Which is it, then—sensual or sensuous? Is there a difference? Yes; just as in underwire and underwear, the distinction is worth preserving.
Sensual has to do with the pleasurable gratification of the senses; for five centuries, it dealt with sexual appetites and carnal desires. “He loves,” sneered a disapproving prude in 1618, “as far as sensual love can go.” To this day, a sensual person is one more inclined to revel in physical pleasures than to get a charge out of moral rectitude.
The poet Milton was not blind to this connotation of lewdness. However, writing in 1641 about the difference between soul and body, he needed a neutral adjective to apply to the body that meant “pertaining to the senses” of touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing. So he dropped the -al from sensual and substituted -ous, writing, “The Soule … finding the ease she had from her visible, and sensuous colleague the body.”
The poet Coleridge announced in 1814 that he would reintroduce Milton’s word “to express in one word what belongs to the senses”; ever since, usagists have differentiated sensual, “indulgent in physical pleasure,” from sensuous, “descriptive of aesthetic appreciation.” You get a sensual kick out of watching an R-rated movie and a sensuous kick out of listening to music or sniffing the cookies in Grandma’s oven.
Shouldst Milton be living at this hour, he would surely take umbrage at the misuse of his uplifting adjective by the bra makers at Hanes. They are alluding to the luxurious feeling of their lightly lined Sensuale product, implying, as in the OED’s sense 3, “a luxurious yielding up of oneself to passive enjoyment.”
I noodled this around with Steven Pinker, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. He does not see the semantic difference to be holding up. “The distinction was blown to smithereens in the early 1970s,” he says, “when ‘J’ published The Sensuous Woman, which as I recall suggested some interesting new uses for Jell-O and Saran Wrap. Apparently sensuous as a synonym for ‘sensory’—pertaining to the senses in a clinical way, as in ‘sensory physiology’—but they have failed.”
Not with me, they haven’t. I like the distinction. It reminds me of the difference between continual and continuous.
Even Pinker, a descriptivist, goes along with me part way on that: “The most consistently respected meaning difference between continual and continuous,” he notes, “is that continuous can be used for spatial as well as temporal continuity (‘a continuous line of trees’), whereas continual can be used only for temporal continuity. We see this in the spatial adjective discontinuous (‘a discontinuous line’).”
Prescriptivists like me go all the way. We say continual means “repeat-edly,” like the plumber upstairs going bang, bang, bang when you’re trying to sleep. Pinker agrees that although continuous is nine times more common in writing, continual “is said to be used for iterated events.” (Iterate means “repeat, say again”; I think he treats reiterate as semiredundant.)
Continuous, on the other hand, is like the steady whine of a buzz saw in operation. Continuous “is said to be used for a truly gapless state or condition, such as heat, war or illness. One can sense this in the contrast between ‘John is working continuously’ (without interruption) and ‘John is continually working late’ (every day).” Pinker has counterexamples, but I refuse to become confused.
Remember the difference between -al and -ous. Suffixes count. It’s fine being imperial (having an empire) but not being imperious (overbearing). Those who observe these distinctions are virtually virtuous.
Shall We Trance? “Scott Henry packed the trance tent,” reported Kelefa Sanneh of the Times, “with a set built on simple melodies, pounding beats and dramatic contrasts.” The article was about an annual dance party held in New York as a kind of mall of music. “Techno and trance both eschew syncopation,” the writer explained. “The listener is tempted to imagine that the thumping will continue forever. By contrast, styles based on syncopation tend to produce shorter, more volatile tracks, often built around vocal performances—songs, in other words.” I like that sudden simplification of the pretentious “vocal performances” with “songs,” but the writer’s wry phrase “in other words” doesn’t work with the single word “songs.” You wouldn’t switch to the singular “in another word” because that would lose the easy, colloquial sense of “to put it in plain English.” I’d try “that is, ‘songs.’” (In this compulsive copyediting, am I being too picky? You should see my e-mail.)
Forget about techno, already being pushed aside by electro. Keep your ear on trance (in another word, noise, as the incognoscenti would mutter). Its meaning is not the same as the noun first used by Chaucer in the 14th century to mean “swoon, a suspension of consciousness.” But the author of The Canterbury Tales also used it as a verb to mean “to skip or prance; to tramp rapidly.”
This lays a shaky etymological basis for trance music, which was first cited in the Guardian in 1970 about shamanist tribal music played in Ethiopia. It surfaced again in the mid ’80s as a name for what Joe Brown described in the Washington Post as a combination of “electronic instruments with traditional acoustic sounds, creating a sense of well-being, even euphoria.” This New Age music was followed by a more distinct beat as an aid to meditation, and in recent usages of trance dance the beat has apparently taken over.
But do not take this as the latest in the musical vocabulary. A decade ago, the Boston Globe coined mash-ups to describe a mixture of styles in a kind of creatively corrupt collage. In the New York Times a few weeks ago, Neil Strauss referred to “the first significant new musical genre to be lifted out of the underground,” called “mash-ups or bootlegs,” mixing two or three quite different recordings by established stars, often in contravention of copyright law. Some bootleggers become furious at others who mash up their “white labels” with other bootlegs.
One practitioner of the mash-up, this time using rock and the voice of a famed television news anchor, is Mark Gunderson of Columbus, Ohio. He cheerfully told the Houston Press that he coined the name for the light-fingered stunt: plagiarhythm.
Shoveling Coalition. Afghanistan’s “Northern Alliance” was a collection of ethnic groups with the joint purpose of opposing and defeating the Taliban. Its victory was made possible by the coalition of outside forces led by, and mainly made up of, U.S. troops and aircraft.
Is there a semantic difference between an alliance and a coalition?
Yes, and we’d better get it straight before the United States and its allies (or coalition partners) hit the next state harboring terrorists.
An alliance is a formal joining of long-term interests, usually expressed in a treaty (even when derogated in 1914 by Germany’s Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg as “a scrap of paper”). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and especially its English-speaking component, is informally but accurately called “the Atlantic Alliance.”
A coalition is a temporary alliance, an ad hoc arrangement between or among nations or groups to effect some immediate end. That describes the force assembled by the U.S. in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But when our NATO allies sought assurances from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last month that the war on terrorism would not extend to countries other than Afghanistan, he replied: “The mission determines the coalition. The coalition doesn’t determine the mission.”
Neither word properly denotes the collection of forces in the recent war in Afghanistan. It was a U.S.-initiated air-sea mission, with U.S. and British commandos on the ground as spotters and organizers for the ground troops of the Northern Alliance, which was really a local coalition; other nations offered grudging moral support or intelligence tips or a willingness not to shoot down our aircraft using their airspace. It was said that calling it a coalition was diplomatically useful, but the word to describe such unilateral cooperative intervention has yet to be coined.
To provide a service to world synonymy, I turned to Henry A. Kissinger for a differentiation of the two terms that do exist to describe unions of force
s or nations in league.
“An alliance,” he responded, “is a group of states assembled for an agreed purpose with specific obligations to deal with that contingency.
“A coalition is a group of states avowing a common purpose, but which may leave the specific obligations it entails open and indeed subject for negotiation when the contingency to which the common purpose applies arises.”
Shtick. Senator Joseph Lieberman was the newsmaker guest at the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Godfrey Sperling Breakfast, sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Before getting down to political business, the first Jewish candidate to be nominated for national office by a major party said, “Let me do shtick for a while.” He then engaged in some mild ethnic humor, just as he did at the Gridiron Dinner, where he told of watching a Jewish pornographic film titled Debbie Does Neiman Marcus, about which he said, “There was no sex, but I felt guilty anyway.”
Lieberman used the Yiddishism shtick to mean “comic routine; line of patter.” It is rooted in the German Stück, with an umlaut over the u.
(About umlauts: In this case, that mark of two dots above the vowel indicates that it is to be pronounced from the front of the mouth. Uh, as in the English stuck, comes from back in the throat; oo, as in stooge, is farther up front. An umlaut—pronounced “OOM-lout,” meaning “changed sound”—also separates the sound of a vowel from the different-sounding vowel that follows, as in reënter, though in English we tend to replace the umlaut with a hyphen. We will now re-enter the subject of this Stück. Like you, I have stumbled through life without knowing what an umlaut signifies and looked it up today only because language is my shtick.)
In the aforesaid “language is my shtick,” the sense of shtick is not the original “piece,” nor the extended “comic routine”; rather, it is the sense absorbed into the English language of “characteristic bit of business” or, more generally, “specialty.”
“Welcome to the season of shtick,” writes Holman W. Jenkins Jr., columnist for the Wall Street Journal, in an article deriding other pundits for knee-jerk narratives about the bursting of the stock market “bubble” coming as a complete surprise.
“For the purposes of the shtick … the small investor is an eternal rube who can’t be expected to have taken a skeptical view of the bubble,” Jenkins writes. “The devil theory of the bubble turns on the notion that investors got bad advice from Wall Street…. In fact, the Wall Street Journal’s first use of the term ‘Internet bubble’ occurred in 1995, four years before the Nasdaq peak…. The underlying message of the shtick is that the small investor is nothing but a victim and a twit.”
Asked for his definition of the Yiddishism, Jenkins replied, “A hackneyed act or comedian’s routine that’s getting a little tired.” Because he was adept at etymology, I asked for the origin of the economic sense of bubble. “The South Sea bubble,” he said instantly. “My best guess is that bubble in that financial context just naturally arose from the connection to the sea.”
For background on the South Sea bubble, Robert Menschel, the Goldman Sachs partner whose research for a book titled Markets, Mobs, and Mayhem has made him an authority on investor psychology, referred me to Charles Mackay’s 1841 work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In it, the British historian detailed Holland’s “tulip-mania,” France’s “Mississippi madness” and the predations of England’s “South Sea Company.”
This last was formed in 1711 to exploit a monopoly on British trade with South America and the islands of the South Seas. Though unprofitable, the company traded its stock for government bonds and took responsibility for the national debt, triggering a wave of speculation, a spate of imitators and a belief that unlimited credit expansion could sustain prosperity. When mass mania subsided and stocks plunged in 1720, the ensuing failure of the banking system was characterized as “the bursting of the South Sea bubble.” The poet Alexander Pope wrote that “avarice creeping on, / Spread, like a low-born mist, and hid the sun.”
Now the word bubble is widely used to describe the run-up in the late ’90s of Internet and related technology stocks. It was given a boost in 1984, when Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, warned, “If you go into what I call a bubble boom, every bubble bursts.”
The financial usage of bubble was full-blown long before the 1720 South Sea Bubble, and it has no connection to sea foam. In fact, it conclusively predates the South Sea Bubble by at least half a century! The great Restoration comedies by Congreve, Etherege and Wycherly are rife with the word, as both noun and verb “to bubble” (to cheat or to trick) was common usage in England by 1675, when Wycherly wrote his salacious comedy, The Country Wife. Scams and financial hype were called “bubbles” at least as early.
In the sense of an ephemeral or deceptive illusion, “bubble” already appears prominently in Macbeth (1607). In Act I, Scene iii, Banquo says, “The earth hath bubbles as the water has, and these are of them. Whither are they vanished?” Macbeth answers, “Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted as breath into the wind. Would that they had stayed!” It’s quite possible that these lines drew pained chuckles from the wealthier members of his audience for Shakespeare may well have been punning on the financial sense of “bubble.” He might have had in mind the Muscovy Company (founded in 1555, which had never yielded the fabulous Russian fortune its 201 merchant shareholders had hoped for), and Sir Walter Raleigh’s expeditions (which cost Raleigh alone at least 40,000 pounds), of the Virginia Company, which had financed the Jamestown expedition just the year before Macbeth was produced.
In any case, Shakespeare seems to have foreseen the lament of NASDAQ investors down to a T.
Chances are, “bubble” wafted over to England from Holland, where the first modern stock market began around 1602. Joseph de la Vega, who described the Amsterdam exchange in 1688 in his Confusion de Confusiones, speaks often of “windhandle,” or “dealing in wind” (trading shares not in the speculator’s possession, as was done even then by short-sellers). What’s more, de la Vega writes of “inflating” stocks by offering to buy them above market price, just as “God with one breath breathed life into Adam.” This image—puffing up prices by blowing them full of air—seems the most likely origin of the financial term “bubble.”
Incidentally, Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a splendid read, but as history is notoriously unreliable. It has been superseded by much more trustworthy works like Charles Kindelberger’s Mania, Panics and Crashes (1978), Peter Graber’s Famous First Bubbles (2000) and the definitive The South Sea Bubble (1960), by John Carswell, a British polymath of Safiresque reach (my favorite book by him is his monograph on Coptic tattoos, I kid you not).
Jason Zweig
Investing Columnist
Money Magazine
New York, New York
Sidekicking. When Vice President-elect Dick Cheney (only intimates call him Richard) took a strong public position on national missile defense, he was quick to add that he did not want to infringe on the turf of “my old sidekick Colin Powell,” the secretary of state-designate.
The Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, suspecting that the incoming vice president was asserting foreign-policy dominance, promptly popped him one: “Even the terminology betrayed Cheney’s ambitions and intentions. Gabby Hayes was Roy Rogers’s ‘sidekick.’ Rogers was not Hayes’s sidekick, just as Don Quixote was never Sancho Panza’s sidekick.”
Hoagland might also have cited George W. Bush’s comment during the campaign referring to Karen Hughes, then his communications director, as “my sidekick”; that suggests a relationship of principal to aide. Was Cheney dissing Powell or respecting him as a colleague?
The first citation of the old slang with a seeming western flavor was in a 1904 story by O. Henry: “Billy was my side-kicker in New York”; in 1906, Helen Green wrote, “The Red Swede … sat over a pint of champagne with Dopey Polly … and his side kick, the Runt.” (Such colorful
nicknames are now frowned upon.) Some speculate that side kicks, two words, was a phrase derived from the outside pockets of an overcoat; in underworld slang, it referred to an accomplice.
Close study of the history of the word indicates the primary meaning to be “partner” or “close friend,” with only a second sense carrying a connotation of “junior partner” or “subordinate,” from “one who walks or rides alongside.” A vice president would not call a president a sidekick, because they are not political equals, but could use the word about a colleague in the administration’s cabinet without seeming to pull rank.
Skutnik. When a person’s name turns into a word, that’s called an eponym, from the Greek epi, “upon,” and onyma, “name.”
The University of California at Santa Barbara had a panel about the media (from the Greek for “really high-class buncha guys”). When CNN’s Jeff Greenfield assured the crowd, “I haven’t planted a skutnik here,” I stopped him: I had heard of a sputnik, the Russian word for the first Soviet satellite, but what was a skutnik?
Greenfield directed me to his book Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow! about the media failure on election night: “A skutnik is a human prop, used by a speaker to make a political point. The name comes from Lenny Skutnik, a young man who heroically saved lives after the Air Florida plane crash in Washington in 1982 and who was introduced by President Reagan during his State of the Union speech.”
The introduction of heroes became a staple in presidential addresses to joint sessions of Congress. In 1995, the columnist William F. Buckley was one of the first to use the name as an eponym: “President Clinton was awash with Skutniks.”
The play on sputnik aside, the word should be spelled Skutnik in deference to the original honoree. Watch for one the next time around.
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 36