The compression of modification suits headline writers and e-mail correspondents, whose shortness of space or haste in composition makes them the language’s leading squeezers. A statement like “a host is on duty at our Web site continuously” is whittled down to 24/7/365-hosting. Some compound adjectives are dying: push-button convenience is passé, and solid-state electronics, which substitutes transistors for vacuum tubes, is not needed in an age that assumes vacuum to be a noun for a device that sucks up dirt. State-of-the-art anything died from overuse, and world-class is out of the competition, falling back into the nonce-word category. And parody has weakened industrial-strength.
I am not the only language maven to notice this. At Astrakhan State Pedagogical University, located in the Volga River delta, Maya Ryashchina has found three patterns: noun plus postpositive, as in hands-on manager and heads-up tennis; verb plus postpositive, as in drive-by killing; and a modal verb plus infinitive, as in can-do mentality, must-have wine and must-see film. (Go, Astrakhan S.P.U.!)
Euphemizers have reached out for compound adjectives. Adults of generous girth or a tendency toward obesity (whom the insensitive used to call “fat people”) wear big-and-tall clothes for men, plus-size for women.
The soul-satisfying impetus for our compound-modifying discourse …it’s getting to me … begin again. The biggest boost to the use of hyphenated adjectives in the way we write has come from the military. In that target-rich environment, we find the World War II use of company-grade and field-grade officers. In the 1960s, zero-defect quality control and zero-tolerance policies made their mark, promptly picked up by politicians. “An unfortunate inclusion in the U.S. legislation,” biologists observed at the Royal Society of London in 1967, “was the use of the term ‘zero tolerance,’ which implied a nil residue level.” (In the scandal affecting the Catholic Church today, a zero-tolerance policy toward pedophile priests is in the headlines.)
What single term epitomizes the triumph of the compound adjective? The hands-down winner (in the old days, I would have written, “The winner, hands down,” and come to think of it, that’s more emphatic) is weapons-grade.
This was coined in a 1952 policy statement by the Atomic Energy Commission calling for “nuclear plants which are economically independent of government commitments to purchase weapons grade plutonium.” It was not then hyphenated; that was done a year later by the scientist George L. Weil, the colleague of Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago who physically initiated the first nuclear chain reaction. Weil started a linguistic chain reaction as well: the meaning became “fissionable material of a quality for use in nuclear weapons,” and its serious meaning now applies to biological agents as well.
As with all horrific words, it was quickly absorbed into popular culture. Voted the “catch-all superlative” of last year by the American Dialect Society, weapons-grade has been used to modify everything from a Toyota’s torque output to Elvis Presley’s charisma. Allan Metcalf, the Dialect Society’s executive secretary, explains, “Weapons-grade salsa would mean really hot.”
The week preceding your article my ninth-grade classes and I had been reading Julius Caesar and noted Cicero’s observation that the night before Caesar’s assassination was a “strange-disposed time,” as well as Cassius’ comment that “certain of the noblest-minded Romans” had chosen to embark with him on “an enterprise / Of honorable-dangerous consequence.”
In the past week, we have completed Act II where troubled Brutus enviously looks at his sleeping servant Lucius and comments “enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber” and Caius Ligarius is willing to follow Brutus with a “heart new-fired.”
Apparently, not only did the Bard invent so much of our vocabulary, he also was the inventor of the compound-adjective!
Elyse Aronauer
Flushing, New York
Welcome Back, Rogue. On June 19, 2000, a date that will live in euphemism, the diplomatic language was deliberately and suddenly attacked by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Speaking on public radio’s Diane Rehm Show, she abandoned the tried-and-true Kissingerism rogue states, preferring instead to refer to nations like Libya, Iraq and North Korea as states of concern.
Peppered with questions about this calculated change in nomenclature, a hard-pressed State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, replied, “We have different policies toward different places because the key issue here is not to categorize.” He was clearly uncomfortable with the linguistic shuffling.
Rogue is a 16th-century English canting word, used by beggars and vagabonds, that is obscure in its origin, though it may be a variant of the name Roger (as in the limerick about the girl from Cape Cod that concludes, “’Twas Roger the Lodger, by God!”). As a noun, rogue is synonymous with, and carries the delicious old flavor of, “knave, scoundrel, villain.” As an adjective, it means “mean” or “uncontrollable.”
We have a rollback. In his budget address to a joint session of Congress, President George W. Bush denounced “rogue nations intent upon developing weapons of mass destruction.” Speaking at the dedication of the USS Reagan the following week, he made clear that the ringing locution or cliché is back in language’s good graces: “Our present dangers … come from rogue nations.”
Mary Ellen Countryman, the National Security Council spokeswoman with the most salutatory name in the new administration, told Al Kamen of the Washington Post that rogue nation was “a term that means something to people.”
Right. No longer will criminals fear being portrayed in a states-of-concern’s gallery, nor will vicious beasts driven out of the herd be called states-of-concern elephants. Nor, thanks to the Bush rollback, will tomorrow’s actors playing Hamlet begin a soliloquy, “O what a state of concern and peasant slave am I.”
Whatever It Takes. I have long been of two minds about the word ambivalent. But the time has come to take an unequivocal stand on ambiguity.
As far back as 1982, an investment banker named Leo Dworsky wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that the Middle East could withstand “more downright strategic ambiguity.” In 1995, Joseph Nye, then a top Pentagon official, used the phrase in a speech to the Asia Society about the extent of America’s defense commitment to Taiwan. As long as Taiwan did not press for independence, any attack by China on the island would have “grave consequences”—which may or may not include use of United States forces. Two years later, James Baker, the former secretary of state, unambiguously defined the phrase at a Rice University conference as “We don’t tell anybody what we might do.”
House Republicans led by Representative Christopher Cox, however, said that strategic ambiguity “virtually invites conflict.” They recalled that when Dean Acheson left South Korea out of a list of countries the United States would defend, the Communists “miscalculated” and invaded. A Clinton assistant secretary of state, Winston Lord, was uncomfortable with the phrase, but said it was “like the Energizer Bunny—it keeps going and going.”
Then along came President Bush’s affirmative response to a question about defending Taiwan if attacked. “With the full force of American mili-tary?” Charles Gibson of ABC asked. Bush replied, “Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend itself.”
When a State Department spokesman said that this was no change in policy and Bush reiterated his expectation that Taiwan would not be provocative, the New York Times reported that this was “making it ambiguous whether the United States still holds to ‘strategic ambiguity.’” Hardliners countered that the best deterrent to war was clarity, not vagueness.
The Latin ambigere means “to be undecided”; synonyms of ambiguity include “uncertainty, doubtfulness, inexplicability.” The addition of strategic makes the uncertainty appear cunning, a deliberate policy of “keep ’em guessing.” But strategic, long a global intensifier in national security circles, lost puissance when “strategic partner,” as applied to China, fell into disfavor and was disavowed by Democrats.
Cool compromisers in Washington’s think tank
s are suggesting on deep-six background that Bush geopolitical thinkers adopt a policy of “tactical ambivalence” in the framework of “strategic clarity.” Those adjectives and nouns can be switched around to fit changed circumstances caused by nuke-ular threats.
Willkie Lives. After Al Gore denounced the old guard and other powerful interests, the relatively moderate Joe Lieberman was asked if the Democratic proposals would cause him to take a populist line. “Political rallies tend not to be places for extremely thoughtful argument,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Rather, he said that the Gore policy proposals were “quite moderate” and added, “You have some rhetorical flourishes.”
That reminded political-history buffs of Wendell Willkie, GOP nominee in 1940 against FDR, who warned in the campaign that “if the present administration is restored to power for a third term, our democratic system will not last another four years.” After his defeat, Willkie undertook a diplomatic mission for President Roosevelt and was asked how he could square his cooperation with his earlier charges. In testifying before Congress in a way that infuriated Republicans, Willkie grinned and let the cat out of the political bag: “It was just a bit of campaign oratory.”
Today, that’s called “rhetorical flourishes.”
Wired. After Bill Clinton expressed contrition at a preconvention interview at a church gathering in Illinois, the Reverend Bill Hybels, one of his pastoral advisers, put his hand on the president’s shoulder and prayed with him, saying, “Thank you, God, that you wired him up the way you did.”
Wired bids fair to be the most multisensed “hot” word on the American linguistic scene. No other old word has more new meanings. Up to 1980, according to a search engine that puff-puffs its way through all the libraries in the world, 61 books had wired in the title, but in the past twenty years, almost 400 more have been added. The noun began in the Latin viere, “to plait,” and the Greek iris, “rainbow.” The Old High German wiara meant “fine gold work.” As a verb, its early definitions—“fasten or strengthen with a metal tie” and “connect in an electrical circuit”—remain, but in our technological time the wound-together word has burst into a rainbow of senses.
Wired for sound, applied in the ’50s to people wearing hearing aids, was the name of a 1986 song by Michael W. Smith and Wayne Kirkpatrick. This was in the Christian contemporary rock section of music stores, deploring the difficulty of studying the Word of God amid the cacophony of “a world that’s wired for sound.”
An entirely different meaning of wired for sound was emerging at the same time: “The joint is wired….” wrote J. D. MacDonald in a 1957 novel, A Man of Affairs. “The next step is cameras and infrared and tape recorders, I guess.” The single word wire stood for “electronic eavesdrop-ping.” A person fitted with a surreptitious recording device to help others spy on conversations is said to wear a wire. This was what Monica Lewin-sky refused to do for investigators for the independent counsel looking into her relationship with the president.
Meanwhile, beginning in 1969, another meaning was taking root: “high on amphetamine drugs; manic.” A mild precursor of this, reported by John Farmer in his 1890 slang dictionary, was “irritated; provoked.” The sense of its modern offshoot, not necessarily drug-related, ranges from “edgy, jumpy, uptight” to “pumped up, visibly nervous” to “feverishly excited.” It was the title of Bob Woodward’s 1984 book, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi.
A sense also first cited in 1969 is from the computer world: “having circuits connected permanently and designed for an unchangeable function.” Scientific American noted in 1981 that “it is a rule of thumb in computer science that an operation can be executed fastest when it is hard-wired into the computer rather than specified as part of a program.” Why “hard”? Because that differentiates it strongly from the software, which is not part of the machine’s wiring.
This computer meaning was quickly transferred to neuroscience and applied to the workings of the brain. “These cells are hard-wired and ready for action,” wrote the New Scientist in 1971, “as soon as the kitten opens its eyes.” In a few years the professor of astronomy Carl Sagan was writing, “The brain is completely hard-wired: specific cognitive functions are localized in particular places in the brain,” an assertion since largely confirmed by imaging technology, though experience or accident can cause “rewiring” to take place. This year, the New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp, writing about the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, noted that the Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman’s institute was “partly inspired by Dr. Edelman’s theory that the brain’s architecture is shaped by our experiences. Tell me what you like, and I will tell you how you’re wired.”
That sense was later applied to more general opinions or abilities. When Joseph Lieberman was chosen by Al Gore to be his running mate, Rabbi Avi Shafran told the New York Times that concern about Jewish visibility in politics was “sort of hard-wired into our system, for better or worse.” Similarly, a coach for the University of California Bears recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that he had high hopes for a young player because “he’s wired the right way for a quarterback”—that is, he had the stable temperament and quick reactions suited to that position.
As the Internet came into being, another new sense was applied: “adept at the use of the computer, tuned into the culture of the Internet.” In Paris, a group that had tried to launch a magazine called Electric Word was reaching for a new name for a magazine addressed to the cyberworld. Jane Met-calf said to John Rosetto, John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, “Wired.” George Shirk, editor of that successful publication’s independent offshoot, Wired News, sees their role as heralds of “the Virtual Class, people in technology, finance, marketing, media, law, politics and education who are driving the Digital Revolution.”
A related sense, beyond the specific Internet culture, is “part of a network of people with related interests; integrated into a social set or part of an informatrix.” A more pejorative side to this is “set up to take advantage of high-level contacts”: a deal that is rigged, its outcome arranged beforehand not on the basis of merit or fair competition, is subject to the charge of being wired.
Thus, the question “Is he wired?” can mean “Is he sure to get the job?” Or “Is he tense, excited, on ‘speed’?” Or “Is he au courant, with-it, where it’s at?” Or “Is his brain’s activity predetermined?” Or “Is he fitted with a secret microphone?” Or “Is he temperamentally disposed for this?” Or “Is he on the Net?”
How will this past participle of a short verb, in future permutations, further transform its meaning and vivify our tongue? Nobody, no matter how well connected, can tell which senses will prevail and which will pass into archaisms. Stay wired.
Wordplayers. What do you call somebody who continually applies his nose to the grindstone, eschews the distractions of fun and games and otherwise occupies himself with those moneymaking endeavors that make Jack a dull boy?
A workaholic, of course. But what did we call that addiction to work—that obsessive attachment to long hours and briefcases voluntarily stuffed with homework—before Wayne E. Oates, in a burst of linguistic innovation in 1968, titled an article in a pastoral magazine, “On Being a ‘Workaholic’?”
We had no word for it. The language suffered from a gaping hole. Not until this Southern Baptist pastor from Louisville, Kentucky, came up with his coinage could English speakers succinctly express themselves. “I have dubbed this addiction of myself and my fellow ministers as workaholism,” Oates wrote, and later defined his term as “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly.”
He based it, obviously, on alcoholic. In so doing, the coiner made a new suffix out of -oholic. But the question of spelling arises: if the suffix is adopted from alcoholic, why did Oates not spell his word workoholic? That was the spelling of a parallel formulation adopted the same year to describe those bittersweet-toothed souls who cannot do without a chocolate f
ix: chocoholic. But choco lent itself to the -oholic; why did Oates prefer the a?
I cannot ask him because Wayne Oates was one of those who died in the past year, remembered in history not so much for his fifty-seven books and hundreds of published articles, but for his undisputed coinage of a necessary word. That’s the way it goes in the word dodge; if you coin a good one, it becomes the lead of your obituary no matter what else you did.
Same for Herbert Freudenberger, the eminent psychologist who died last month in New York. Was he noted for his work with people who lost self-esteem, became bored, discouraged and sloppy? Or for his free clinics for drug addicts, or for his court-ordered analysis of the murderous Charles Manson? No. The headline in the New York Times read “Herbert Freudenberger, 73, Coiner of ‘Burnout,’ Is Dead.”
He first used the word as the title of a 1974 book, subtitled The High Cost of High Achievement, which he wrote with Geraldine Richelson, defining burnout as “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.” In his native Germany, from which he fled in 1938, the term is aus gebrant, literally “burned out.”
Burnout had been a 1940s term for “the sudden loss of rocket engine.” By the ’50s, it had been largely replaced by flameout, giving Dr. Freudenberger a chance to give it a new life with his psychological sense. Though he did not coin the word itself, as Mr. Oates did with workaholic, he gave burnout the sense by which it is known today.
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 42