The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (14 page)

I inveigh against the use of the written grunt because either it assumes the reader is an ignoramus or it needlessly apologizes for a writer’s attempt at wit. Do not presume that your reader is moving his lips as he reads your prose. Do not be afraid to deliver the nudes.

Euphemism Watch.
In Shakespeare’s time, they were called
gravediggers
. Then they got organized, raised prices and named themselves
undertakers
. When that acquired a too-gloomy connotation, they changed it to
morticians
. But now that caretakers have given way to caregivers, and even
sharing
has been overtaken by
caring
as the most pious participle, we have—trumpeted in a reverential, hushed
ta-dah!
—the
deathcare industry
.

The other major euphemism to burst forth this year is the diplomatic replacement for
rogue state
. The earliest use I can find of this phrase was in a 1983
Wall Street Journal
story noting that smokestack industries have “won Ohio a largely deserved reputation as a
rogue state
on the environment.” Two years later, the columnist William Pfaff first applied it in its current sense: “The Soviet Union had deliberately isolated itself. Its role was that of a
rogue state,
a revolutionary power that challenged all the others.”

In recent years, the phrase has been applied to states like Libya, Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Sudan, Syria and North Korea that supported or condoned the presence of terrorists. Last month, however, on National Public Radio’s
Diane Rehm Show,
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright revealed an official smoothing-over: “We are now calling these states
states of concern
.” Asked about this new locution, State spokesman Richard Boucher said of Iraq, a hard-core
rogue state
in the earlier formulation, that it had become “a state previously known as
rogue
.”

Problem solved; worry removed. Of course, if one of those
states of concern
gets hold of a nuclear or biological missile, it could be a bonanza for the
deathcare industry
.

Eviscerate.
A word with a fearsome and odious primary meaning has been adopted by our military to describe the effect of our air power on the enemy in Afghanistan.

At a Pentagon briefing, Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold informed reporters that “the combat power of the Taliban has been
eviscerated
.” The vivid verb became the basis of a front-page headline in the
Washington Post:
“Pentagon: Taliban Forces
‘Eviscerated
.’ ”

Eviscerate
has to do with the removal of the
viscera,
or “internal organs.” A
visceral
reaction is also called a
gut
reaction, because the noun
gut
means “intestine, entrails.” (Only in the plural,
guts,
does that word gain the meaning of “courage,” or “intestinal fortitude.”) Thus, the literal meaning of the verb
eviscerate
is “disembowel, gut.” It evokes the image of medieval combat with swords.

But it gave rise to a figurative sense, less bloody-minded: “to deprive of essential parts, to remove the essence of.” Interviewed by Fox News the day after the Pentagon briefing, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel, said that in considering the possibility of a Palestinian state, air and water rights would have to be restricted: “You’ll
eviscerate
a lot of those powers that are normally associated with sovereignty.” Also using that figurative sense, Seth Waxman, solicitor general in the Clinton administration, wrote in the
Boston Globe,
“Statutory provisions that permit information-sharing relating to terrorism do not
eviscerate
constitutional freedom.”

Headline writers have to be careful to apply the verb to a power, using the figurative sense, and not to military forces made up of people, seeming to take the original sense. Such disempowering, rather than disemboweling, is what the Pentagon general surely had in mind.

Eviscerate
is the removal of contents of a multiple-layered cavity or organ, according to our terminology. As an ophthalmologist, when I eviscerate an eye I remove its contents without removing the eyeball itself (i.e., the scleral shell).

Heskel Haddad, MD

New York, New York

Eviscerate
is the term preferred by feminists and other right-minded people to
emasculate,
as it is gender neutral and has the added advantage of not insulting those of us who are non-masculine by nature.

Beverly S. Cohen

New York, New York

F

Fall Fashionese.
“For Fall,” headlined the
Times
’ fashion page, “Some Swash, Some Buckle and a Tougher Look.”

To
swash,
as every swordsman knows, is to swing your blade violently so as to make a great clanging sound on the
buckler,
or shield, of your opponent. Your noisy blustering does not hurt anybody, but such intimidating braggadocio satisfies your urge to swagger, especially when it is difficult to see anything through your iron visor. Hence, the 1560 word
swashbuckler,
“a swaggering ruffian,” defined now as the 2001 woman with the tough high-fashion attitude.

Vogue
magazine’s September 2001 issue featured ten pages of a hard-eyed supermodel in thigh-high, flat-heeled boots wearing what appeared to me to be a chef ’s hat made of fur, as if created by a cook about to visit a walk-in meat refrigerator. One caption under a threatening pose by the usually delectable Nadja Auermann read, “She’ll lead you on with
toques
to die for.”

Toque
is a French word for “cap,” most famous as
toque blanche
, the tall white hat originally worn by chefs in monasteries and now the phrase that adorns a thousand bistros. The word appeared early in English spelled
toockes;
perhaps because this might cause confusion among Seventh Avenue designers with its homonym in Yiddish, the French spelling and pronunciation are preferred. When trimmed with fox to go with the leathery equestrian dominatrix look, the
toque
has a Russian air. (If the czar only knew …)

“So what gives with all this hard extravagance with the economy in a soft slump?” wrote my colleague Cathy Horyn in her sparkling analysis of the new toughness. (The phrase
What gives?,
first cited in John O’Hara’s 1940 novel,
Pal Joey,
is a direct translation of the German
Was gibt’s?,
an idiom meaning “What is happening?” Editors permit such informal, with-it usage on fashion, op-ed and sports pages, where au courant prose is encouraged.)

I prevailed on Horyn to translate some of the words in her article. It seems that the peasant look adopted in Tom Ford’s collection for Yves Saint Laurent “consists of nothing more than a
ruched
blouse” with “nicely done
ruching
.”

“
Ruching,
pronounced
rooshing,
is a common technique in dressmaking and curtain making for gathering fabric and making it pucker,” she informed me. “It is looser looking than
smocking
. Picture the neckline of a peasant blouse that might be worn off the shoulders. That look has turned up a lot in fashion for this fall.” (Further etymology takes the French word
ruche
to “beehive,” an allusion to the frills and plaits of a straw hive.)

She wrote of women wearing “distressed leather or roughed-up shearling … jodhpurs and a blanket cape closed with a
snaffle-bit
buckle.” That compound adjective, more than four centuries old, describes a gentle form of bridle bit. “It’s a bit for a horse’s mouth, made up of two metal bars joined by a circular piece of metal,” Horyn said. “It’s a bit, typically for English-style riding, not western, and has long been a fashion detail. Gucci put a small
snaffle bit
on his loafer, and it’s been widely copied.” (This is useful information for Washington pundits: when I see a lobbyist on K Street’s “Gucci Gulch,” I’ll look down at his shoes and say, “Nice
snaffle-bit
buckle.”)

“It remains to be seen,” goes the fashion forecast, “how many soufflé-size
toques
and capacious
Elmer Fudd trapper hats
will be worn.” What kind of hat? “It’s like a trapper hat with flaps on the ears—same idea but more generous in shape. The
toque
has always been a sort of elegant shape in fashion, but not the Elmer Fudd, which is now just everywhere.”

Fudd is not a competitor of L.L. Bean. Further investigation reveals him to be the animated cartoon character created by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones in 1939 who quickly became the dupe of Bugs Bunny. “The root word for
‘befuddled
’ is
fudd,
“ goes facetious ad copy on the Warner Brothers Web site, “and the prefix for
fudd
is Elmer.”

He wears a tall cap without earflaps but with a distinctive visor, and when you see one on a glowering glamour girl or atop a mannequin in Bergdorf’s window, you’ll know what’s up, Doc. And
was gibt’s,
too.

Toque
is not French for cap, which is
casquette.
A toque is a type of hat that
is cylindrical in shape and of which the top is several inches about the top of the head. It is worn by judges and tall toques by chefs.

Toqué
is colloquial for crazy—hence
toquade,
an infatuation with someone or something.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

I have always heard that the term “Gucci Gulch” refers not to K Street, but to the hallway outside the Ways and Means Committee room in the Longworth Building.

Roger M. Schwartz

Princeton, New Jersey

Farewell My Lovely Miss/Ms./Mrs.
The Associated Press, reflecting the desire of the great majority of its newspaper members, has just dropped the use of the courtesy titles
Miss, Mrs.
and
Ms.
in its news reports.

That means that the first reference to Emily Jones is her full name, and the second reference is merely Jones, the same way men are treated. Gee; after all the battling that went on years ago in this space to get the
New York Times
to adopt
Ms
., out it goes.

Not completely; the
Times,
in the main news sections, will continue to use courtesy titles on second reference for both men and women. But, according to the stylebook, “The
Times Magazine
and the
Book Review,
edited in the more literary style of a weekend periodical, omit all courtesy titles.” I suppose it all has to do with the appearance of sexual equality. If you don’t use the
Mr.
instead of repeating the first name for men, equality demands the same treatment for women. And who would be so boldly old-fashioned and out of joint as to stand up for any form of inequality? Here goes. It’s not such a hot idea because it needlessly conceals information useful to the reader—specifically, the sex of the person being written about. I could understand the change if first names reflected sex as in olden times: “Emily Jones today was appointed commandant of the Marine Corps. Jones, who is 19, said …” In that article, the reader knows that a woman was appointed and needs no courtesy title in front of the second reference unless interested in the commandant’s marital status, which the reader knows is none of his or her business, and do you have a problem with that?

The problem I have with that is that you can no longer tell the boys from the girls by their given names. A lineup of Alex, Chris, Pat, Brett, Ashley, Cameron, Meredith, Adrian and Leslie could be a bearded baseball team or a Miss America pageant (soon to be the America pageant, skip the honorific). Here’s the story: “Cameron Jones today bench-pressed 300 pounds in the Olympic trials. Jones, not even out of breath, said …” Is that a normal weight lifter’s story, or a breakthrough for the human spirit? How does an editor know, from the copy, whether to bury it or call for a picture to be emblazoned across the front page?

Maybe the new AP rule is a space saver and will boost journalism’s profits. It doesn’t strike me as helpful to the reader, and in my nonliterary style I will resolutely continue to use the
Ms.
I fought for, but sometimes I feel as lonely as the guy who played the harp in Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl Orchestra.

Federalism.
Janus, the Roman god who was guardian of gates and doors, is depicted with his bearded face looking forward and backward at the same time; this helped him watch everybody. It is the metaphoric source of “Janus words,” those confusing terms that mean both one thing and its opposite, like
cleave
(“to split” and “to cling”) or
sanction
(“to approve” and “to punish”). Janus has now taken over the central word defining the American system of government.
Federalism
is suffering through a semantic crisis and needs our help.

A headline in the
New York Times
over an article about a case that pitched states’ rights against the authority of the national government read: “Supreme Court, in Blow to Federalism, Shields States From Age Discrimination Suits.” Linda Greenhouse reported that the court, “continuing its march in the direction of states’ rights, ruled today that Congress lacked the authority to bind state governments to the federal law that bars discrimination against older workers.”

That was surely a blow to the
federal
(by which we mean “national”) government in Washington, but was it a blow to
federalism
? The founding fathers (a paternalistic but accurate alliteration coined in 1918 by Senator Warren G. Harding) would say no. Not if you take the
Oxford English Dictionary
’s first definition of that word (coined in 1788 by Patrick Henry with his irate question, “Is this
federalism
?”). The
OED
answers his query with “that form of government in which two or more states constitute a political unity while remaining more or less independent with regard to their internal affairs.”

Other lexicographers agree about the essence of the
federalist
idea, which is to divide power between a central authority and its constituent political units. But right from the start two centuries ago, confusion was built in; to George Washington, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton,
federalism
accentuated the unity that only a strong central government could provide. To Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who formed a faction they called “republican” but that was promptly labeled Anti-Federalist
, federalism
emphasized the diffusion of power to levels of government closest to the people and furthest from
royalism
—at that time, the states.

When Jefferson defeated the Hamilton-Adams
Federalists
to become president, he famously said, “We are all
Federalists,
“ to absorb the defeated party. But the word’s meaning was no longer just “a power-sharing arrangement among national and regional sovereignties”; its primary sense had become “a strong central government.” These meanings, if not antithetical, are at least Janus-like in their difference.

Some political scientists today are reverting to the power-sharing meaning. “While Federalists in 1787 advocated creation of a powerful central government,” reports Warren Richey in the
Christian Science Monitor,
“those advocating
federalism
today are seeking a resurgence of a federal-state balance as mandated in the Constitution.”