Sleeper. In the stock market, a sleeper is an undervalued security. Among publishers, a sleeper is a book that sells for years without being advertised. Movie moguls think of it as a film that surprises by grabbing audiences, and in politics a sleeper is a seemingly unimportant amendment that would cost billions if not spotted by alert opponents. In horse racing, when a horse has been held back in previous races to build up the odds—and then is allowed to go full speed to win its owner’s big bet—that horse is a sleeper.
That word of so many senses (and don’t forget the garment with no opening for toes that sleepwear manufacturers produce for toddlers) has awakened new interest with its most sinister meaning: “a spy long in place but not yet activated.”
“Hollister … was a sleeper,” wrote the mystery novelist Holly Roth in a 1955 book that used that word as its title, “a member of the Communist Party whose whole life was dedicated to the one big moment.” In 1976, the Times of London observed, “There almost certainly exists within our political establishment, what is known as a ‘sleeper’—a high-level political figure who is in fact a Soviet agent, infiltrated into the system many years ago.”
As the cold war ended, the word surfaced again with a slightly different meaning: in 1990, Professor Paul Wilkinson, a British terrorism expert, told the Press Association that Iraq was unrivaled in the technique, with sleeper squads, known as “submarines,” already in position.
Benjamin Weiser reported in the New York Times on Dec. 22, 2000, that a former U.S. Army sergeant, Ali A. Mohamed, testified to a federal grand jury investigating the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa that the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden used the technique: “In 1997, [Mohamed] told the FBI about networks of terrorists,” wrote Weiser, “known as ‘sleepers,’ who lie low for years but do not need to be told what to do.” The reporter quoted an FBI document released in court holding that Mohamed knew “that there are hundreds of ‘sleepers’ or ‘submarines’ in place who don’t fit neatly into the terrorist profile.”
Four years after that FBI report was written, the word sleeper moved from spookspeak jargon into the general language. “The pattern of bin Laden’s terrorism,” wrote Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball in Newsweek two weeks after September 11, “is to insert operatives into a country where they are ‘sleepers,’ burrowed deep into the local culture, leading normal lives while awaiting orders.”
Slippery Slope. “In bioethics,” writes Robin Henig, a science writer from Takoma Park, Maryland, “a slippery slope implies a certain inevitability to scientific progress, an inability to put a stop to progressively more loathsome applications of knowledge once we receive knowledge in the first place. When did the term come into use, and what has it meant other than the way we use it today in bioethics?”
In politics: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in decrying the undemocratic methods of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, said that the African nation was “on the slippery slope of perdition.” (By using “of,” he used perdition to mean “eternal damnation”; had he said “to,” it would have meant “hell.”) The Nobel laureate Tutu liked that phrase: “When you use violence to silence your critics … you are on the slippery slope toward dictatorship.”
Civil libertarians in the United States use it, too: Otis Moss III, pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, warned that President Bush and his attorney general “stand upon a slippery moral slope as they attempt to respond to this horrific act [September 11] with legal procedures that shred the foundation of our Constitution.”
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Before the ever-popular phrase was extended into metaphor, it was used by poets who liked the alliteration to mean, simply enough, a muddy hill on which one could break one’s neck. Herman Melville in his 1876 Clarel: “The steeds withstand the slippery slope / While yet their outflung fore-feet grope.” And Robert Frost in 1916: “As standing in the river road / He looked back up the slippery slope / (Two miles it was) to his abode.”
But the key task of the phrasedick is to find earliest uses of the current sense of “a course that leads inexorably to disaster.” The OED tracks it to a 1951 novel, but new retrieval technology lets us do better than that. The economist Herbert Heaton wrote in 1928 that Canadian “cards and bills alike found themselves on the steep slippery slope of war finance.” And thanks to the Cornell Making of America database, we have this 1857 use from Chamber’s Journal: “When the educated person of middle class is reduced to pennilessness … what but this gives him the desire to struggle again up the slippery slope of fortune?”
In both those citations, the meaning is closer to “the greasy pole,” a figure of political speech popularized by Benjamin Disraeli to describe the difficult climb and easy fall from power. The current sense of “first step in what will be a long slide” probably surfaced in the early 20th century, possibly in an article by a writer in a 1909 Quarterly Review, published in London: “the first step down that slippery slope at the bottom of which lies a parliamentary government for India.” If you want to join the phrasedick fellowship, send along an earlier usage and get an effusive accolade.
Nowadays, as Ms. Henig notes, the phrase is often used in controversies about ethics. “It does not make sense to ban stem-cell research where abortion is completely legal and fertility clinics destroy untold embryos,” wrote Marcel D’Eon in the StarPhoenix of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, last month. “And it demonstrates what opponents of abortion have been saying for more than 30 years: we are on a slippery slope. Who knows where it will lead?”
Logicians are very cautious about slippery slope arguments because it is impossible to know beforehand, with absolute deductive certainty, that an “if-then” statement is true. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 came up with the “falling domino” principle: “You knocked over the first one, and what would happen to the last one was the certainty that it would go over very quickly.” This “domino theory” was later much derided by opponents to our defense of South Vietnam.
I notice that the word “phrasedick” is a favorite of yours. I assume you intend it to mean a person who investigates origins and associations of phrases, as in “phrase detective.” The second syllable was used in that meaning more popularly in my youth (’40s and ’50s) than it is today, when, as you surely know, it more commonly suggests a vulgar definition. I’d hate to think of you in that way.
Madeline Hamermesh
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Slug It Tout. Headline writers—at their best, the language’s poets of the succinct—sometimes give in to the urge to accentuate a minor sense of a temptingly short word. In response to the television news producers’ “If it bleeds, it leads,” some writers of our headlines are in danger of adopting its counterpart: If it fits, it hits.
“Bush Touts Welfare-to-Work Proposal During Ohio Trip” was an AP headline this month. It was soon followed in the Washington Post by a headline over an article from Michigan, “Bush Steps Into the Classroom to Tout New Education Law.”
We’re talking about the English verb tout, pronounced “towt,” not the French word for the adjective “all,” pronounced “too,” as in “le tout New York,” meaning “anybody who is anybody among the glitterati.” The English tout is hot, not just in headlinese but also in the body of articles. A Washington Times reporter, object of no pleas to squeeze, picked up on the vogue verb with “The president was scheduled to travel to Pennsylvania today to tout another component of his budget: $11 billion to fight bioterrorism.” A reporter for the New York Times noted that Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey supported a deduction of college tuition payments from federal income taxes with “He and his advisers tout this whenever possible.”
An AP deskman, asked about the meaning of touts atop the wire service article about welfare-to-work, quickly replied, “It means ‘speaks in favor of.’” Others would defend their use of touts as meaning “recommends, urges passage of, advocates, supports, presses for” or even “praises, hails.�
� Those are not the primary meanings of this colorful colloquialism. Words carry connotations; because of its larcenous, racy origin, this verb lugs along an aura of slyly phony enthusiasm.
Touter began as a noun in the English village of Tunbridge Wells in 1754. “Here are a parcel of fellows,” wrote Samuel Richardson, “mean traders, whom they call touters and their business touting … riding out miles to meet coaches … to beg their custom while here.” The racetrack association came early, as Sporting magazine in 1812 defined a touter as “a person who hides up between the furzes on the heath to see the trials of horses.” The novelist Charles Dickens, in his 1844 Martin Chuzzlewit, used it to mean “a thieves’ scout” when he wrote of “thimble-riggers, duffers, touters, or any of those sharpers … known to the Police.”
Clipped to the single-syllable touts, these sneaky souls can still be spotted coming back from the furzes on the heath at some of our huge raceways to tout—the verb—a horse to an unsuspecting bettor, thereby to manipulate the odds or get a piece of the winnings. (A generation ago, I bought a double-breasted pinstripe suit; A. M. Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the Times, said, “You’re supposed to look like a newspaperman, not a racetrack tout,” and I have not worn it since.)
From this sleazy background we get the current extended meaning of the verb to tout: “to publicize blatantly, to praise extravagantly; to importune often for a selfish or sinister purpose.” Politicians have been known to do that, of course, and opinionmongers have the right to use it freely. Though it is terse and punchy, its judgmental appearance in a headline is to be (to use the favorite verbs in headlinese) assailed and decried. What’s a good substitute for tout? Discuss has no sell in it, and advocate is too bookish; if you’re reaching for dignified pushiness, try promote.
Slurvian. What students of the New York accent now categorize as “first-stage Slurvian” was reported in the 1938 Federal Writers Project “Almanac for New Yorkers.” An example given was onnafyah.
The definition of onnafyah, as consumers of hurried meals in Manhattan know, is “a short order is being prepared.” The metaphor of a burger sizzling on the grill has since been extended to a more general “it’ll be ready in a minute,” whether or not applied to food. This brings to mind another first-stage Slurvian expression, jeet?, a quick way of asking someone if he has eaten.
Slurvian is not limited to New York City. The most famous example of slurred speech embodied in dialect is the southern y’all, which has its equivalent in New York Slurvian alluhyuz. (That’s if the emphasis is on the all; if the speaker wishes to stress the plural you, the phrase becomes alluhyooz.) And in California, g’yonit signifies “get on it,” meaning “get moving.”
These amalgams and other familiar interrogatory compressions—tsamatta?, hootoadjadat?, whaddyanutz?—have no meaning other than the phrases when separated: “What’s the matter? Who told you that? What are you, nuts?” Of greater semantic interest are the phrases that gain a separate sense when deliberately slurred. We will now consider “second-stage Slurvian.”
Linguists will not soon forget fuggedaboudit. Although the transliteration of the New Yorkese phrase has appeared on T-shirts around the country, the expression is not being dropped by Noo Yawkiz, which so often happens when a dialect phrase becomes adopted by outsiders. That is because the slurred words do not mean only the literal “forget about it”; rather, the phrase is second-stage Slurvian for “don’t bother me with that” or a more figurative “it’ll be a cold day in hell before I buy that cockamamie notion.”
The closest Slurvian synonym to fuggedaboudit is gedaddaheeuh, which long ago lost its initial meaning of “leave the premises” and now conveys disbelief shot through with an abiding disdain. Standing alone, gedaddaheeuh means “I don’t believe you” or the more vivid “don’t give me that baloney.” But when used in the start of a sentence like “Gedaddaheeuh wid yer fancy talk,” the disbelief turns to vehement rejection, in the sense of “I vigorously reject your highfalutin language.”
The sense of the compressed phrase is no longer the sum of its individual words; the compressed phrase conveys a meaning all its own. Another example of the semantic change called “figurative extension” that grew out of New York speedspeech is noprollem, which originally meant “I can do it easily” but now can be a modest response to gratitude with the primary sense of “you’re welcome.”
Derision at such elision is misplaced. The University of Pennsylvania’s William Labov, whose classic 1966 study, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, demonstrated that the city is a melting pot of various dialects, should be delighted. (I have been unable to pinpoint the locale of gerareheeuh, a variant of gedaddaheeuh; fresh street research is needed.)
The lexicographer Sol Steinmetz notes that the Brooklyn accent differs from Noo Yawkese: “Oily boid is Brooklynese,” he says, “as any Manhattanite or Bronxite will inform you in no unsoyten toyms. There is no standard New York pronunciation of words like car, bad and off.What we think of as ‘New Yorkese’ is the least prestigious of the various social dialects, or the one that differs or deviates most from standard American English. That is why New York speech has a low prestige even among its own speakers.”
Off. I just pronounced that as I wrote it, and it sounded like “awf,” as in awful, not like “off” as in offal. For help on this, I turned to the pronunciation maven Charles Harrington Elster, author of Is There a Cow in Moscow? (Yes, but there is no zoo in zo-ology.)
“New York tawk features a diphthongal aw sound,” Elster observes, “that in heavy New Yorkese sounds almost disyllabic.” (Before a Parisian reader of this column in the International Herald Tribune expostulates, “Gedaddaheeuh avec ton baratin,” let me translate. A diphthong is the gliding sound of combining vowels, as in the oy in the head-smacking Yiddish oy veh. Disyllabic means “having two syllables.”) “It’s impossible for me to transliterate this elongated aw here, but ask a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker to pronounce dog and coffee and you’ll come close.
“New Yorkers are also renowned r-droppers,” Elster says. “Day eat wid a fawk, day walk onna flaw, an day drink adda bah. The superintendent of their apartment building is da soopuh, and the New York Times is da paypuh.” He agrees that “their propensity for slurvy pronunciation can sometimes be nothing short of miraculous. When I lived in New York, I remember how conductors on the Long Island Rail Road managed to slur the name of a certain station, Woodside, into the unintelligible wuss-eye (the eye of a wuss?).”
On hamburger that will “be ready in a minute,” I fear you are paying your researchers too much, thus forcing them into restaurants that employ wait-persons who do not use the expression heard virtually universally in the Big Apple, namely, “It’s coming right out,” or “it’ll be right out.”
Ask someone who eats in a luncheonette, a Chinese restaurant, a greasy spoon, or other places where the bourgeoisie take their nourishment.
As for “r” droppers, the real epidemic hereabout comes in the form of the “t” droppers, people who intone Atlanna, Toronno, innerception, cenner in their manner of slurring speech.
What next?
Melvin Poretz
Merrick, New York
I haven’t heard “gerareheeuh” in close to seventy years, and I’ve probably never seen it in print before. Unfortunately, I don’t live there anymore, and so I can’t do any street research for you, but I suspect there is a Yiddish connection. Mr. Weisberg, the landlaw nexdaw, used it alluhtime when he wahnid us to gedawf his propuhdy. Actually, it was more like “gerahfumheeuh,” but we got the idea. Perhaps the Slurvian phrase developed from the German/Yiddish “heraus,” meaning “out” or “outside,” which sounds a bit like “get out.”
Donald Berger
Hollywood, Florida
You mention that you have been unable to pinpoint the locale of gerareheeuh, a variant of gedaddaheeuh. I think it may come from the annals of immigration from Eastern Europe. I seem to recall an article entitl
ed “Hungarians,” by I remember not whom, in The New Yorker about 35 years ago. The author describes his first days in public school in the United States, at which point he knew no English. So he transliterated the schoolyard expressions he heard into Hungarian, attempting to observe how they were used: sarap seemed to mean, “be quiet,” and gerarahir seemed to mean, “Go away.” Flip (or roll) the “r” and it sounds right.
Lisa H. Newton
Fairfield University
Fairfield, Connecticut
When you talk about New Yorkers dropping “r’s” you know perfectly well that New Englanders do the same, and perhaps they corrupted the New Yawkuhs, or perhaps they all got it at once. I spent forty years of life in Boston, where they also ADD “r’s” where they do NOT belong (as in Kennedy’s “Cuber”). Not having lived in New York for any length of time, I’m not sure what New Yorkers do about adding “r’s” inappropriately. All I know is that I still say “fowdy” for forty, after twenty-five yeahs on the West Coast, although by now I do not say “Californier,” and sort of miss being called “Sheiler.”
Sheila Madden
Berkeley, California
You previously did a column, as I recall, on words that mean something different in other parts of the country, but are pronounced the same way. I have noticed a few. For example, in New York, a wok is a cooking instrument. In Chicago, you wok the dog (or dagh?) (In New York you wuak the duag). A friend in Iowa told me proudly, “My brother is a liar!” That is a strong Midwestern pronunciation for those who pass the bar!
I would suggest a real-life addition to your column about such New Yorkisms as fuggedaboutit. I used to work for a college president. He was from the Bronx and the college is in the Bronx. I was the chief financial officer. He used to ask, yagotdanumbizz? When the situation was more urgent, he would ask, yagotdafreakinnumbizz? Remembering that he was a college president with a PhD, he also referred to a large building on campus as the lieberry. When that was a subject of urgency, it became dafreakinlieberry.
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 37