This takes us into the world of metaphoric ignorance. DARE asked Americans across the nation how they would end the sentence “He hasn’t sense enough to …” Among the most colorful answers were “to pour water [or sand] out of a boot with directions on the heel and the toes cut”; “to lap salt and drool”; “to pack guts to a hog”; “to tie his own shoelaces”; and “to find his rear end with both hands and a road map.” By far the most frequent was “to come in out of the rain,” with “to pound sand down a rat hole” finishing a strong second.
That’s been the primary sense for years. However, the sense that is now becoming predominant, replacing stupefying stupidity, is “wasting time by doing something pointless.” A 1975 usage found by DARE is “The lumber didn’t come, so the carpenters pounded sand all afternoon.”
That was the meaning of the phrase used by the president to the prime minister, and by the White House chief of staff to the crisis group assembled at Camp David—if all the backgrounders are true and the reporters are not pounding sand.
Predator’s Adjective. In finding that Microsoft violated antitrust laws, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson cited the 1890 Sherman Act, which requires the plaintiff to prove “that the defendant has engaged in predatory or anticompetitive conduct.”
He ruled, “Viewing Microsoft’s conduct as a whole also reinforces the conviction that it was predacious.” The New York Times headline writer preferred the more familiar adjective in the act, and went with “predatory be-havior.”
Which is it? The Latin root is praedari, “to prey upon.” Since 1589, predatory behavior has been characterized by pillaging, plundering and robbery. Edward Gibbon, in his 1781 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote of a general who “recalled to their standard his predatory detach-ments.”
Predacious, more often spelled predaceous, came along in 1713 to be applied to animals. Samuel Johnson’s friend and acolyte Mrs. Piozzi wrote in 1789 of “one predaceous creature caught in the very act of gorging his prey.”
Today, predacious is almost always applied to the savagery of animals; predatory, which appears in databases one hundred times more often, describes the plundering or rapacious action of humans, extended to the monopolistic action of corporations.
Ironically, Microsoft’s Encarta dictionary loosely defines both adjectives first as pertaining to animals; not so in the Oxford English Dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, and their sequence of definitions is clearly backed up by my usage count.
Therefore, I say the judge erred in choosing predacious; Bill Gates’s practices may be monopolistic, but to judge them to be savagely animalistic goes overboard.
Preshrunk Flower. In introducing Don Rumsfeld as his choice for secretary of defense, President Bush the Younger emphasized the designee’s policy strength and ability to hold his own in council: “You bet General Powell’s a strong figure and Dick Cheney’s no shrinking violet. But neither is Don Rumsfeld.” The phrase runs in the family; shortly after his election, President Bush the Elder said of the then newly chosen House Republican whip, Newt Gingrich: “I don’t think he needs any lectures from me. He’s not going to suddenly become a shrinking violet, but we don’t want that.”
Asked about the man selected to be Bush’s secretary of veterans affairs (the government mistakenly puts no apostrophe after veterans), the retired commandant of the Marine Corps, Charles Krulak, said of Anthony Principi: “Tony is no shrinking violet. He’ll tell it like it is and do what’s right.”
Why has this metaphor, used only in negation, become so vital to the vocabulary of the new administration? More to the linguistic point, when did violets gain their reputation for congenital shrinkage, and why?
The earliest use that my researcher, Elizabeth Phillips, can find is the 1827 play Sylvia, by George Darley. In it, the fairy queen Morgana says to the spirit Floretta: “I’ve seen thee stand / Drowning amid the fields to save a daisy, / And with warm kisses keep its sweet life in. / The shrinking violet thou dost cheer; and raise / The cowslip’s drooping head.”
The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his 1860 The Marble Faun, used the flower in a simile stressing shyness: “An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets.”
Yes, but why is a violet more modest than, say, one of Everett Dirksen’s favorite marigolds? A clue can be found in the poet John Byrne Leicester Warren’s 1893 poem about Circe, a beautiful witch: “Thou art the shrinking violet, half afraid”—and here comes the explanation—“That, in rathe April born, / Where icy winds complain, / Hardly unfolds her petals to the morn / Between the rainbow and the weep of rain.” Look up rathe; it’s not a misprint of rather but an archaic word meaning “exposed too early, as in a flower that blooms in still-frigid spring.”
That’s the source of the trope: the violet may appear to shrink from the cold because it often blossoms early. Is this just a conceit of poets and novelists? Let’s turn to a botanist. Dr. Wayt Thomas of the New York Botanical Garden gets to the root of the plant’s seeming shyness: “A possible answer is that violets often hold their blooms underneath, or partly underneath, the foliage, so that the otherwise showy flowers are hidden.”
However, President Bush should not use the metaphor too frequently. For freshness of imagery, I recommend “He’s no drooping cowslip!”
Props. When at a loss for words (a good title for a collection of these columns), I walk around the Washington bureau of the Times as deadline time approaches, hands in my pockets, head down but with ears attuned, trolling for linguistic leads. Reporters, too busy at their terminals to converse at length with a passing language maven, toss the latest locutions in my direction, as one would throw scraps to a hungry hound.
“Props!” barked Kit Seelye, never looking up. I snatched at the possibilities of meanings for the plural noun: (1) A shortening of propellers, a means of propulsion in the pre-jet era; no, nothing new about that. (2) A shortening of properties, articles on a stage set, an item like Yorick’s skull in Hamlet’s hand; that has centuries of use in greenrooms. (3) Supports like tent poles, or aides that “prop up” a political candidate; that’s a current sense, but hardly on the qui vive or worthy of note. That leaves (4), (5) and (6): a shortening of propaganda, propination or propaedeutics.
My next stop was the news desk, where young clerks and interns communicate with all the latest and most mysterious locutions. “If I were to use the word props in a sentence,” I said as if testing them, “what would you take it to mean?”
“Applause,” said one. “Kudos,” agreed another, apparently versed in classical Greek (which would have told him that propaedeutic means “about elementary instruction”). An editor, eyes fixed on his screen but always alert to his surroundings, gave a little grunt and then said, “Two hits in the last two months in the Times.” Without missing a beat, the helpful backfielder had searched the newspaper’s recent archives and in a flash found both citations. One of the clerks (never say “copy boy,” especially if she’s a young woman) reached into the mouth of a printer as it spat out two pages and handed me the research it would have taken Sir James Murray and his minions at the Oxford English Dictionary years to assemble a century ago.
“I’d like to give props to my dawg D.J. Jazzy Jeff,” the president of CBS Television, Leslie Moonves, told advertisers as reported by Jim Rutenberg of the Times last month, “for waking us all up this morning.” (When an interviewee pronounces the word dog as “dawg,” it is permissible in the more informal sections of the paper to render it as pronounced.)
This month, before her performance at a Battery Park festival helping to revitalize downtown New York, the singer Sheryl Crow offered her respects to the heroic Fire Department: “I want to give props to Ladder 9, Engine 33—my buds.”
From these examples it can be deduced that the verb currently most closely associated with the noun props is give. Now the etymologist ru
shes back to his library and plunges into other databases and slang booklets for early usages and semantic development.
In April 1992 (where have I been?) in a Seattle Times article on graffiti, latrinalia and hip-hop lingo, Marc Ramirez defined to give props as “to honor or owe respect to. Writers sometimes give props to other writers or crews in their pieces by including their tags or initials.” Three months later, the music industry phrase appeared in Ebony magazine: “Give him props.”
I have nondatabase resources. Definitions of two senses were provided in the fifth edition (1997) of “A Dictionary of Cal Poly Slang,” compiled by the students of intercultural communication at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, under the direction of Dr. Judi Sanders. One sense is “friends: I got props who can back me up if I need them.” The second, and ultimately dominant, sense is reported with the origin implicit: “Proper respect. The class gave me much props during the presentation.”
That’s it: props, coined on the West Coast in the music business, is a slang term for “proper respect” and is now sweeping the country, or at least my newsroom. (Consequently, propination means “a toast to someone’s health.”)
With a somewhat less hangdawg expression, I cruised the bureau again, giving props to the with-it clerks, until I heard shoes.
Jack Cushman, the weekend editor, mentioned that he heard someone say, “My wife has shoes with that.” That didn’t impress me (my wife has shoes with that outfit, too), but the editor repeated the word in a broader-context phrase: “Very worrisome shoes.”
Short for issues! Another significant lexical find. We have seen how the scholarly-sounding word issues has for a decade swept aside the prosaic problems and obliterated the euphemism challenges. Even the feminist slogan “You got a problem with that?” has been emended to “You got an issue with that?”
To retain its freshness or insidership, a voguism frequently has to mutate, usually by clipping the first syllable. (Your children refer to you as rents, not parents.) Thus do we now have the second syllable of issues acting for the entire word. How to express it in print? This does not work: ’sues. Nor does this: ’ssues. The printed word must reflect the pronunciation, which could be shooz or shoes.
In my judgment, the clipped form of issues is best expressed in print with an apostrophe to indicate the lost syllable, followed by the group of letters that most familiarly evokes the sound. Thus, if you wish to pay proper respect to issues of great moment while appearing to be in that moment, you can say, “I give props to ’shoes.”
Props(Cont’d). More than one hundred e-mailers responded to my column about props, a slang term with its origin in “proper respect.”
“I thought you were going to mention Aretha Franklin’s usage of the word on her 1967 hit single ‘Respect,’” observes Dan Williamson of the Department of Philosophy at San Jose State University. “I think she sings, ‘Give me my propers when I get home.’ Despite the somewhat down-and-funky implications, I could swear that’s really what yo’ music-biz pals are really thinking.”
Bernard Schneider of Falmouth Foreside, Maine, recalled that “during a recently aired Ed Bradley interview of the artist on 60 Minutes, he inferred that her artistic plea for propers was for adoration and attention of a sexual nature.”
That torrent of informed correction drove me to J. Redding Ware’s 1909 Passing English of the Victorian Era, which touches lightly on the term as “erotic.”
Reached during a tour that took her through Washington, Franklin is having none of that. Her use of propers (which many heard as profits) in the lyric was her own, not in the words originally written and performed by Otis Redding in 1965.
“I do say propers,” says the queen of soul. “I got it from the Detroit street. It was common street slang in the 1960s. The person’s saying it has a sexual connotation couldn’t be further from the truth. ‘My propers’ means ‘mutual respect’—what you know is right.”
Proteomics. Remember the word urgently whispered into Dustin Hoffman’s ear in the 1967 movie The Graduate—the secret that would lead him on to great fortune? Of course you do: “plastics!”
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year’s word—the linguistic key to the future—was whispered into my ear by a great brain scientist: “proteomics!”
As in genomics, the study of the genetic material in the chromosomes unique to a specific organism, the accent is on the om. Pronounced “protee OM-iks,” the hot new word in the cutting-edge community means “the study of the way proteins expressed by genes interact inside cells, especially to determine differences in protein action between diseased cells and healthy ones.”
We need to know this, not so much to understand the sequencing of the human genome as to be able to drop the word into cocktail-party conversation.
(Nobody goes to cocktail parties anymore, because ever-fewer people are being served individually mixed cocktails, since it is easier for waiters to pass out glasses of wine; instead, we go to receptions, a word that conceals today’s standardized boozing. However, cocktail remains an adjective describing a perfect little black dress and cocktail-party lives on as a compound adjective modifying conversation, the phrase meaning “idle chat-ter.” I have digressed.)
The term proteome (“proteins that are encoded and expressed by a genome”) was coined in 1994 by Marc Wilkins, then a graduate student at Macquarrie University in Sydney, Australia. On the analogy of genome/genomics came the formulation proteome/proteomics. Reached in Sydney, Wilkins—now with Proteome Systems there—defines proteomics as “the study of proteins, how they’re modified, when and where they’re expressed, how they’re involved in metabolic pathways and how they interact with one another.”
Frankly, if I were a biotech genius faced with the challenge of coining a word for “the study of proteins expressed by genes,” I would have come up with the easier-to-say proteinomics. That has the smooth consonant n between the vowels e and o, as in economics. The -omics suffix is most comfortable following an n: you often heard Nixonomics, Reaganomics and Clintonomics but not Fordomics, Carteromics or Bushomics.
The New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade, soon after the widely hailed publication of evolution’s set of instructions, wrote in June 2000, “Understanding the role of every human protein—proteomics—will be one of the goals of the post-genome era.” (Are we post-genomic already? Genome, we hardly knew ye.) A Times business reporter, Sana Siwolop, followed up with an article about “an early leader in the field of proteomics, which many scientists generally regard as the next step after genomics research. Proteomics involves the large-scale study of the proteins that are made by genes.”
As I whispered the magical word denoting the lucrative field into every available ear in Davos, one listener nodded and whispered back, “optical semiconductor!” His badge identified him as Michael Dell, the computer man. It seems that a regular semiconductor, like the chip in today’s computers, is based on electricity, but an optical semiconductor is based on light, of which nothing is faster. This fellow Dell thinks the phrase optical semiconductor will be on everyone’s lips in a few years, and I pass it along here in case people betting on proteomics lose their shirts.
However, eight syllables are a mouthful; how about opticonductor, or shorter still, crossing the opticon? You don’t have to understand this stuff to name it.
Proteomics very soon will be over, and superseded by metabolomics, name-dropped by a colleague here. Proteins are, after all, only a subset of all the chemicals that bounce and diffuse around the inside of a cell. These metabolites, for example, sugars and lipids, are the products, substrates, stimulants and repressors of proteins and genes.
And when metabolomics is over, we’ll go back to good ol’ cell biology.
Doug Yu
School for Biological Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich, United Kingdom
I am a lowly college student with only a couple of semester
s of Greek, but I may be able to offer a good reason why the “omics” suffix is most comfortable following an “n.” My understanding is that the suffix is actually “nomics,” coming from the Greek “nomos,” meaning custom or law.
Ross O’Connell
Amherst, Massachusetts
You of all people! Nothing is faster than light, so an optical semiconductor is based on light, than which nothing is faster, not of which.
Gerald M. Levitis, MD
New York, New York
When you write that nothing is faster than light, haven’t you impaled yourself on the horns of a Lurking Amphiboly? It is like saying that nothing is better than mom’s cooking, a terrible indictment of the old lady’s cuisine. Fill my tank with nothing! It is faster than light and a good deal cheaper.
J. J. Kilpatrick
Washington, D.C.
Proteomic Fix. I wrote, “An optical semiconductor is based on light, of which nothing is faster.” Fourteen members of the Gotcha! Gang, including James J. Kilpatrick, journalism’s master philologist, noted that “nothing is faster of light” is meaningless, and that if I meant “nothing is faster than light,” I should have written, “light, than which nothing is faster.” They are correct. Some days never end.
Push-Back. Douglas Feith, a high-level Pentagon official, took me aside at a reception and whispered a single noun in my ear: “Push-back.” I felt like Dustin Hoffman getting the one-word advice about plastics in The Graduate.
He’s right; the noun push-back is everywhere. The vogue began with the verb form among secretaries of state: Henry Kissinger often spoke of seeking “to push back the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.” In 1998, Madeleine Albright spoke of “one of the major reasons to push back on Saddam,” and in May of this year, Colin Powell said, “I have to push back a little when you say America is not willing to give its lives.”
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 31