The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (16 page)

Foot/Hoof in/and Mouth.
We need a cure for the confusion surrounding the common name for
aftosa
.

“In Britain today,” reported Peter Jennings on ABC six weeks ago, “the government has now confirmed twelve separate cases of
hoof-and-mouth
disease.” For his American audience, he explained, “We call it
foot-and-mouth
disease here.”

He may have it turned around; for example, in a 1978 Supreme Court decision about waste disposal, Justice Rehnquist, not yet chief justice, wrote in dissent that New Jersey must “treat New Jersey cattle suffering from
hoof-and-mouth
disease.” Noting that, Timothy Crowley of Tulane Law School adds, “I have never seen a hoofed animal with a foot.”

The confusion extends further. A year earlier, a dispatch from the
Wall Street Journal
’s Marcus Brauchli in Shanghai gave the two terms a different differentiation, noting that the fast-spreading disease was “known as
hoof-and-mouth
in cattle and
foot-and-mouth
in hogs.” That may not be correct, either.

To the origin: the earliest citation in the
OED
is from an 1862
Edinburgh
Veterinary Review:
“Cows affected with the
foot-and-mouth
disease.” When that nomenclature crossed the Atlantic to the United States in 1869,
Harper’s Weekly
put it that Liverpool was informing the State Department that “a contagion called murrain, or
hoof-and-mouth
disease, has broken out.” The
Dictionary of Americanisms
lists
hoof-and-mouth
as an Americanism, citing an 1884 use here and defining it as “the
foot-and-mouth
disease.”

As
foot
predominated in Britain,
hoof
had the usage edge in the U.S. In the 1963 western movie
Hud,
starring Paul Newman as a cattle rancher,
hoof
was the word employed, causing Bill Cosby to do a comedy routine he called “Hoof and Mouth,” reviewing the movie from a cow’s point of view.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture has always resolutely followed the British Ministry of Agriculture’s preference for
foot,
and leading American dictionaries have gone along. The
New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
directs us unequivocally to use the
foot,
sternly warning “not
hoof-and-mouth
.” (The
Times
also prefers the plural
hooves,
but it behooves me to use
hoofs.
)

I’m sorry about those lexicographical and official
diktats
about striking
hoof,
because further confusion is caused by the shortening of
and
after
foot,
which is often heard as
in.
We never hear
ham ’n’ eggs
as
ham in eggs,
but we do hear
foot ’n’ mouth
as
foot in mouth
. That’s because of a similar expression,
to put your foot in your mouth,
defined as “to commit a gaffe” or by the bureaucratic locution “to misspeak.” The expression is rooted in Jonathan Swift’s 1738 “The bishop has put his foot in it” and was carried forward when a 1984 collection of stories by Saul Bellow was titled
Him with His Foot in His Mouth
.

In the early ’50s, when Eisenhower Defense Secretary “Engine Charlie” Wilson showed a lack of sympathy for the unemployed by saying he preferred bird dogs to kennel dogs, he admitted that some of his cabinet colleagues “seem to think I have
foot-in-mouth
disease.”

That play on words has since been used often to deride the tendency of politicians to commit verbal blunders. In 2001 at the Gridiron Dinner, where political figures and journalists poke fun at themselves and one another, President George W. Bush acknowledged his habit of tripping over his tongue with the line “You know that
foot ’n’ mouth
disease rampant in Europe? I’ve got it.” Such wordplay will become muted as concern rises about the possible spread to the U.S. of the real cattle, sheep and swine disease.

Relatedly, another cattle affliction is raising even greater worries: bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known formally by its initials BSE and more widely as
mad cow
disease. Unlike
foot-and-mouth
disease (which the French call
la fièvre aphteuse
after its virus and the Germans call
Maul- und Klauenseuche,
“jaws, muzzle or snout and claw, paw or hoof “), BSE can be transmitted to humans, in rare cases.

Mad cow,
probably bottomed on
mad dog,
was coined or first used in 1988 by David Brown, then agricultural correspondent for the
Sunday Telegraph
and now editor of the
Daily Telegraph
. He chose
mad
because “the cattle went from being very placid and calm to raging beasts, suddenly berserk.” He recalls that the name “took off very slowly” but then “just cranked itself up.”

I have been told, no reference, that the change in the nomenclature occurred because horses have hooves but do not get the disease.

Bernadine Z. Paulshock, MD

Wilmington, Delaware

Forward, Lean!
In Warsaw, George W. Bush used a vivid figure of speech in responding to a question about European reaction to his plans for an American missile defense: “I was very pleased to see how
forward-leaning
many nations were during our discussion.” A week later, he repeated the compound adjective in answering a question from Peggy Noonan of the
Wall Street Journal
about global warming: Bush found a “different attitude” among European Union leaders, who were “a little more
forward-leaning
“ about it.

That word-picture of a crouch of cooperation, or a tilt toward tomorrow, appeals to him. On the eve of his second mission to Europe, asked about his desire to include in NATO the democratic countries nearest Russia, the president said, “We ought to be very
forward-leaning
toward those countries.”

What does this fast-spreading trope mean? Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, uses it in the sense of “premature”: “I think it’s just a tad
forward-leaning
to call that quite a ‘proposal’ at this time.” George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, uses it to mean “open,” as in his core dump of five million pages of old classified documents: “It reflects my commitment to be as
forward-leaning
as possible in releasing information that with the passage of time no longer needs to be protected.”

A quite different sense is “aggressive”: a former Justice Department prosecutor, asked by two
Times
reporters about the present reluctance to bring charges against Iranian officials in a major terrorist bombing case, demanded to know, “Why haven’t we been more
forward-leaning
on Iran?” This picks up on an early definition by Morton Kondracke in a 1987
New Republic,
holding that the Reagan National Security Council staff was peopled with hyperactivists: “subordinates who were ‘
forward-leaning
’—bold, imaginative and aggressive.”

Yet another meaning is “advanced,” as in Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania’s applause for the Bush administration’s “
forward-leaning
21st-century energy plan.” Vice President Dick Cheney gave it a sense of “eager” when asked about his boss’s appearance of remoteness from the press when relaxing on his ranch: “We’ve been criticized for being too
forward-leaning
. Now you suggest maybe we’re too laid-back.” I have been bending over backward here to permit the reported usage to determine the hot modifier’s primary meaning. Time now for a semantic judgment.

The most widely understood sense of this compound adjective is the new sense of
forthcoming
. That old word’s early definition as “soon to appear” has been largely eclipsed by
upcoming,
and a new meaning of
forthcoming
has emerged of “responsive, open, outgoing, cooperative,” even “a pleasure to do business with.” For some reason, that happy extension of
forthcoming
is losing favor under the vogue onslaught of
forward-leaning
.

Thus, the forthcoming (in the old sense) meaning of
forthcoming
(in the new sense) is “forward-leaning.” The fresh figure of speech racing through the lingo of the edge-cutting calls up the image of a runner straining ahead, the tilt of the body throwing weight forward to aid acceleration. That fine image will have its moment of popularity but contains the seed of its metaphoric destruction: if you lean forward far enough, you fall on your face.

You left out the most interesting question: why are people (and ideologies) leaning? And what happens if they lean too far; fall on their faces and their behinds respectively? And what about the left and right leaners? Do the former become Maoists and the latter paleoconservatives or just right-wing crazies. And why aren’t centrists leaning?

Herbert J. Gans

Department of Sociology

Columbia University

New York, New York

Franken-.
The hottest combining form in populist suspicion of science was coined in a letter to the
New York Times
on June 2, 1992, from Paul Lewis, professor of English at Boston College.

Commenting on an op-ed column criticizing the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to exempt genetically engineered crops from caseby case review, Professor Lewis held, “Ever since Mary Shelley’s baron rolled his improved human flesh out of the lab, scientists have been bringing such good things to life.” After this reference to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who created the monster in Ms. Shelley’s 1818 novel, the academic letter writer shot a bolt of juice into the lifeless coinage dodge with “If they want to sell us
Frankenfood,
perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.”

And that’s what they did! “Genetic engineering” was not then a scary enough phrase. The science of making foods more productive or resistant to disease had noncontroversial roots in hybrid corn pioneered in 1923, but ethical concerns about cloning merged with worries about mad-cow disease and suited the promotion of “organic” foods. A frightening metaphor was needed, and the
Franken-
prefix did the trick.

A
Boston Globe
reporter wrote in 1992 that
Frankenfood
“summed up nicely the monstrous unnaturalness of such controversial new products as genetically enhanced tomatoes and chromosome-tinkered cows,” and quoted the delighted Lewis, today chairman of the English Department, saying: “It has a phonetic rhythm, it’s pithy and you can use the
Franken-
prefix on anything:
Frankenfruit
…
Frankenair
…
Frankenwater
. It’s a
Frankenworld
.”

Since then, biotechnophobes and other members of the antigenetic movement have denounced
Frankenseeds, Frankenveggies, Frankenfish,
Frankenpigs
and
Frankenchicken,
lumping them together as fearsome
Frankenscience
. In the
Chicago Tribune,
David Greising wrote in 1999 of
Frankenfarmers
supported by
Frankenfans
arguing with
Frankenprotesters
about unfounded
Frankenfears
.

Frankly, there’s no telling when or how it will end. It has enhanced the sales of the metaphysical novel that Ms. Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, encouraged her to write, and has not harmed sales at “Frank ’n’ stein,” the fast-food chain whose hot dogs and beer I find delectably inorganic.

At the American Dialect Society, Laurence Horn says: “I was hoping somebody might have coined
Frankensense
by now. This would be sort of the opposite of common sense, maybe as a description of politicians’mo-tivations for a creatively stupid piece of legislation.”

But this play on
frankincense,
an aromatic gum resin used in religious ceremonies, has not caught on. “Alas,” says the dialectologist Horn, “all the Web site usages I can find for
Frankensense
seem to be unintended misspellings of the traditional Christmas gift. You can tell because there’s an equally orthographically challenged rendering of
myrrh
.”