Pashmina is the Persian word for “woolen,” with a feminine ending. A couple of years ago, the pashmina push began. “Finer than cashmere,” touted one catalog, “extraordinarily soft, warm and lightweight.” Scarce; higher-priced; a gift even more eagerly sought after by the uxorious luxurious.
In the Wall Street Journal in November, Lauren Lipton shot it down: “Sit down, fashionistas: Pashmina, this most hyped of fabrics, is not a particularly premium kind of cashmere.” She quoted textile-science sources scoffing at the promotion and cashmere industry sources saying: “Cashmere is the hair of the cashmere goat. Pashmina is the same goat.”
Pashmina marketers were quick to bleat that cashmere fibers were usually fifteen microns thick while pashmina’s were a few microns thinner, and their product was woven on a warp of spun silk. You can believe that if you’re a Big Spender. A company calling itself Nepal Pashmina Industry, in Katmandu, honestly begins its product profile with “pashmina (better known as cashmere).”
The source of the expression “to pull the wool over one’s eyes” is a mystery. It was first seen in a Jamestown (N.Y.) Journal in 1839, at about the same time the term OK appeared: “That lawyer has been trying to spread the wool over your eyes.” The allusion seems to be to spread a blanket over the head to obstruct one’s figurative sight, similar to the origin of hoodwink; other speculation goes as far as to suggest pulling a person’s hairpiece over his face. But no etymologist has yet come up with the specific item made of wool, or fine goat’s hair, on which the expression is based.
Perils of Parlous. These are parlous times. Make that observation in a speech, and each member of your audience will frown and nod, joining in the general worriment. One or two misfits will be wondering, “Does the speaker mean parlous or perilous?”
In the International Herald Tribune, the historian Roger Buckley writes darkly about “the parlous prospects for the economy.” Bloomberg News was told by a spokesman for Cathay Pacific Airways that the airline industry “is in a parlous state worldwide.” The ABC anchor Peter Jennings was quoted by Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Globe as saying, “We are in parlous economic times.”
The word is not related to parley; it has nothing to do with the French parler, “to talk.” Parlous has the same meaning as the word it sounds like: perilous. The Latin periculum, akin to peritus, “experiment,” means “risk.” But perilous is beyond “risky,” scarier than the general “dangerous” or the unavoidable “hazardous”; it is “fraught (meaning ‘full of, laden’) with peril.”
If parlous means perilous, who needs both? The two forms of the same word have been battling it out for seven centuries, and today we’re going to declare a winner.
Parlous is a delicious example of linguistic syncopation. Every ragtime or jazz enthusiast knows that when you syncopate (from the Greek for “cut short”), you begin a note on a weak beat in the bar, sustaining it into the accented part, thereby shifting the accent. In grammar, you syncopate by snipping a word short or by skipping one or two syllables in the middle. Examples: fo’c’sle for forecastle, and Chumley for Cholmondelay. They don’t order Worcestershire sauce in Wooster, Ohio.
Usually the shorter and easier forms win, and extrality is likely to overtake extraterritoriality. However, parlous has an arch, archaic ring and carries a touch of the pompously bookish (like fraught), while perilous has a straightforward, sailor-take-warning feel. You won’t be incorrect if you try to impress your friends with the syncopated form of perilous, but if you do, it’s at your parl.
Ping! From the highest reaches of the New York Times comes the query: “What does the verb ping mean, as in ‘I’ll ping him and ask’?”
At the same time, Microsoft Windows asked itself this question and sent my computer a copy: “What is the ping command and how is it used?”
Both senses are illustrated in this comment in Internet Magazine in May 2001: “In some offices, people are even sent to ‘ping’ the sales department to see if their figures are ready, just as networked computers ‘ping’ one another to see if they’re still there.”
“The ping command,” Windows informs my machine, “is used to test whether a network connection is active.” You send your ping and wait for a response from the pinged machine. From this we get a metaphoric extension: to ping a person, you send an e-mail message to see if your friend is alive and online.
Do not believe the Internet dictionaries that treat the verb as an acronym for Packet Internet Groper, a Unix utility that accomplishes the above test but sounds to me like an odious new form of sexual harassment. The verb’s e-mail meaning lies halfway between “to buzz” and “to noodge.”
The origin is not, as commonly believed, in the short, high-pitched pulsing sound emitted by sonar. Before that, ping signified the engine sound dreaded by motorists; if your engine pinged, you probably had piston problems. Before that, it was the sound of a bullet’s ricochet: “If a button was shown,” wrote Sir James E. Alexander in 1835, “ping went a bullet at it immediately.” And before that, in 897, King Ælfred the Great, in his translation of St. Gregory’s Liber pastoralis curae, wrote in Old English, “He waerlice hine pynge mid sumum wordum,” which means “Let him prick him very cautiously with some words.” And before that, Roman noodges used the Latin pungere, “to prick, poke, urge.” The same basic meaning echoes through the millennia.
If any deeper etymology is required, Arthur, don’t ping me; I’ll ping you.
I strongly believe you are mistaken in writing that the network sense of ping doesn’t derive from analogy (direct equivalent, really) to the sonar ping.
You send out a signal and pay attention to the response. In sonar or on a network.
All of your examples of earlier uses of ping don’t have a darned thing to do with that sense of the word. They are just other uses, other meanings, of ping.
Sonar ping may derive, cleanly and directly or obscurely and circuitously, from your referenced uses, but it’s absurd and contentious to argue that those who originated the network sense of the word didn’t take it directly from the everyday knowledge of sonar. You’ve outsmarted yourself and gotten lost in your own scholarship.
Peter Horton
Santa Monica, California
Playing Percentages. President Bush the elder often liked to quote Woody Allen as saying, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.” I checked with Allen, who confirmed his authorship of the line but said the percentage he mentioned was 80. Why 80? “The figure seems high to me today,” he replied, “but I know it was more than 60, and the extra syllable in 70 ruins the rhythm of the quote, so I think we should let it stand at 80.”
This is a formula for profundity, but presidents keep upping the ante, sometimes ruining the rhythm. On a fund-raising trip to California in the fall, Bill Clinton saw a baby girl reach out to him, her little fingers clutching at his hand. “Look at her,” he said. “She’s holding on. That’s 90 percent of life, just holding on.”
Ploy. “That’s nothing but a ploy,” said Bill Bradley to Al Gore on Meet the Press last month.
The two men were locked in TV combat. Gore had just suggested that the two Democratic candidates pledge to shun TV commercials and engage only in debates. The vice president dramatically extended his hand and said: “I’m ready to agree right now. Debates aren’t ploys.”
Bradley looked at his opponent’s hand like an uninterested palm reader; he wasn’t having any part of the surprise offer: “No, to come here, shake my hand-that’s nothing but a ploy.” At Gore’s repeated use of the word, Bradley edged it with increasing scorn, adding, “I’m not someone who’s interested in tactics, Al.”
Across America, the question arose: was the no-commercials proposal a sincere suggestion, as Gore maintained, or was it merely a ploy, tactic, ruse, stratagem or trick, as Bradley insisted? Around the world, viewers asked a more fundamental question:What is a ploy, anyway?
The attack word is closely associated with the current campaign. Two months ag
o, Cragg Hines of the Houston Chronicle wrote that “Gore has repeatedly tried the weekly debate ploy against Bradley, who has refused to take the bait.” A month before that, when Gore relocated his headquarters to Nashville—the better to detach from Washington Beltway associations and reestablish middle-American roots—Tex Austin, a musician and cowboy-boot salesman, was quoted deriding the move in the Chicago Tribune: “This is obviously just a political ploy.” This drew an observation from James Dao, a New York Times reporter: “History may someday show that voters viewed Mr. Gore’s headquarters shift as a disingenuous ploy or, more likely, a move that was forgotten the day after it happened.”
The word’s origin is shrouded in mysterious Highland vapors. Most etymologists believe it to be the product of aphesis, the process by which we clip unaccented vowel syllables off a word’s stem. That is how alone becomes lone and around becomes round. (“Is the Lone Ranger round here, Tonto?”) In this hypothesis regarding the origin of ploy, the Scottish dialect clipped the em off the verb employ to create a noun that meant “activity” and later “an amusing way to pass the time; an escapade, hobby or sport.”
In 1950, Stephen Potter, the British author of Gamesmanship and Lifemanship and the coiner of one-upmanship, gave the word a tongue-in-cheek sense of “a maneuver to gain the better of an opponent or co-worker.” He wrote, “Each one of us can, by ploy or gambit, most naturally gain the advantage.”
In the following decade, the Potter sense of the word was snatched up into the language of diplomacy. An occasional plot device in the 19th-century novels of Anthony Trollope involved the misheard proposal or the misread caress. A man would say or do something innocuous; a Victorian maiden would interpret that word or gesture romantically and accept what she considered as amounting to a proposal of marriage; and the poor (or lucky) fellow found himself affianced.
Lord Rufford makes such a gesture to the husband-hunting Arabella Trefoil in Trollope’s 1875 American Senator and finds himself in the center of Trefoil’s formidable attempt at landing a proper mate. (Her attempt does not succeed.) Trollope uses the same ploy four years later in John Caldigate, in which John gets thrown into a linen closet with his cousin Julia and comes out, in Julia’s and her mother’s minds, engaged.
During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President Kennedy received two messages from the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev: one was informal and ambiguous, a later one more official and threatening. He chose to ignore the later one and to interpret the earlier one as an offer to remove Soviet missiles in return for a pledge not to invade Cuba—an inference that left Khrushchev with his non-offer “accepted.” This deft maneuver was described, in what some felt was the mythmaking that followed, as “the Trollope ploy.”
In current usage, a ploy is more cunning than a subterfuge, not as overtly false or bookishly old-fashioned as a ruse and somewhat more creative than a tactic. It is not planned in as much detail as a stratagem, is less contrived than an artifice and does not have the coquettish quality of a wile. A ploy is more underhanded than a maneuver and not as playful or artful as a dodge.
Another synonym is gambit, which began as an opening move in chess that sacrifices a pawn to gain position for a more powerful piece. By metaphoric extension, a gambit can range from an enticing opening in conversation to a tactic in gaining advantage in business.
In the lexicon of trickery, a correct gamesman uses a gambit while an engaging rogue employs a ploy, and the mildest deceiver trots out a gimmick. When Bill Bradley’s spokesman, Eric Hauser, followed up his candidate’s ploy characterization by castigating Gore for “resorting to contrived gimmicks,” his use of contrived was redundant.
In politics, as we see, a ploy is double-edged; accusations of trickiness can get tricky. In dealing with nationalities, Winston Churchill observed in 1906, “Nothing is more fatal than a dodge. Wrongs will be forgiven, sufferings and losses will be forgiven or forgotten, battles will be remembered only as they recall the martial virtues of the combatants; but anything like a trick, will always rankle.”
I think you connived at a crime. (Note first the precise use of connive.) You inserted tactic, in the singular, among synonyms for ploy: ruse, stratagem, trick. That use of tactic in the singular destroys the root ideas of the proper word tactics, also a singular though it looks plural. It means arrangement, method, system, plan of action. To reduce it to a detail of the plan is to ignore a difference that runs through all talk about practical matters, the difference between means and their coordination.
The distinction is embodied in all the words that end in -ics: ethics, politics, esthetics, mathematics. They are collectives and suffer loss when used in the singular. Usage has sanctioned “the Protestant ethic” and “the artist’s esthetic,” and there is a bare excuse for it, because in these phrases the collective idea is retained. Nobody is tempted to say that Van Gogh’s esthetic was thick oil on the brush, any more than with system, one would say “my system for driving nails is a hammer.”
In short, tactics is a bunch of ploys, and there’s an end.
Jacques Barzun
San Antonio, Texas
Plus Which. As Bill Clinton prepares to leave the White House, constitutionally forbidden to return as its principal occupant, some wonder: what will we miss most about his tenure? The answer to those in the dialect dodge is plain: the Ozarkian’s free-and-easy use of the American idiom.
“There are a lot of family-owned businesses,” the president said in support of reduction of inheritance taxes, “that people would like to pass down to their family members … that would be burdened by the way the estate tax works. Plus which, the maximum rate’s too high.”
Plus which is an intriguing Americanism. Its meaning is not merely “plus, in addition to” or “and.” In the context of Clinton’s usage, plus which means “besides”; its direct synonym is the earlier “besides which,” in its adverbial sense of “moreover, furthermore”; these are connecting words that transmit greater emphasis than conjunctions like and or the plus that is unaccompanied by which.
Plus which, first cited by Merriam-Webster in Down Beat magazine in 1950, seems to have overtaken besides which in recent years. Perhaps this was stimulated by the advertising industry’s fascination with plus at the beginning of sentences to mean “as an extra added attraction.”
The fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary labels plus which “not well established in formal writing”; its editor, Joe Pickett, calls the usage “a bizarre construction that combines two conjunctions and has the force of a conjunctive adverb” (indeed!).
OK; that does it with plus which. But in settling that meaning of “furthermore, you ninny,” we have just blundered into an area of furious lexicographic controversy: is plus a conjunction (which connects) or a preposition (which introduces)?
Should you say, “Two plus two is four” or “Two plus two are four”? (I’m a preppy, and say is.) Should you begin a sentence with plus? (I say no, never.) But Fred Mish, editor in chief of Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate and now America’s Rex of Lex, says, “Nobody should let their drawers get in a twist over this question.” (Plus this subtly demonstrates that the plural their can refer to the singular nobody in an idiom.)
If I had given someone a list of my needs, and suddenly remembered another one, I’d naturally call out plus. If we didn’t use plus we’d have to use a long-winded group of words, such as “in addition to all of which,” and by the time we’d have said all that we’d have forgotten what we needed to add.
In its proper place, plus is a fine word. We couldn’t do without it. Please don’t abuse it.
Estelle Gelshenen
Northport, New York
TWO CONJUNCTIONS? I can agree with Mr. Pickett that “plus which” behaves like a conjunctive adverb; but when has “which” ever been defined as a conjunction? The construction is quite straightforward (although—in my opinion—the recent popularity of “plus” as a preposition, or a conjunction, or a con
junctive adverb, is an abomination and ought to be abolished!): it is simply an adverbial prepositional phrase, a preposition plus (!!!) a noun phrase or, in this instance, a pronoun object. The pronoun “which” is used to replace the noun clause(s) “that people … too high.” An analogue: “I didn’t feel like going to the birthday party; in addition to that, I hadn’t bought a gift.” My own “Sprachgefuehl” would lead me to use “in addition to that” rather than “plus which.” It has more euphony and style, at the cost of just four more syllables.
Robert Frankum
Huntington, New York
As a person who has been a teacher of mathematics for a long time it is clear that “Two plus two is four” is shorter for “The sum of two plus two is four.”
Stan Lieberman
Howard Beach, New York
Two plus two equal four. So there.
“Plus” is a perfectly proper word to begin a sentence with. Similarly, “with” is a perfectly proper word to end a sentence with. Additionally, plus can be an adjective as well as a conjunction, as in the following sentences, and there is no rule preventing starting a sentence with an adjective:
“Plus fours are no longer fashionable in golf.”
“Plus sizes are hard to find at the mall.”
Ralph Kirshner
Center Harbor, New Hampshire
Politics Of. Think of Ronald Reagan, and his phrases evil empire and there you go again and make my day come to mind, along with the derogations star wars and morning in America.
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 29