Bill Clinton put the constitutional phrase into a question and then answered it in 1994: “What’s the state of our Union? It is growing stronger, but it must be stronger still.” In 1996, he said “the state of the Union is strong” and in the next two years repeated that phrase, reverting to his initial our Union, but sticking to strong. In 2000, with the economy still booming and surpluses projected as far as the eye could see, Clinton concluded his string of SOU addresses with “the state of our Union is the strongest it has ever been.”
George W. Bush last month also used stronger, but his speechwriter Michael Gerson used it in a creative way, pointing to a seeming paradox: “Our nation is at war, our economy is in recession and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger.” This anomaly was apparent in the victory in Afghanistan and was largely brought about by “the might of the United States military.” In Bush’s first SOU, he was able to point out how a justified pride in our power and national will overwhelmed both the economic strains and the dangers of terrorism. The favorite adjective of recent presidents to characterize the nation’s state—strong—was thus unarguably applicable. Do presidents and their writers think about the one-word summation of the state of the Union (always capitalized) when the time for the report required by the Constitution rolls around? Do they read the way their predecessors handled it and chew over whether to stick with previous usage (Good? Sound? Strong?), or play off one of those usages, or come up with something fresh? As this history should show, you bet they do.
Squeezewords. Rush Limbaugh, the radio philosopher, was appalled. Thousands of his listeners were sending in messages protesting the increased number of commercials on his program. Because he was talking the same amount of time every day, and the show ran the same three hours, how could this be?
Then a surreptitious form of editing was revealed to him. “A new kind of digital technology,” wrote Alex Kuczynski in the New York Times, “was literally snipping out the silent pockets between words, shortening the pauses and generally speeding up the pace of Mr. Limbaugh’s speech.” The irate radio commentator stormed, “I think it is potential doom for the radio industry.” Since then, he tells me: “I have amended that. They will reduce the pauses judiciously, no more than a minute and a half per hour. I want to see if the nuances are affected—after all, a pause can be pregnant.”
Decades ago I did something similar to Humphrey Bogart. He had a habit, as do many of us, of punctuating his ad-lib phrases with uh. (This has since been replaced with “I mean” and “y’know,” which serve the same function of demonstrating a presence while not saying anything.) When Bogie had a couple of drinks, the uh’s came thick and fast. In the ’50s, after taping an interview with him for the Armed Forces Network, I did him a favor and laboriously snipped all those stammering self-interruptions out of the tape. When our talk was broadcast, he was surprised at how articulate he sounded.
In most cases, I would do the same today as a courtesy to interviewee and listener. I’ll even clean up a grammatical error when taking notes for a written interview, thereby preserving a source and avoiding [sic-sic-sic] wiseguyism. But secret snipping for commercial gain is another kettle of fishiness. Not only is it sneaky, but the silent squeeze also weakens discourse by removing dramatic pauses.
A related danger is not a result of nefarious squeezing by money-grubbing time-savers, but of the hurried laziness of speakers. Let’s not be stiffs about this: in pronunciation, the English language has always tended toward contraction. Old-timers cannot recall ever having heard business, colonel or Wednesday pronounced with three syllables. Chocolate, which geezers recall as “CHOCK-a-lit,” has become “CHAW-klit”; its central syllable melted away in our mouths. In a 1949 article in the New Yorker (now the Nyawka), John Davenport commented on “Slurvian,” the language of what linguists call syncope (“SING-kuh-pee”). In this laid-back lingo, syrup becomes surp, Americans are Merkins, and “no, Ma’am” gnome. His forn, for foreign, was picked up by the Central Intelligence Agency, and now “no foreign distribution” is stamped NOFORN.
In our time, such speeding up must not go unremarked. In today’s compulsive compression, other majestic and sonorous words are losing their central syllables. In The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Charles Harrington Elster argues that “syncopated pronunciations tend to improve the fluidity of speech” and cites “VEJ-tuh-bul” for vegetable, “FAM-lee” for family and “DY-pur” for diaper. (Only babies say “change my ‘DI-a-per.’”)
This has not taken place in a vacuum. (That word was once pronounced “VAK-u-um,” but our natures abhorred it, and it’s now “VAK-yoom.”)
However, Elster still cites as objectionable to cultivated speakers such squeezings as “AK-rit” for accurate, “YOO-zhul” for usual, “claps” for collapse and “VUR-bij” for verbiage. (I would add an “ASS-ter-ik.”) He takes a pop at me for countenancing an r-less “TEM-puh-chur,” and he’s right: from now on, I’ll take my “TEM-pra-chur.”
In this political season, two locutions have come under the sustained pressure of the squeezers. One is President, the three-syllabled office much coveted by campaigning candidates. I never minded Lyndon Johnson’s southern pronunciation of the last syllable in his warm “I am yo’ Presidint”; that is a legitimate dialect variation. However, the near-universal adoption of Prezdent seems to me to diminish the office.
A special target for the squirrels of squeeze has been Social Security. This generation, promised six full syllables with no cutbacks, was willing to accept “Soshasecurity.” But what of the candidates who promise the salvation of “Sosh-security” or preserving untouched the indexed benefits of “Sosa CURE-ity”? Dwayna M. Wisdom of Union City, New Jersey, notes other variations from “SoSecurity” to “Soshacurity.”
How can anyone pledge expanded benefits to a contracted program? Cock a wary ear to the way the candidates squeeze this revered phrase in coming debates. Then cast your vote for Prezdent.
Stovepiping. The new bête noire of the military, and of the most modern managers, is stovepiping .
“Flat organizations work better than vertical organizations,” decrees the Pentagon’s manpower analysis handbook. “It should be noted that stovepiping is not inherently evil, but the burden of proof should be on the stovepiping function to demonstrate that it is not.”
Lt. Gen. Ed Rowny (Ret.) urged in the Wall Street Journal that Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, be given authority to order widely dispersed bureaucracies into coordinated action. Ridge’s present problem? “Rampant stovepiping—different agencies under different command.”
Rowny was present at the time of the creation of the word. When he was working for James Forrestal in forming the Defense Department in 1947, he notes, “we all went up and down our particular chain of command, but when it came time for the Army to cooperate with the Navy, we’d stovepipe—go up to the top of the pipe and then back down, instead of cross feeding.”
The noun stovepipe is a vertical cylinder carrying a stove’s smoke up through the roof. As an adjective modifying hat, it describes the tall top hat that Lincoln wore. Now that business schools use the participle form, stovepiping, in derogation of managers who fail to look around, the question arises: what do rising managers call horizontal cooperation that avoids direction from the top? Floorboarding comes to mind.
Strip Search. “Republican leaders are sure to fight hard to either defeat the bill or strip out parts,” wrote the Orlando Sentinel. The CNN correspondent Chris Huntington said, “If you strip out certain charges, they’re reporting a profit of 12 cents.” Fortune magazine quoted Andy Fastow, an Enron executive, as having said, “We strip out price risk; we strip out interest risk; we strip out all the risks.”
Gypsy Rose Lee, where are you? Strips is an acronym apparently coined by a bump-and-grind ecdysiast enthusiast at Treasury for “Separate Trading of Registered Interest and Principal of Securities.” To
strip a bond is to remove its interest-paying coupons and sell the principal of the bond separately. What you have left is a zero-coupon bond and a separate bunch of coupons. “To strip out,” says Professor Robert Jarrow of Cornell, “is to infer the value of the zero-coupon bonds underlying the value of a coupon bond. It relates to Treasury Strips that the Federal Reserve Board trades.”
That specific financial meaning has been removed—stripped out, if you will—in the vogue use of the phrase by scandalmongers on the periphery of the Enron story. It now means “snatched away from, in the dead of night.”
Stuff.Stuff is hot. It began a few years ago, with stuff-stuff-stuff temporarily replacing “et cetera, all that jazz and on and on.” The word received a boost when Richard Carlson titled a series of books Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, an expression first popularized as a book title in 1988 by Michael Mantell. The word was applied to character by Tom Wolfe a decade before in his book about astronauts, The Right Stuff.
But those uses carried the meaning of “things” or “material.” In its latest vogue sense, stuff is racing through the lingo of the software industry as the word to denote all the extra goodies provided with the purchase of a computer, usually in the phrase “plus lotsa great stuff.” There may be a mocking quality to the use of the simple old word by the nerds of the newest technology, as if to say, “This is too complicated for me to explain to the likes of you in my space-time continuum.”
Vogue-Word Watchers will note that I did not observe that stuff was “in.” In is out—way out. (Way, in its adverbial sense of “exceedingly,” is way voguish.) As categories for cutting-edge terminology, in and out are as archaic as Uand Non-U, as behind the times as avant-garde. Remember edgy, last year’s word for what you had to be? It’s in the graveyard of nonce words, behind the tomb of state of the art.
Those on the qui vive who need to flaunt their with-it-ness in the face of the stodgily au courant have turned to hot, with the extreme of “forwardly fashionable, at the center of attention” expressed as way hot or hot-hot. (In the nomenclature of the new, forget cool, which is no longer hot. Lists that used to classify people and places as In and Out are now labeled “What’s Hot and What’s Not.”)
In “Hot New York”—an assessment of the latest socialites, chefs, designers, “Web guys” and media bosses—the New York Observer’s editors observed that “heat is hot” and defined it as “the ethereal stuff that makes a man or woman in this town shine.” It is not power but notoriety—an especially transient or raffish aspect of celebrity—that determines the degree of heat: “As one of the largest shareholders of AOL-Time Warner, Ted Turner certainly is as powerful as most world leaders,” observed the temperature-takers, “but in terms of heat, he’s Mr. Freeze.”
This department is blessed with the Vogue-Word Watchers, shock troops of the Lexicographic Irregulars with eyes sharpened and ears cocked to catch the hot-hot in midflight. “What’s the sudden attraction to traction,” asks my Times colleague, the business reporter Tim Race, “in business and political contexts?” Example from a West Palm Beach Democrat during the recent Long Count: “If Gore gets any traction, you’ll see a special session.” Traction is a word originally meaning “the action of pulling” that came to mean “the adhesive friction of a vehicle on the ground” and has been extended further in politics to “the grip of a campaign on the public attention.” I have used it too often and stand corrected.
“We need something more than this feckless, photo-op foreign policy,” declared Senator John McCain on the stump in October. Vogue-Word Watcher Darren Gersh of Chevy Chase, Maryland, asks: “Often users of feckless seem to be looking for an SAT synonym for ‘clueless.’ Only a few seem to be aiming at the dictionary definition of ‘ineffective, or lacking purpose.’ By the way, if you are feckless, can you be feckful? And is having feck a good thing?”
You bet; the Scotticism comes from effect, rooted in the Latin facere, “to do.” If you’re feckless, you don’t do nuthin’. Good word; needs rest; try feeble. As for the archaic feckful, go with the modern effective or efficient .
“Can something be done about this word robust?” demands James MacGregor Burns, the great historian at Williams College in Massachusetts. The adjective has been married to economy;Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News, recently denounced it because “it means whatever you want it to mean. Do we mean growing demand, increasing demand? Then why don’t we say that?” Professor Burns’s theory is that “the word has risen with prosperity and will promptly decline if there is a recession.” (In the lexicon of the Old Economy, a roboom is followed by a robust.)
The vogue word rooted in the Latin robur, “strength,” is now hot in diplomacy, where even a demarche can be robust, and especially in the wide world ofWebese (forget the passé cyberlingo). The Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media (I was a pioneer in digital media, but it was then called “fingerpainting”) defines robust as describing “a system with the ability to recover gracefully from exceptional inputs and adverse situations. A robust system is almost bulletproof.” The word is rapidly becoming feckless.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff” was very big in Northern California, specifically in Walnut Creek (just outside of Berkeley), at Del Valle High School, in 1963—well before 1988.
There may have been some bigger connection to Big Events in the phrase: several of the members of Del Valle’s 1964 graduating class went on to participate in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the fall. And the rest, of course, is history.
Kate Buford
Irvington-on-Hudson, New York
Summitese. “A parley at the summit” was what Winston Churchill called for a half-century ago. He envisioned an intimate get-together of a few world leaders and not a paperbound conference “zealously contested by hordes of experts and officials drawn up in a vast cumbrous array.”
The summit in Moscow between Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton would not be to Churchill’s taste; hordes drawn up in a vast cumbrous array (what a mouth-filling derogation of staff) will be whispering in summiteers’ ears.
Whoops! In referring to the summit, I have transgressed. “As a noun,” reads the ordinarily sensible New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, “summit may designate the level or format of a meeting (the issue will go to the summit) but is jargon when used as a synonym for meeting (they held a summit ).”
As they say in the Pentagon, I nonconcur. (That’s jargon.) The stylist’s resistance to linguistic change is laudable—new terms should have to fight their way into general acceptance over time—but players in the poker game that is language have to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. Summit is no longer merely an attributive noun modifying meeting or conference; usage over fifty years has turned the modifier into that top-level conclave itself. Cancel the meeting.
With that settled (at least in my mind), we can turn to the summit in Moscow and diplomacy’s fierce struggle of verbs about a controversial arms control treaty: abrogate versus withdraw.
In 1972, the general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, and President Richard Nixon signed a treaty to limit antiballistic missile systems. The ABM treaty, in its Article XV, says, “Each Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events … have jeopardized its supreme interests.” Six months’ notice is to be given “prior to withdrawal.”
Hard-liners in the United States point to a new missile threat from rogue nations, learnedly mutter rebus sic santibus—“circumstances have changed”—and add that the Soviet signatory of 1972 no longer exists. Unless the Russians agree to let us build a limited missile defense against a terrorist attack (a defense not powerful enough to affect Russia’s deterring missile forces), then we should withdraw from the treaty.
Softer-liners counter that such unilateral action would undermine all arms control; instead, they hope Clinton in Moscow will seek minor amendm
ents to the treaty to allow a limited U.S. defense that would not cause the Russians to worry that their missile force could be stopped. (I am being excruciatingly evenhanded here.) They warn of a worldwide reaction against us if the United States abrogates the treaty.
The choice of verbs—withdraw or abrogate—tips the reader to the point of view. Abrogate means “to cancel, annul, quash, void, to abolish authoritatively.” The word is harsh; in William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, we see the controversial “In that he sayth a new testament he hath abrogat the olde.”
Withdraw, in contrast, means “to retract, to take back or away” or “to remove”; in another sense, it means “leave the room.” Robert Henryson, in his 1480 Testament of Cresseid, came up with a gentle line still remembered fondly by copy editors afflicted with prolix writers: “Withdraw thy sentence, and be gracious.”
A New York Times editorial opined, “Mr. Bush would withdraw loans and credits to Russia over its crackdown in Chechnya and abrogate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.” Though in the newspaper’s view both steps would be “dangerously confrontational,” its use of withdraw regarding loans and abrogate about the treaty suggests that it would find the latter step more troubling.
“Abrogate has a pejorative connotation,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, a revered professor of international law at Harvard, “in the sense that it means ‘to end the treaty not in accordance with the treaty’s terms.’ It suggests a much more active decision to end the treaty and is much closer to the term breach than the term withdraw.”
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 39