,” as in “enduring personal attacks, he carried on.”

  “The meaning that comes to mind with most people,” says the lexicographer Mish, “is the meaning Rumsfeld probably meant.” That meaning is “lasting,” using enduring as a modifier. The other meaning would be close to an abnormality. (Abnormalcy? No such word.)

  No Sentence Fragments. Jim Nicholson, the GOP chairman, sent out a release under a header encapsulating his party’s message for the current campaign: “Renewing America’s Purpose. Together.”

  This raises the issue of sentence fragments. Slogans—from the Gaelic sluagh- (army) gairm (yell), or “battle cry”—need not be complete sentences. A Republican slogan in the 1928 campaign was “Hoover and Happiness, or Smith and Soup Houses,” which contained no verb. (The Democratic response four years later, “In Hoover We Trusted, Now We Are Busted,” was a comma splice of two complete sentences and helped elect FDR.) Some facetious slogans of the ’70s were sentences (“Support Mental Health or I’ll Kill You”) and some were not (“Dog Litter—An Issue You Can’t Sidestep”).

  I have long rallied to battle cries containing verbs. “Keep Cool with Coolidge” strikes me as more forceful than “Rum, Romanism and Rebel-lion,” the ill-chosen phrase that sank James Blaine’s campaign against Grover Cleveland, though both phrases were alliterative gems. “Vote As You Shot,” with its two verbs, stirred Ulysses Grant’s followers, while “Elect a Leader Not a Lover” savaged Nelson Rockefeller, and “Make Love Not War” signs danced at demonstrations in the 1960s. All these were short sentences studded with the action of verbs and not passive sentence fragments.

  What is a sentence fragment? A decade ago, I collected a bunch of “fumblerules” that demonstrated the errors they intended to correct. These ranged from “Don’t Use No Double Negatives” to “Avoid Clichés Like the Plague,” and included “No Sentence Fragments.” I confidently passed along the conventional pop-grammarian wisdom that a sentence should contain a complete thought and thus requires a verb.

  Not so fast (as sentence-fragmenters say). James McCawley, the late linguistics master at the University of Chicago, took issue with my knee-jerk pedagogy. First, he noted that a sentence should express, rather than be, a complete thought. This was no nitpick; the example he gave was the answer to “What did he buy?” “A hatrack.” McCawley wrote that “A hatrack expresses exactly the same thought as He bought a hatrack and hence doesn’t express any less complete a thought: the difference between the full sentence and the sentence fragment is not in the completeness of the thought expressed but in the completeness of the form in which it is expressed.”

  Furthermore, McCawley instructed me that “for something that occupies the position of a sentence to be a ‘sentence fragment,’ it is not necessary that it not contain a verb.” The fragment of an expressed thought-not a complete sentence—can indeed contain a verb: Lincoln’s anguished “And the war came” is an example.

  Seized of the great grammarian’s clarifying subtlety, and willing after ten years to rethink my pronouncement (and allowing for sloganeering li-cense), I cannot now denounce the current Republican slogan as blatantly incorrect.

  That slogan—“Renewing America’s Purpose. Together.”—may be choppy prose and less than catchy or rousing. And putting together at the end, freestanding, rather than at the beginning as “Together Renewing America’s Purpose,” seems to make the unity pitch appear to be an afterthought. But the two expressed thoughts cannot be easily denounced as an offense to good grammar. Just awkward.

  No Way. A decade ago, the youngest editor at Merriam-Webster, who was fresh out of college, noted to his boss at the Collegiate Dictionary offices that the system of dating senses of words was “way cool.”

  That snapped Fred Mish’s head around. “It was really so striking when I first heard it,” the lexicographer recalls. “Way was being used as an adverb to modify the kind of adjective or adverb that it did not traditionally modify.”

  In olden times, the adverb way was a shortening of far away, as in this 1868 praise of the mail service by General George Armstrong Custer: “They had braved the perils … in order to bring us, way out here, news from our loved ones.” (Contrary to popular belief, the last-standing Custer did not then say, “Those look like friendly Indians.”) The same sense of distance existed in the 19th century in phrases like way off, way up and way over yonder.

  But in the middle of the 20th century, adverbial way took a sharp turn: way-out was a compound adjective in this 1954 Merriam-Webster citation from a toast recorded in Sing Sing prison: “I’ll make a whole lot of money for you, ’cause hustling’s in my blood, / And because I go for you and think you’re a way-out stud.” A drug connotation was added with a 1958 “I turn on a little, and I get way out“—that is, removed from reality-and was soon accompanied by a sense of avant-garde, as in Norman Mailer’s description of a favored hypothesis of his as way out.

  Way was long an intensifier of distance but through the popularity of way-out became an intensifier of anything. In 1985, People magazine surveyed contemporary slang and classified as admiring value judgments terms like neato, superpeachy, awesome, intense, funky fresh, totally hot and way cool.

  Two years later, Marla Donato wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “No matter how cool you are … there is always somebody even cooler than you—somebody who is way cool.” She defined way cool as “being rich enough to hire bodyguards to create your own constant, mobile, limited-access V.I.P. space.” A few years later, as we have seen, the usage cruised up to the offices of Merriam-Webster.

  And, in due course, to network television. Katie Couric, on NBC’s Today show, said in 1999, “I recently spent some time talking to President Clinton in the Oval Office at the White House, which, I have to say, was way cool.” To which her cohost, Ann Curry, responded, “Way, way cool,” twice using the adverb way to modify the adjective cool. This exemplified the adverbial use of way as a general intensifier like profoundly, indubitably, very or damn.

  A quick database scan shows a rush of usages in the past couple of years, from way serious, way bad to way cute, way fun. Last month, Time magazine, straining to be as with-it as People’s 1985 glossary, subheadlined,“The latest trendy drugs are … chic, mellowing and way addictive.” I spotted a billboard on the way (in its
original noun sense of “path,” from the Latin via) to La Guardia Airport. Its only message: “Way Fast.” (At the bottom of the billboard is the word Informix, presumably the name of a software company or a dot-com shop or a new movie about the Irish troubles starring Victor McLaglen. Way soft-sell.)

  We now have way as the intensifier of choice in the vogue-word set. It has grown steadily for nearly a generation, has separated itself from any hint of distance and is now way, way with-it. Will it replace very, as in the Johnny Mercer lyric “You’re much too much, and just too very very“? Hard to tell. But a copy editor long ago had this advice for writers who tried to strengthen feeble adjectives with very: “Change the very to damn, and somebody will surely cut out the damn.” Apply the same treatment to way.

  You refer to Custer being a general in 1868; he was not. At the end of the Civil War, he was a major general of volunteers, but his rank in the regular army was much lower: at the time of his death in 1876 he was a lieutenant colonel. That he wanted people to call him general doesn’t change things.

  David Hawkins

  Brooklyn, New York

  As a Germanophile, I must dispute your etymology of “way,” that it developed “from its original noun sense of ‘path,’ from the Latin via. “ “Way” is the modern English descendant of the good, old Anglo-Saxon weg, an immediate cognate of the German Weg, and only related at the Centum level to the Latin vehere. Gnarly, isn’t it?

  Brad James

  Quakertown, Pennsylvania

  Although I live in California (a linguistic researcher’s paradise in itself), I would say that the majority of people my age use “very,” “incredibly,” or “really” as a modifier twenty times for every “way” they use, and most likely if they say “way cool” it’s in an ironic sense. The more common slang version (probably used more on the West coast) would be “super,” “hella,” and “uber,” all prefixed to words. While “super” and “hella” mean approximately the same thing (equivalent to “very”), “uber,” which is mostly used by those from Los Angeles, is only used in situations of grand importance: “That guy is the hottest guy I’ve ever seen; he is an uber-hottie!” Additionally, there is a usage I’ve heard in conversation where people use hella to modify nouns to mean “a lot of.” For instance, when responding to “How are your finals going?” one might answer with, “Dude, I have hella-work to do tonight. I’ll be up until 3 a.m.”