The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (10 page)

The Russian word you mentioned is spelled
koordinaty,
not
koordinatu.
The former is the plural form, and the latter is the dative case of the singular.

Russians have been using this word for a long time in the sense of “contact information.” When I was a kid in the ’70s, it was already an old people’s joke, so the usage is probably quite old. It certainly came about before the age of wireless communications. It probably comes from sailor’s parlance—one would ask a girl her coordinates to hint at one’s adventurous occupation. I would not be surprised to find that Russian borrowed the use of the word from another language, too. While borrowing a word is a relatively rare occurrence, borrowing another use of an existing word is much more common cross-fertilization of languages, and could be traced to some mistakes a nonnative speaker makes that native speakers find interesting.

My coordinates:

Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin

Bowling Green State University

Bowling Green, Ohio

I think you missed the true origin of
coordinates.
It is a French import, which explains your tracing it to bilingual Canada. It has long been standard and common in French, and appears in any full-sized French dictionary, under the entry “coordonner.”

And there is good reason. The notion of coordinates was invented by the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, the same fellow who thought that he was. When he turned his attention to the question of where he was, he came up with what we mathematicians call to this day the Cartesian coordinate system.

Evans Harrell

Georgia Institute of Technology

Atlanta, Georgia

Cover Story.
Within a week of the terrorist attack, George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington and said, “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.” In remarks to State Department employees on October 4, President Bush spoke warmly of “stories of Christian and Jewish women alike helping
women of cover,
Arab-American women, go shop because they’re afraid to leave their home.”

At a televised news conference a week later, he reprised this ecumenical theme: “In many cities when Christian and Jewish women learned that Muslim women,
women of cover,
were afraid of going out of their homes alone … they went shopping with them … an act that shows the world the true nature of America.” He repeated that phrase,
women of cover,
calling “such an outpouring of compassion … such a wonderful example.”

The
cover
is a veil that expresses Muslim piety. The
hijab,
meaning “cover, curtain,” can range from a floral kerchief that leaves the face exposed, to the
niqab, abbaya
or in Persian,
chador,
which covers the whole body except the face, to the
burka,
as worn in Afghanistan, which covers everything. “To have good
hijab
” is a general term meaning “to be properly covered.” Some Muslim women believe that the cover need not be worn outside the mosque. The linguistic question: in describing the wearers of the veil, is it
women who cover,
as the president first used it, or
women of cover?

Sue Obeidi, at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, uses
women who cover, women who wear the scarf
and
women who wear hijab
. She is unfamiliar with
women of cover,
and I cannot find it in databases.

It’s possible that the president coined the phrase; if so, it was on the analogy of
women of color,
a description adopted by many nonwhites. (Though
colored people
is dated and almost a slur,
people of color
is not in the least offensive.) The substitution of
who
with
of
in the cover category introduces a nice parallel to the
women of color
phrase; we’ll see if it takes.

Crying Woof!
“We can sell all the
woof tickets
we want,” the Washington Wizards’ basketball forward Juwan Howard said, but “it’s about performance out there…. We’ve got to get it together.”

“Any idea what Juwan Howard is talking about?” Joe Anderson of Arlington, Virginia, asks.

As early as 1985, Clarence Page of the
Chicago Tribune
defined
selling woof tickets
as “an invitation to fight.” In 1996, Jane Kennedy of the
San Francisco Examiner
called it “telling lies.” In the
Atlanta Journal Constitution,
Betty Parham and Gerrie Ferris wrote in 1992, “Although its origin is uncertain, ‘
woof ticket
’ is a somewhat dated phrase that refers to an outrageous or exaggerated boast meant to intimidate or impress the listener.”
Woof
is a Black English pronunciation of
wolf
. According to Geneva Smitherman’s 1994
Black Talk,
a
woof ticket
is “a verbal threat, which one sells to somebody; may or may not be real. Often used as a strategy to make another person back down and surrender to what that person perceives as a superior power.”

Tom McIntyre, professor of special education at Hunter College in New York, noted nearly a decade ago: “
Woofing
is especially effective against those who are unfamiliar with it and don’t realize that it is most often ‘all show and no go.’ … The menacing behavior can usually be defused and eliminated by informed, tactful action.” He advised teachers to “look secure and self-assured while you withdraw.”

In the context of the basketball star Howard’s remarks,
woof tickets
are not to be bought; on the contrary, he uses the phrase to show that performance, and not intimidating attitude, is needed to “get it together.”

A woof ticket is a provocation: a threat, accusation, insult, or other statement that is sufficiently injurious to justify violent retaliation. It comes from the verb “to woof.” Thus a student who can no longer find his pencil might turn to a nearby kid and say, “’ey why you takin’ ma pencil, man?” The accused might reply, “You woofin’?” In white talk, “Do you want to make something of it?”

The origin had nothing to do with “wolf.” The metaphor was of a barking watchdog (“woof, woof!”). It was assumed that the one doing the woofin’ expected his recipient (the woofee, as it were) to feel the same fear a person would have when confronted by an aggressive barking dog, and to back away from confrontation with the same prudent concern for self-preservation.

The phrase “woof ticket” was most often heard in the context of the never-ending game of trading humorous insults, what sociologists call “the dozens” but we have always referred to as “rank-out sessions.” Speaker A might start off with, “Maaaan, in yo’ house, the roaches are so big the rats carry switch-blades!” Speaker B could return the volley with a comparable rank-out, such as “Ya’ll live in the only house I know where you can stand on the roof and get hit by a truck!” an amusingly oblique but recognizable reference to the ubiquitous urban structure more generally known as the sewer.

A woof ticket need not lead to fight or flight, however. One who is truly skilled at the repartee of “ranking out,” or who correctly sizes up the woofer as having more bark than bite, could manage to keep things verbal rather than physical, for example with mockery: “He swear he bad! He rank you out so low you can play handball off the curb!” That is, “He thinks he’s tough; his insults are truly hurtful! He can really make a person feel small!”

By the 1970s, “woof ticket” had disappeared from the speech of young black Americans, though it may still be remembered among those who are old enough. I can’t think of any other expression that I would consider its direct successor, though the practice of verbal provocation certainly survived both in life and art. In fact I recall a friend my age using the expression about 1973, and then remarking that he hadn’t heard anyone say it in a long time. I’ve since read that “woofin’ “ is still sometimes used among jazz musicians to describe the back-and-forth challenges between instrumental soloists. If it is true that “woof ticket” did not emerge into the mainstream print media until the 1980s and 1990s sources you cited, I would consider it a fascinating example of a short-lived slang locution entering written usage decades after it had achieved obsolescence in its original oral context.

Peter Jeffery

Princeton University

Guilford, Connecticut

D

Dash It All.
The stately colon, the confiding parenthesis and the gently pausing comma demand to know: What’s behind today’s big dash to the dash? Why has this
lingua interruptu
s—expressing uncertainty, jerking the reader around, setting up startling conclusions, imitating patterns of speech—come to dominate our prose?

In the preceding paragraph, I used a pair of dashes to interrupt a sentence and insert supplementary material that gave the question meaning or—to writers, at least—urgency. I could as easily have used a pair of parentheses, specifically designed for the purpose of graceful interjection of useful explication. In the sentence beginning this paragraph, I could again have used parentheses (“parens” to friends) or even commas to separate the mild interjection of “to writers, at least,” but I didn’t. Why not? Because I have fallen into the habit of trying too often to make writing read like speaking.

The spoken sentence is filled with uttered second thoughts, changes of direction, lurches off on tangents and similar twists. That’s because we say what we think as we think it, and thoughts have a way of tumbling over one another, and we stick them in our flow of words as each notion comes to us. In this age of raw transcription, art strains to imitate life, and artful writers feel the pressure to mirror the speech patterns of yammering people by imitating their higgledy-piggledy outpouring of unedited thoughts.

That transcribed-speech technique is fine for writers of fiction and is especially apt for playwrights and screenwriters who reveal the characters’ characters realistically through their speech. Some characters blurt their thoughts, showing honesty; others weasel their words, showing duplicity; yet others expostulate grammatically but endlessly, showing off. Writers of drama must write speech, not writing, because real people do not speak writing. Hence we have pauses, delays—you get my drift?—half-stops, restarts, stammering and exclamatory grunts (ugh!) and drifting off into pre-dot-com ellipses … To put this speech in written form—that is, to transcribe it—we have seen the powerful punch—pow! right in the kisser—of illustrative punctuation.

Good dramatic writers are in favor of whatever turns the reader on. In an 1863 poem, Emily Dickinson, writing in the halting voice of a woman dying, used the dash to signify gasping for breath: “I am alive—I guess—/ The Branches on my Hand / Are full of Morning Glory—/ And at my finger’s end—/ The Carmine—tingles warm—/ And if I hold a Glass / Across my Mouth—it blurs it—/ Physician’s—proof of Breath—/ I am alive …”

In our time, the writing of Tom Wolfe has made stylish use of the dash; he combines it with italics and the mid-sentence exclamation point to indicate herky-jerkiness or panic in thinking. In an article in the current
Harper’s
deriding the critics of American “triumphalism,” the iconoclastic Wolfe steps into their shoes to write, “After the Soviet archives were opened up—I mean, damn!—it looks like Hiss and the Rosenbergs actually
were
Soviet agents—and even the Witch Hunt, which was one of the bedrocks of our beliefs—damn again!—…” That’s the use of fictional internal monologue in a nonfiction article, and the dash does its job of chopping up the speech.

But writers of narrative and exposition, as well as those who present fiction in the third person, choose to use the language in the voice of the writer and not of a character. The written sentence, which is not to be confused with the spoken sentence that has been transcribed, gives its creator a chance to rethink the ideas that have come off the top of the head, to reassemble them in an orderly series, to snip off the stupidities and shoot the strays, thereby to marshal a cogent argument or paint a striking image.

On Punctuation Highway, the writer-as-speaker is a dasher, only half-braking at every stop sign; the writer-as-writer measures every pause, uses a comma for the speed bump and a semicolon to proceed with caution at the balancing of closely related complete thoughts, as in this sentence. The colon, a strict setter-up of things to follow, is like an arrow that says “Now watch this” to the reader, but it is too often replaced by the do-anything dash.

Professor Richard Veit of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington disagrees with me about the danger of the
em,
which is the typographer’s term for the length of the dash: it’s as long as the letter
M
in the same font. “Technically, no function of the
em
couldn’t be handled by other punctuation—comma, colon, semicolon, period or parentheses,” he notes. “The impact of the
em
is not syntactic but visual. Its shape and length demand a pause and impart drama. It sets up a punch line in a way a colon cannot. Arthur Wallace Calhoun put a code of the Old South into words in 1918: ‘A woman’s name should appear in print but twice—when she marries and when she dies.’ “ That was then; now, just as women appear in print a lot, the dash appears too often. I acknowledge that dashes can be useful—say, to add an example—and are surely more emphatic than parentheses (without the sly sharing of confidence with the reader). And the dash is
indispensible
for surrounding a list that already contains commas—weakly beginning a sentence with a conjunction, misspelling
indispensable,
and incorrectly using a comma before the
and
preceding the final item in a series—but undiluted dashiness has become the mark of the slapdash writer who fails to take the trouble to differentiate among the pauses of punctuation.

Writing is different from speaking. Organize your written thoughts so that you don’t have to stud your sentences with asides, sudden additions, curses or last-minute entries. Limit your use of the dash to its indisp—to those functions where it beats the other punctuation pauses—or else.

I very much enjoyed—as usual—your witty, learned, and enlightening discourse on the subtle properties of the dash in modern punctuation. Your keen analysis displayed a good deal of dash-not to put too fine a point on it—and you doubtless did not dash it off in a jiffy, as it were. Nonetheless, your resident Latin censor—dash it all—must have been dozing when he allowed a certain
lapsus calami
(aka “slip of the pen”) to pass his watchful eye. You will probably receive a sack full of mail from all your faithful admirers who finished a semester of Latin, so my humble contribution will by now be merely old hash—no rhyme intended.

I am, of course, referring to your allusion concerning “lingua interruptus,” which, I am almost tempted to suspect, you might have dangled before your eager readers as a tempting bait. As you see, I am one of the innocents who fell for your ruse.

By now, I have no doubt, you have been lectured
ad nauseam
about this petty point, so I shall just briefly confirm what you already know; i.e., that the term in question ought to be either “lingua interrupta”—or, stylistically more preferable—“oratia interrupta,” or, if you insist on “interruptus”—and who would not under such circumstance—the noun ought to be “sermo,” which is masculine, and thus in agreement with the adjective. For in Latin, which has three grammatical genders, nouns and adjectives must agree, to make a proper, if not dashing impression.

Hoping you will not look askance at this punctilious observation on behalf of what is, after all, a dead
lingua.

Bodo Reichenbach

Arlington, Massachusetts

I am sure that we are agreed that
coitus interruptus
should be avoided by all means.

Lingua interruptus
should also be avoided, because it is incorrect. It should be
lingua interrupta,
of course.

Gerardo Joffe

San Francisco, California

Date War.
Language is expressed in writing with a series of symbols. When people cannot agree what the symbols stand for, all is confusion. We find ourselves gesticulating wildly in a Tower of Babel.

Ah, you say, but globalization and Internetting will fix all that. Computers inside a little translating bug in our ear will enable us all to understand one another instantly. Or English will become everybody’s second language until a universal language takes over someday.

Oh, yeah? (That’s based on the Sanskrit for “Izzat so?”) Then how come all the nations of the world, marching into the new millennium, can’t agree on what date of the month this is? A furious tug of war is going on between Europe and America that dwarfs the banana wars in importance, threatens the Atlantic Alliance and paralyzes the U.N. But nobody is willing to face up to the Date Debate.

What’s today? Unless we’re Chinese or Hebrew or some other civilization with its own calendar, we can all agree it’s the fifth day of the month of March in the year 2000. And we also agree that it’s easier to put that date in a combination of words and numerals:
March 5, 2000
.

Unless, of course, you’re in the military. Then it’s
5 March 2000,
saving valuable commas needed for investment in missile research and—more to the point—nicely separating the numbers with a word.

But we’re all in a hurry; who wants to take all the time to write out the whole word signifying the month? Since March is the third month, we substitute the number 3 for the word’s interminable five letters. So
March 5, 2000
is shown as
3/5/2000
. (Unless you like hyphens—then it’s
3-5-2000
. Or unless you prefer voguish periods, now called dots, as the
Times Magazine
finger-snappingly does; then it’s
3.5.2000,
which has been further shortened to
3.5.00
.)

This simple act of reducing a date to its shortest elements is the cause of the semiotic War Between the Continents now threatening to end globalization as we know it. “In the United States,” writes Dr. Alan D. Legatt of White Plains, New York, “a date written as
½
would mean Jan. 2, while in Europe it would mean the first of February.”

So today’s date—the fifth day of the third month in the run-up to our brand-new third millennium—is written in America as
3/5/00.
(I’m a slasher, not a hyphenator or a dotter.) But in Britain and throughout Europe, those same numerals signify an entirely different date: the third day of the fifth month, or
May 3, 2000
.

Big difference. March goes out like a lamb; rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. Even worse, when President Bill Clinton sends a cheery note to Prime Minister Tony Blair and dates it 4/11, the Yank is thinking of April 11 but the Brit thinks it is November 4. This is sure to contribute to Anglo-American misunderstanding; if it leads to one leader standing the other up at a scheduled summit meeting, it could put a strain on the special relationship.

To resolve this problem before it discombobulates transatlantic e-mail and drives the editors of the
International Herald Tribune
to distraction, a nongovernmental organization that calls itself ISO has put forward a recommendation. The name is an acronym formed by the rejiggered initials of the International Organization for Standardization, headquartered in Geneva; ISO is rooted in the Greek word for “equal,” and this outfit seeks to get everyone to agree on the same symbols for the same things. To avert date warfare, ISO recommends that we all start with the year, followed by the month and finally the day. Today’s date, in ISO format, is
2000-3-5
.