The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (11 page)

As they like to mutter in the Pentagon, I nonconcur. Who are these cookie-pushing cookie cutters of an unelected international bureaucracy to tell America’s native speakers that we must conform to the linguistic
diktats
of Continental Common Marketeers and sovereignty-grabbing European Unionists? Do the Brits think that English is a better language than Merkin? ISO may call me a lationist, but I reject this backdoor attempt to force American check writers to date our support of the IMF in a way alien to our ways.

If those one-worlders in Geneva are so het up about standardization, why don’t they adopt the American system? A millennium and a half from now, the standardeers will be writing the second of January in the year three thousand four hundred and fifty-six as
3456/1/2,
while we will write it as 1/2
/3456,
which will be a real kick.

The Brits, on the verge of giving up their pound for the euro, are losing their regard for tradition, but when it comes to habits, Americans—even those who prattle about the need for great change at election time—hate change. It was hard enough for some of us to memorize the month-day-year sequence in the first place (if I have that order right); we don’t need to reprogram our minds just because some professional smoother-outers want everybody in the world to march in lockstep.

Hawks, finding geopolitical significance in this coming symbolic dust-up, will cry: if being a sole superpower does not give us hegemony in the writing of dates, why go to the expense of being a superpower at all? Doves, taking a less bellicose line, will coo: diversity is more precious than uniformity.

I say: By jingo, let’s stick to our slashes and hold fast to the American Way of Dating. To the standardizers, we should refuse to give a centimeter. Write today’s date as
3/5/00
and let the rest of the world complain about us being out of date, out of step, out of time and out of sorts. So what if we miss a few appointments? We will be striking a blow for dialectical uniqueness, iconoclastic individuality, national sovereignty and international confusion.

Only make it a convention to use Roman numerals for the month and everybody can go his own sweet way. Your jingoism in the matter of dating is worthy of Stephen Decatur.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

Diplolingo.
The diplomatic oxymoron of the year was issued by the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, attempting to put the best face on a disappointing summit meeting between President Clinton and the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. “It’s a step forward,” said Mr. Mubarak, “although there was no progress.”

Dirigiste.
“Financial markets and market-based economics,” declared the former treasury secretary Robert Rubin in the
Economist
’s millennial issue, “have replaced
dirigiste
economics….”

So in a special issue predicting events in 2000, he shot down the dirigible. (That is an arcane allusion to the midair explosion of the airship Hindenburg, tearfully described by a reporter in one of old-time radio’s most thrilling moments. The Latin
dirigere
means “to direct,” and a balloon capable of being directed by a pilot was dubbed a
dirigible
in 1885.)

“What are
dirigiste
economics?” asks Susan Neisuler of Newton, MA. (
MA
is the Postal Service’s arbitrary abbreviation for
Massachusetts,
not
Maine;
my style follows the more sensible
New York Times
style, which abbreviates
Massachusetts
as
Mass. Maine
is
ME
at the Postal Service and
Me
. at the
Times;
I write out the whole word.) “Should I be afraid of them?” Ms. Neisuler wonders, construing
economics
incorrectly as plural. “Is Robert Rubin making it up?”

No, Mr. Rubin was not making it up. Back in 1989
Barron’s
was writing about the “French, who left to their own devices, would fashion Brussels into the capital of
dirigiste
economics.”
Dirigiste
is also used with things other than economics. At the end of January this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee he was encouraged by “forces emerging in Europe which will gradually bring down a lot of the
dirigiste
attitudes.”

If you’re a capitalist, or if you have no capital but believe in the creative force of untrammeled free enterprise, then you will be glad that the
dirigistes
are on the run. Their philosophy calls for “direction and control of the economy by the state.” The mildly socialistic phrase that preceded it was
central planning,
and the phrase that took it all the way to the Soviet system was
command economy,
the opposite of
market economy
.

The earliest use I can find is in the Nov. 28, 1946, issue of
Le Monde,
when the writer summarized the American attitude toward France as “Be liberal or
dirigiste
. Return to a capitalist or a socialist economy. But take the decision and show us a serious program.” The English translation first appeared in
Political Science Quarterly
in September 1947 and soon was taken up on both sides of the Atlantic. The
Economist
in the same month denounced such control as fascistic: “Authoritarianism or stagnation—that is the choice which
dirigisme
thrusts on us.” Nor was the word limited to economics: in the earliest entry in the
OED,
from a 1951
Archivum Linguisticum,
a roundheeled lexicographer sneered at “linguistic
dirigisme,
standards of correctness in a constantly evolving language.” (Now wait a minute: some of us think that kind of
dirigisme
is good.)

Another watcher of Rubinlingo, John Di Clemente of Tinley Park, IL (that’s a postocrat’s idea of an abbreviation for Illinois; I still write the old-fashioned
Ill.,
which the postocrats think is sick), sends in a clipping from the
Wall Street Journal
quoting Rubin about restrictions on his lobbying the White House from his new banking job: “We’ll be
belt and suspenders
with respect to those.” Mr. Di Clemente wants to know: “What’s the connection between such haberdashery and ethics?”

Earliest use I can find of this locution is in the
Dallas Morning News
in 1987: “To qualify for the Scott Burns
Belt and Suspender
Bank List, a bank had to have primary equity capital amounting to at least 10 percent of its assets.” From the context, it appears that (a) this is not the first use of the phrase and (b) it refers to safety. Nor is the metaphor limited to finance: an 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision in 1997 described a government motion to compel testimony as “this
belt-and-suspenders
approach,” using the phrase as a hyphenated compound adjective.

I called Mr. Rubin at Citigroup, where his trousers are now most securely held up, to ask his definition of the metaphor. “It emphasizes cer-tainty,” he says. “When you’re wearing both, you’re doubly safe.” And so it is with stable banks and legal rights and ethical standards. In the lingo of newsies, my
Times
copy desk colleagues inform me, it means “overkill.”

I suspect the fairly recent U.S. usage of “belt and suspenders” is merely a transatlantic translation of the English “belt and braces” which I believe I have seen in pre-WWII British fiction (e.g., “I brought a knife as well as a gun because I’m a belt and braces man.”). Same range of signification and same register.

Daniel F. Melia

Department of Rhetoric

University of California

Berkeley, California

In
Double Indemnity,
the Billy Wilder classic from the late 1940s, Edward G. Robinson plays a crafty insurance manager. He is Fred MacMurray’s boss. After Barbara Stanwyck’s husband is murdered and dropped from a moving train, there is a witness to the event. He arrives at the insurance office to meet Edward G. Robinson, who is suspicious of the apparent suicide. Robinson calls the witness a cautious man. The witness asks why. Robinson replies that he is a “belt and suspenders man,” since he is wearing both.

Michael McTague

New York, New York

Don’t Go There.
After I expressed my intent to explore an area that strikes terror of embarrassment into so many hearts, a colleague warned, “I wouldn’t go there if I were you.”

Linguistic exploration rejects such faintheartedness. We will now deal forthrightly with the cliché that has been embraced by the squirming squeamish:
Don’t go there
.

Its literal sense is of no concern.
There,
meaning “a place,” can be construed as an adverb modifying
go
or as a noun in its own right. But the figurative sense—of some undiscover’d country from whose bourn no shamefaced traveler returns—is what has gripped the bromide set.

It can mean “We’d better not talk about that.” Or “If our conversation reaches that subject, you will be uncomfortable and I will be chagrined.” Or “Now you’re getting into a touchy subject.” Or more severely, “Beware—you are approaching a taboo zone.”

Interviewing Dan Quayle, the former vice president, last spring before he withdrew from the presidential race, the
Times
reporter Melinda Henneberger noted this intelligent man’s abiding need to prove he was not stupid. “Waking up from a nap on the campaign plane, he asked what I was reading,” she wrote, “and it was
Anna Karenina
. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again a second later. ‘Russian, right?’ Then, a look of relief. Why, oh why, does he
go there
?”

Where is
there
in this figurative sense? It is not uncharted territory; on the contrary, it is a subject area all too well charted or remembered for its embarrassments by the person not eager to get back to that place.

“I suspect this may have had its origin in psychobabble,” writes Stephen Rosen of New York. “Where does it come from?”

Let’s go there. David Barnhart, editor of the
Dictionary Companion
that bears his name (I like that archaic locution), suggests that the proto-phrase for the expression is “I don’t want to
go that route
.” If so, the meaning has changed from “way of getting there” to “being there, unhappily.” The first lexicographic listing I can find is in
Da Bomb!
—the March 1997 dictionary of slang compiled by Judi Sanders’s intercultural communication class at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. It defined
Don’t even go there
simply as “Do not say that” and the shorter
Don’t go there
as “Don’t talk about it or mention it.” (
That’s da bomb,
by the way, is synonymous with the no-longer-so-cool
cool
.)

Tom Dalzell, the California slanguist, has no citation to offer but opines that “
don’t go there
started with black drag queens and then found its legs with Ricki Lake,” the talk-show host.

Barry Popik of the American Dialect Society found a 1994 usage of the imperative warning by the comic Martin Lawrence, talking to
Entertainment Weekly
about his Fox sitcom. “We started using the expressions ‘You go, girl!’ and
‘Don’t go there!
’ ” Lawrence said, “and no one in television was doing that. No one. Now a lot of Fox shows are using the same stuff.”

Now that its roots and overusage have been exposed, we can hope for the early demise of the cliché. As Yogi Berra once put it, “That place is so popular that nobody
goes there
anymore.”

Referring to a popular restaurant, Yogi said, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” The eloquence is in the phrase, not just the thought.

Richard Schlesinger

New York, New York

Don’t Presume.
Asked by one of his fellow candidates if he would commit to choosing a pro-life running mate, George W. Bush replied, “I think it’s incredibly
presumptive
for someone who has yet to earn his party’s nomination to be picking vice presidents.”

The cable commentator Laura Ingraham promptly picked up the error, pointing out that the word Governor Bush had in mind was
presumptuous
.

It’s a fairly common error, with both words based on the verb
presume,
from the Latin
præsumere,
“to take in advance.” That would now be put as “to take for granted,” as in “Dr. Livingstone, I
presume
.” (If less certain, the newsman Henry Stanley would have used
assume,
“to suppose.” How did I get in darkest Africa?)