The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Laurence Urdang

  Old Lyme, Connecticut

  Old Guard. “Let others argue the case for the old guard,” Al Gore said in his Los Angeles acceptance speech. “We’re the new guard.”

  In Michigan two days earlier, the vice president scorned “the failed ways of the old guard,” and one night before, his choice for vice president, Joseph Lieberman, asked the Democratic convention, “Are we going to elect the old guard that created the problems or a new guard that will continue to work solving them?”

  From this we can safely assume that Democrats have formulated a rhetorical strategy to get around the In party’s traditional “time for a change” problem. “My goodness,” exclaimed the CNN analyst William Schneider as the slogan was repeated, “they’ve been in for eight year—show can they be the new guard?”

  As the old song goes, wishing will make it so. The daring idea is to take the “new” out of newcomer and the “in” out of incumbent. How? By hanging the old guard label on the challengers, those who have been the Ins for the past two terms cast themselves as the contrasting new guard. No such audacious reversal has been suggested since Adlai Stevenson countered the charges of a “mess in Washington” by saying that the GOP slogan in 1952 should be “Throw the rascals in.”

  As the fair-minded reader will note, the scholarly function of this linguistic column during a presidential campaign is to examine, with scrupulous nonpartisanship, the roots of its catchphrases.

  “The Guard dies, but never surrenders” (“La Garde meurt, mais ne serend pas”) was supposed to have been said by Count Cambronne on June 18, 1815, rejecting the Duke of Wellington’s call for Napoleon’s surrender after the battle of Waterloo. He did not say “the old Guard”; indeed, Cambronne went to his grave denying that he ever said anything of the sort, which was one of the last times anybody denied making a historic utterance. (I erred recently in attributing the wrong gender to La Garde. J’en suis désolé.)

  Others suggested that the count had said, simply and forcefully, merde!—an expletive of excrement, which sounds like meurt, the French for “dies.” General Anthony McAuliffe of the United States, rejecting surrender at Bastogne in the World War II Battle of the Bulge, is also suspected of having used a more forceful expression than his recorded “Nuts!” But I digress.

  Even if Cambronne did say, “The Guard dies,” etc., whence comes the old Guard? Evidently this was the familiar name of the Imperial Guard of Napoleon I, cited in an 1809 message to the emperor as la vieille Garde and repeated by him in his final adieu in 1814: “Soldiers of my Old Guard: I bid you farewell.”

  The phrase was not extended beyond the specific Napoleonic troops until applied to “grim sea grenadiers” by the American novelist Herman Melville, in White-Jacket in 1850, who called them “hearty old members of the Old Guard.” The phrase continued to have an affectionate, loyal-veteran connotation until 1880, when supporters of a third term for President Ulysses S. Grant wore medallions proclaiming “Old Guard” on them; Democrats reacted by using the phrase as a description of Republican reactionaries.

  That is the current sense. Aware of this, a conservative Republican group in the 1970s, the Young Americans for Freedom, named its publication the New Guard. But in political terminology, anything can be freely swiped. In this case, that is what the creative Gore word-slingers seeking to keep the Democrats in office have done in their coordinated effort to derogate the freshness of the Bush challenge.

  On the Right’s Words. William F. Buckley announced last month that he has decided to give up public speaking; in its stead, this pioneering practitioner of self-mocking rodomontade has endowed his conservative followers with Let Us Talk of Many Things, a high-stylish compilation of fifty years of piquant and literate comment.

  His speeches show his easy way of teaching as if in passing. “I shall not introduce—the rhetoricians call this paraleipsis—the wonderful woman sitting, appropriately, on my left, Mrs. Robert Kennedy.” This is a device of emphasis by pretending to omit (the old “to say nothing of” and “not to mention” trick). When you paralep like that, but then call attention to your own emphasis-by-omission, you’re subtly instructing.

  He also provokes you to teach yourself. Buckley is known for his delight in using unfamiliar words. He referred to Henry Kissinger and “one truth no one can challenge: the petrology of our association.” I had to look it up: petrology is the study of the structure of rocks. So why not say “the rock-solid quality of our association”? Because the speaker sometimes wants to push his audience a little. He is saying, Go look up the word—work on it a little—and then you won’t forget it or my point.

  He’s made those of us in the word trade stretch. “There is pleasure in even a little progress,” he said in tribute to the conservative thinker James Burnham, “even among those of us taught, at our mother’s knee, not to seek to immanentize the eschaton.”

  Eschatology is the study of ultimate destiny, the purpose of life reckoned at the last accounting. The eschaton is its Greek root: the last thing, the divinely ordained climax of history, with its present sense of a final judgment that should inform our lives. That’s the easy part.

  But immanentize? The Latin immanere, “to remain in,” leads us to immanent, “inherent, intrinsic,” with a special philosophical sense of “confined to the mind.” It’s not a word I would use because inherent does the job and immanent is too easily confused with imminent, “about to take place,” with a connotation of danger.

  So I admitted defeat and called Buckley.

  “The source of immanentize the eschaton is the 1952 New Science of Politics, by Eric Voegelin,” he explained. “It’s a warning against taking ultimate reality and treating it pantheistically, rather than as an objective philosophical phenomenon.” The conservative pioneer added: “It was turned into a bumper sticker by the Young Americans for Freedom. Delicious, don’t you think?”

  “The petrology of our association,” my foot! Buckley has over-reached with that figment of speech. Petrology is not the structure of rocks. It is the study of rocks, and in the science of the Earth it is generally taken to mean the origin of rocks—how they got that way. I am a petrologist. I know from petrology.

  Buckley no doubt came at this private and irreproducible meaning through his biblical understanding. This is the way I used to introduce my subject at the start of a course in petrology. This is not about petroleum, I used to say; oil from rocks. This is from petrus, rock and logos, word. It means this is The Word about Rocks. (If you want the full discourse on logos, read Tolstoy’s translation and extended commentary on the gospel of John. If you get past logos, let me know.) This word petrology should be understood not from the more familiar oil of rocks but from what is in English an apparent pun by Jesus in the New Testament.

  When Simon Bar-Joan proclaims the Christ, Jesus responds: “Thou art Peter, and upon the rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 16:18-19)

  This powerful statement is taken by the Buckley faithful to be prophetic of the founding of the Christian church in Rome by the apostle Peter. I am told by Jesuits that this is not an actual pun in the original Greek.

  S. A. Morse

  Research Professor of Petrology

  University of Massachusetts

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  Your piece on Buckley reminded me of my latest memorable encounter with him. He murmured something nice about my book, identifying himself as a member of that generation and then said, “So thank you for enhancing my already exaggerated sense of self-importance.”

  Tom Brokaw

  NBC News

  New York, New York

  Operation Proceed. When the governor of Massachusetts, Paul Cel-lucci, is confirmed as our ambassador to Canada, Lt. Gov. Jane Swift will become our first pregnant acting governor. “And although no governor has ever given birth before,” wrote the New York T
imes columnist Gail Collins, “plenty of them take to their beds for one reason or another. Mr. Cellucci himself underwent heart surgery while in office. ‘We like to call it a procedure,’ said an aide.” Ms. Collins noted wryly that Jane Swift “is expecting a procedure in June.”

  That spotted and skewered a rising euphemism. When do you have an operation, when a procedure, and how is each different from having surgery?

  LaSalle Leffall Jr., MD, professor of surgery at Howard University Hospital, says: “Every operation is a procedure, but not every procedure is an operation. A colonoscopy, for example, is a procedure and not an operation.

  “You can say ‘a surgical procedure,’” Dr. Leffall continues, “but it would be redundant to say ‘a surgical operation.’ But surgery is a discipline of using manual means for diagnosis and treatment. I’d never say, ‘He had surgery.’”

  Claude H. Organ Jr., MD, a surgeon and editor of the AMA’s Archives of Surgery, agrees that “the word that a lot of people are using today that is not appropriate is surgeries.” But he uses operation and procedure interchangeably, as does George McGee, MD, who adds, “in general, if it requires an incision, then it would be called an operation.”

  Eric Rose, MD, chairman of surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, uses a nice metaphor to illustrate the difference: “If a procedure is a melody, then an operation is a symphony. A lot of component procedures make up an operation.”

  An operation is a surgical procedure. Patients who call operations procedures without the surgical modifying it are the sort who sit up in bed afterward and ask for a dish of stewed dried plums.

  Surgery also means a physician’s, dentist’s or veterinarian’s office (in the U.K.).

  Herbert S. Saffir, PE, Hon. M. ASCE

  Coral Gables, Florida

  … Or Shut Up. “The time for generalities without specifics,” said candidate Al Gore, “I think is just about over…. It’s kind of put up or shut up time.”

  His opponent promptly complained about the “tone” of this remark. Amid the general fear of being counterpunched with a charge of negativity, politicians shy from any locution that can be construed as harsh. Evidently Gore was concerned about his use of the directly challenging put up or shut up, because he preceded it with the ameliorating kind of and followed it with time.

  The time combining form was pioneered in party time and was popularized by TV’s Bob Smith in the late 1940s with “Hi, kids—it’s Howdy Doody time!” The time turns the preceding word or phrase into a modifier, thereby weakening put up or shut up.

  The substance of the charge has no place in this resolutely nonpolitical column. To philologists, however, the use of the Americanism put up or shut up poses a question: from what metaphor is it derived?

  The earliest recorded use is in Fred H. Hart’s 1878 collection of stories, The Sazerac Lying Club. (This may have been a dialectical source of the poet Mary Karr’s recent memoir of her childhood, The Liar’s Club; that best seller is soon to be followed by the avidly awaited memoir of her adolescence, Cherry, a slang reference to virginity. I enjoy digressions.) In a Hart story, the initialese PU or SU appears, explained by a character saying, “PU or SU means put up or shut up, doesn’t it?” The caption to a cartoon in an 1884 Police Gazette was “Put up, shut up or get!” (presumably, “get out” or “git”), and the Americanism was locked into language by Mark Twain in his 1889 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with “This was a plain case of ‘put up, or shut up.’”

  Put up what? If the metaphor is from fisticuffs, the figure of speech is one of a fighter putting up his dukes, or fists, and telling his opponent to be quiet or prepare to put up his own dukes to defend himself.

  A different possibility: the phrase could come from card playing, a rich source of phrases used in politics. Samples: FDR’s New Deal, Truman’s the buck stops here, with the buck, often a silver dollar, used to mark the position of the dealer, and stand pat, a poker locution used once by Richard Nixon as “America cannot stand pat,” and struck by his speechwriter from subsequent speeches after it drew a sharp glance from the candidate’s wife.

  Card playing is a strong possibility for the root because of the first verb, put, which is also used in put your money where your mouth is. To put up is synonymous with ante up, a call to place money in the ante, or “pot.” (Ante means “before,” and could allude to the stake that must be placed “before the draw.” In 1882, Charles Welsh wrote in his poker guide about the “eldest hand” in the game: “Before the dealer begins to deal the cards, the player next to his left, who is called the ante-man, or age, must deposit in the pool an ante not exceeding one-half the limit previously agreed upon.”)

  Did dealer Gore obliquely demand that the ante-man put up or quietly fold? Or did he make a veiled dialect reference to the stance of a pugilist? It’s a down-and-dirty dialectical mystery.

  “The buck stops here” is a Navy term. In an officers’ mess or wardroom a small object—a silver dollar would do—is placed at the table setting of the person who is to be served first that day. It is then moved to the adjoining seat, and that person is served first and his seatmate last. The term does not denote responsibility, but rather fleeting privilege. Truman was an excellent man in many ways, but alas, he was an officer in the Army, which evidently has no such sociable practice.

  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan*

  United States Senate

  Washington, D.C.

  There are two howlers in your article. (1) The stake is placed before the “deal” not the “draw” (draw is taking new cards after the deal); (2) logically the “ante-man” could never “put up or quietly fold” (fold is not meeting someone else’s bet); how could the first to bet be in that position? He could either “ante” or “pass.” Not “fold.”

  Thomas R. Moore

  New York, New York

  P

  Package Deal. In the Left Coast convention speech introducing himself to the nation, Senator Joseph Lieberman said: “My dad lived in an orphanage when he was a child. He went to work in a bakery truck and then owned a package store in Stamford, Connecticut.”

  The week before, however, in a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in Hartford, Lieberman used the phrase liquor store. Crawford Lincoln of Brimfield, Massachusetts, asks, “Was this a gentler locution to soften the image of his family’s business for a national audience?”

  I’d say yes, and thereby hangs a euphemism. A package store is a store, not a bar, where liquor is sold by the bottle and not by the drink and where the contents of the “package” are consumed off premises.

  In 1880, Bradstreet’s reported active trade in package houses. In 1890, the London Daily News reported that “Judge Foster recently decided that liquor could only be sold in ‘original packages,’ which is construed as meaning one or more bottles of beer or whisky. The merchants … are not allowed to sell beer or whisky by the glass.”

  Our earliest evidence for the phrase package store, I am informed by Joanne Despres at Merriam-Webster, “is an entry in the 1918 Addenda to the New International Dictionary (originally published in 1909), where it is labeled ‘cant, U.S.’” (Cant means “jargon,” and business euphemisms fall into that category.)

  Let’s face it: what the seller is selling is not a package but what is contained in the package, which is liquor. Why the squeamishness about that word? After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, state legislatures had the opportunity to license booze shops and saloons but did not want to upset the many “drys.” That led to the linguistic prettification of saloons as taverns and of shops purveying the mother’s milk of John Barleycorn as package stores.

  Maybe the senator uses the terms interchangeably. But I have a hunch that some politically sensitive soul remembered that “drys” still exist and vote and changed the candidate for vice president’s word from liquor to package. It shows a sandpapered-fingertip sensitivity to the shades of meaning of words.

  Pashmina. Do advert
ising tricks—those hidden persuasions of the huckster class—get your goat? If so, consider what has been done to the Capra hircus, a hairy wild goat that likes to graze along the mountainsides of the Himalayas.

  For generations until 1684, the maharajah of Kashmir had exclusive rights to the underfur combed from the throat and belly of this cold old goat. The maharajah’s domain was spelled Kashmir, a land that remains in dispute even today between India and Pakistan, but the wool was spelled cashmere.

  Though sometimes challenged by exotic fabrics like vicuna (who now remembers what kind of coat Bernard Goldfine gave Sherman Adams?), cashmere has long been known as the finest wool that money can buy. That meant, of course, that it had to be topped by a wool even more rare, available at a higher price, to warm the skin of those late-arriving arrivistes who could learn to scorn the harsh feel of the cashmere worn by the riffraff.

  Shahtoosh is a no-no; that “king of wool” comes from the Tibetan antelope, an endangered species. Enter pashmina, pronounced “pash-MEE-nah,” a new name to create the illusion of a new goat with softer fur. The linguistic trick is to use the Persian word for the mountain goat’s fur and to ignore the name of the place—Kashmir, pronounced “cashmere”—where the weaving into wool is done.

  Pashm is the Persian word for “wool,” or more specifically, “soft wool from under the throat of sheep or goats.” In 1880, Mrs. A.G.F. Eliot James in Indian Industries wrote, “The pashm, or shawl-wool, is a downy substance, growing next to the skin and under the thick hair of those goats found in Thibet and in the elevated lands north of the Himalayas.” Thirteen years later, a British natural history magazine explained, “It is this pashm of the goat of these regions which affords the materials for the celebrated Kashmir shawls.”