An invitation to look anything up is my meat; I did, and one common meaning is substantially as Powell defined it: a sighing, wrist-to-forehead fainting away, historically done by a delicate flower of a woman. (To swoon is “to be overcome by rapture,” rooted in the Old English geswogen, “unconscious,” and popularized in descriptions of teenage girls at the early performances of Frank Sinatra at New York’s Paramount Theater.)
Ah, but the vapors has a variety of meanings and a long history. The Century Dictionary defined it a century ago as “a disease of nervous disability in which strange images seem to float hazily before the eyes, or appear as if real … the ‘blues’: a term much affected in the 18th century, but now rarely used.” Synonymy was provided by Henry Fielding in his novel Amelia, written in 1751: “Some call it the fever on the spirits, some a nervous fever, some the vapours, and some the hysterics.” In Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s hero evoked the hallucinatory connotation: “These things fill’d my Head with new Imaginations, and gave me the Vapours again.” It is a manifestation of what was first called “melancholia”; in President Lincoln’s time, “the hypo,” and later “depression.”
Why vapors, which has to do with gaseous, misty or steamy exhalations? Because the mental state of low spirits was thought to originate in the stomach or spleen (in men), or the uterus (in women), for which the Greek word is hystera, bubbling up to the brain and causing morbidity. In a “discourse concerning chocolata,” Henry Stubbe wrote in 1662 that “by the eating of those Nuts, she feels the Hypochondriacal vapours … to be instantly allayed.” Though this belief that internal emanations were the basis for nervous disorders was rejected during the rise of psychiatry, the old idea that mental states are affected by chemical products of the body has made a comeback (as did the lay term “blues”).
In current use, vapors is a word used jocularly, not in allusion to depression but often to suggest mild hysteria or unmanly weepiness. When applied to men, it carries a feminine overtone: the writer Peggy Noonan told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times in 1991 of White House aides “who are utterly at the mercy of the lunar tides and utterly affected by the vapors and by an almost feline desire to look man to man at one’s enemy and scratch his little eyes out.” Two years later, Dowd returned to the expression in its evocation of the past no longer relevant: “In the old days, if a woman wished to escape a difficult encounter, she could plead a case of the vapours and retire to her Victorian fainting couch.”
That trivializing sense can also be applied to governments: writing about an abortive attempt by Iraqis in 1995 to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Claire Berlinski noted this month in the conservative Weekly Standard, “Moments before the plan was to be effected, the Clinton administration, seized by an attack of the vapors, changed its mind.”
Afterthought: In the medical lexicon, the names of ailments and diseases are often changed to get more formal or avoid the sort of kidding-around that became attached to the vapors. Thus, grippe is now “influenza,” dropsy is “edema” and lumbago is “lumbar pain.”
Apoplexy, whose adjective form, apoplectic, came to mean “red-faced with rage,” is now called “stroke” (like apoplexy, from the Greek plessien, “to strike”) because this third largest killer in the United States was nothing to treat lightly.
The best example of the laugh associated with this abandoned term was Ethel Merman’s famous ad-lib when playing in Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun: Annie Oakley was to show her marksmanship by shooting a duck; the stage gun did not go off, but the duck fell on cue. Merman, never the sort to get the vapors over a show-biz mishap, walked over to the prop, held it up and said, “Whaddya know—apoplexy!”
Visit With. “Vice President Cheney has a completely open door” to members of Congress, said the Bush counselor Karen Hughes last month on ABC’s Nightline. “He’s always available to visit with any member who’d like to visit with him.”
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer recalled the days when George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, would “drop by and visit with various legislators of both parties.”
John McCain’s recent get-together with the Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, was described in the New York Times as “Mr. Daschle’s highly publicized weekend visit with Senator John McCain.” Elizabeth Becker, a Times colleague, notes that “the political use of visit with is rampant. Not visit to, or just visit, and rarely meet—always visit with. Where is it from?”
The South. Lyndon Johnson used that venerable southern Americanism when he introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965, telling a joint session of Congress he was grateful for the chance “to reason with my friends, to give them my views and to visit with my former colleagues.”
What does the preposition with do to the verb visit? It milks out most of the action, making the verb intransitive and changing its tone from purposeful to neighborly. “To say that John McCain visited with Tom Daschle,” says Leonard Zwilling, general editor at the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), “implies a friendly exchange of views, as opposed to met with, which could just as well suggest that they had a flaming set-to.”
Visit does not mean visit with. You can visit a place or a person, but you can visit with people only. In his 1927 We, the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who had just visited France, wrote of “Perryville, Mo., where we visited with some of Klink’s friends.”
In his Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, E. Ward Gilman adds a nice distinction: “To say that you ‘visited with’ someone usually implies not only that you conversed, but that you went a bit out of your way for the sake of some friendly talk.” Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado sensed that distinction earlier this month, thanking Defense Department nominees “for taking time to drop by my office and visit with me personally.”
Let moguls continue to take meetings; let confrontationalists visit imprecations on one another; let trustees descend on colleges with stern visitations, and let Lady Macbeth fear “no compunctious visitings of nature,” but remember—today’s successful politicians sailed smoothly into the era of sweet, nonpartisan visits with.
Voguism I. What’s with voguism? The reader will ask: “Is it a word? Why isn’t it in my dictionary?”
It is not synonymous with nonce word, which is “a term used once for some special occasion.” Rather, voguism is a not-so-new neologism that was created in this space in 1982. Though picked up and used once by Newsweek, the word has since languished, out of print and out of sorts. It is today getting another chance at linguistic life because it meets a need—not a “felt” need, but a real one—in an age when words and phrases come and go like overnight celebrities. (When was the last time you used the ’80s state of the art or the ’90s at the end of the day? There was a time you couldn’t get through a New York talk-show minute without them.)
We need a term that goes beyond vogue word to encompass whole phrases like having said that. In my personal lexicon, voguism means “a word or phrase in fashion, used by writers who are with-it and then repeated endlessly by politicians and public intellectuals unable to assert their relevance without it; a breeze-by bromide, a cliché without staying power.”
Dictionaries, limited to reporting words in use, need citations to trigger inclusion in future editions. At the end of the day, only adoption by other language mavens will determine how voguism fares.
Although it won’t affect your semantic analysis of that (having been) said, it might be useful to note that it appeared in British English a few decades before it surfaced in the U.S.
As for voguism, it would seem to be a voguism for cliché. You’ll find vogue word in the OED, and I suspect that voguism is to vogue word (or expression) as Briticism is to British word (or expression ).
Laurence Urdang
Old Lyme, Connecticut
Voguism II: This Day Is Over. “A few months ago,” writes Joan Swirsky from someplace (look, if you’re going to send me e-mail, it would help regional dialectologists if you said where you’re fr
om), “it seemed that every talking head I saw on TV started using the expression at the end of the day. I thought of writing you about the derivation, but time went by. Then I saw Terry McAuliffe interviewed by Tim Russert. Without exaggeration, McAuliffe used that expression at least twenty times, like it was his tic!”
You are indeed exaggerating, Swirsky, wherever you are. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, used the phrase only seventeen times in the twelve minutes he spoke on the air: “At the end of the day we won on the issues”; “At the end of the day if all the votes were counted”; “There was no swap at the end of the day.” This off-putting tic, as Swirsky accurately described it, continued until the end of his appearance, distracting viewers from his earnest message.
Fifteen years ago, I cited George Washington’s early use of this phrase in a 1797 letter and suggested that its vogue use in the ’80s was getting out of hand. After heaping ridicule on it as an affectation and a cliché, I concluded: “At the end of the day is hot. But you’ll see, when all is said and done …”
Evidently, this did not do the trick. Although the phrase is now banned at the DNC, it has become a staple of speakers determined to take a lofty, daylong view of what they consider to be other people’s feeding frenzies. Like famously, another vogue term savaged here six years ago, it marches on. A language maven finds this humbling.
Voguism III: Three Little Words. Soon after Governor George W. Bush became the likely Republican nominee, Vice President Al Gore blasted his opponent’s proposed tax cut as a “risky tax scheme that would threaten our prosperity.” A few days later, he assailed the Bush plan “to blow the entire surplus on a risky tax scheme that would benefit the wealthy.” A database search shows Gore using that phrase 164 times in the past two years, 44 in the last month alone.
Its provenance can be found in the Democratic campaign of 1996. In his debate with GOP vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp, Gore zapped the tax-reduction plan put forward by Bob Dole as a “risky tax scheme that would blow a hole in the deficit.” Because Gore evidently believes this attack phrase to be effective, it is worth analyzing.
Risky, an adjective coined in 1827 by the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, suggests danger without going so far as “dangerous, unsafe” or “perilous.” It suggests a knowledge of the hazard ahead that can be avoided by prudent action. Although the noun risk in a financial sense is acceptable, the adjective risky is intended to engender wariness or suspicion.
In American English, scheme, especially as a verb but also as a noun, suggests a crafty or secret plan to attain a sinister end. This is not the case in Britain, which treats the noun scheme as synonymous with “project, enterprise, plan.” However, the verb on both sides of the Atlantic has a larcenous tinge, as “to effect by contrivance or devise by underhanded means.” A long-ago cartoon showed an ambitious IBM employee setting aside the company’s slogan, “Think,” with another sign: “Scheme.” That sly sense of the verb has slopped over the noun in America.
Candidate Gore plans, or schemes, to keep risky tax scheme in his verbal arsenal. As Mr. Bush comes up with words equally effective, they will receive equal etymological treatment here.
Voguism IV: Bold Initiative. Readers who enjoyed the exhaustive exegesis in this space of Al Gore’s use of risky tax scheme were promised a similar study of favored words of his opponent, George W. Bush.
We have an entry culled from a column by Gail Collins in the New York Times, wherein my colleague wondered “whether Mr. Gore is right in charging that the Bush tax plan is ‘risky,’ or Mr. Bush is more correct in dubbing it ‘bold.’”
As far back as 1997, the governor described his tax plan to the Texas legislature as “this complex, bold, aggressive plan.” The Dallas Morning News promptly hailed his “bold tax plan.” In a presidential primary debate in New Hampshire in late 1999, Bush described his tax proposal as “a good, bold, practical plan.” One of his early competitors, Senator Orrin Hatch, later saluted the Bush proposal to reduce taxes by $483 billion over five years as “bold but responsible.”
Hatch’s qualifier—“but responsible”—was intended to strip any possible riskiness out of the Bush plan (or, as Gore keeps deriding it,“scheme”). It indicates the senator’s subtle awareness of the adjective’s ability to trouble the easily daunted.
The word, of Teutonic origin and first spelled bealde, appeared in Old English about the end of the first millennium. Shakespeare, in 1593, felt it necessary to place it near a synonym: “when their brave hope, bold Hector, marched to field.” But even as the meaning of “brave” took firm hold, Shakespeare recognized that the word had acquired a different sense, of “overly audacious, too forward”: in his 1605 King Lear, he wrote of “men so disordered, so deboshed and bold.”
Bold, applied to a person, today connotes “pushy,” sometimes “fearless,” but on the edge of “reckless”; applied to an idea, however, the connotation is slightly stronger than audacious and just short of courageous. It’s better to have bold ideas than timid ones.
But watch out for cliché fusion: the Dow Jones database spits out 1,802 hits in the past decade on bold initiative. William Godwin coined initiative in 1793 to mean “the first step in some enterprise” and (prefiguring debate in the art world centuries later) wrote, “Sensation … possesses the initiative.” The overuse of bold to modify Godwin’s word vitiates its potency. An alternative to initiative is undertaking, but that may have fallen by the wayside as the managers of funerals became known as undertakers. (They now prefer morticians.)
Bold suffered a decline in use for some years (brave, undaunted, and intrepid were preferred) but made a comeback in the great example of the split infinitive of our time: the Star Trek plan “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the man was changed to one; that was a bold initiative.
W
Wave of the Wand. Under “Enhanced Security Measures,” the White House Web site lists, among other items, “random hand-wanding of passengers at the gate.”
The Toronto Star wrote in 1989 about a “physical search which includes hand-wanding and X-raying.” When a guard at an inspection post at Kennedy Airport in New York failed to give a passenger a once-over with a handheld electronic search instrument, the terminal was evacuated. “The employee was conducting pat searches,” an airline spokesman told the Daily News, “but was not wanding passengers.”
Wand is a noun meaning “stick,” its root in the verb wend or wind, connoting a slender, twisting rod. Since the 15th century, wand has evoked images of a magician or a fairy casting a spell.
No more. In 1979, the Bookseller reported on “the light pen, or ‘wand’ that could read machine-readable codes on books.” But it was a series of short jumps from handheld devices to bar-code scanners to electronic instruments that detect metal objects in a person’s clothing. Now you can’t board a plane without being wanded. (Those with beards or Middle Eastern looks are among the ten most wanded.)
The word hand is being dropped from hand-wanded because the essence of the search by the wand is personal: security people do not put whole human beings through the baggage-scanning machine. The wand, properly wielded, does not touch the person. The other verb, in which the body is searched by hand, is frisk. That sense goes back to Cockney rhyming slang, “to frisk a cly,” the allusion to which escapes me.
You referred to the expression frisking a cly as Cockney rhyming slang. Slang it is; rhyming it ain’t.
Cly is slang for seize or steal; a clyfaker is a pickpocket. So frisking a cly is searching a pickpocket.
Graeme McLean
New York, New York
The Victorian pickpockets and cutpurses referred to their victims as their “clients.” Inevitably, the term “client” was shortened to cly. Sometimes pickpockets worked on the fly against a moving target, but they also worked on the frisk. When a crowd assembled to watch some public spectacle, a pickpocket would stand next to his victim a
nd then he would (here comes the interesting verb) fimble him, using only his fingertips to probe surreptitiously until he located the victim’s note-case (as wallets were often called in those days). The subtle pat-down before the actual snatch was called frisking the cly.
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
New York, New York
Weapons-Grade. Are you in favor of same-sex marriage? Have you recently gone through wrong-site surgery leading to a near-death experience? Do you search a drop-down menu to find a with-it shop so that you can look (to use a compound adverb) drop-dead gorgeous in your bare-midriff dress?
When the vogue for compound adjectives was just getting under way, the hyphenated terms were usually literal: a white-collar worker wore a white shirt to the office, and a blue-collar worker’s collar at the factory was often blue. The literal meaning is expressed today in disco-inspired tees (formerly T-shirts) and Gucci’s under-the-breast corset. But the hyphenations could also be metaphoric: lace-curtain Irish required some knowledge of social history, much as baby-boom generation does today. Early on, the precedent was established permitting the stringing-together of several words: the going-out-of-business sale of the Depression is matched in word number by out-of-the-box thinking today.
Now the hyphenation of modifiers rules the linguistic roost. This rule-roosting device—See? Nothing to it—satisfies the need for the new: “Hyphenation gives the impression,” says Frank Abate, former editor in chief of the U.S. Dictionaries program at Oxford University Press, “that the compound is novel, imaginative or requires some background knowledge.” He notes that some of these double-word modifiers grow out of adverbial phrases: in “technology at the cutting edge,” the adverbial phrase is swung around in front of the noun to become cutting-edge technology; in the same way, “you can track changes in real time” becomes real-time data.
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 41