The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (2 page)

Now
history
is over. However,
over
—as in “like, so
over
“—is a Valley Girl expression from the ’80s that has shown remarkable legs for what seemed to be a nonce term, outlasting both
history
and
been there, done that
. Toward the end of the second millennium,
so 1999
had a brief run, and
so second millennium
surfaced briefly, but both were too tightly tied to a specific date to have staying power.

The Yogi lesson drawn by dialectologists on both sides of the pond:
over
ain’t over till it’s over.

In the, uh, rarified vernacular of the world of professional wrestling, “over” means “popular,” as in “The Rock is still amazingly over, while daring aerialist Essa Rios could pop the crowd in his hometown.”

Rhonda Reddy
Santa Monica, California

Anticounter.
Are we engaged in
antiterrorism
or
counterterrorism
?

Antiterrorism,
according to the Department of Defense
Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms,
is “defensive measures used to reduce the
vulnerability
of individuals and property to terrorist acts, to include limited response and containment by local military forces.”

Counterterrorism
is “offensive measures taken to prevent, deter and respond to terrorism.”

How to respond to September 11? Doves prefer
antiterrorism;
hawks plump for
counterterrorism
.

Arab street.
Peppered by questions from senators about why the Bush administration supported a Saudi monarchy that oppressed political or religious dissenters, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a reply that struck many as puzzling: “Unto dust thou shalt return the day you stop representing
the street
.” He explained, “When you don’t have a free, democratic system, where the street is represented in the halls of the legislature and in the executive branches of those governments, then they”—the Saudi rulers—“have to be more concerned by the passions of
the street
.”

Members of PAW—the Poetic Allusion Watch—instantly caught the secretary’s “unto dust” drift. The allusion was to Henry Wadsworth Long-fellow’s “Dust thou art to dust returnest, / Was not spoken of the soul.” The poet, in turn, was referring to the passage in Genesis 3:19, “Dust thou art, and into dust shalt thou return,” often cited on Ash Wednesday and at funerals.

Powell’s message limited itself to the prayer’s “dust to dust” portion. His import was that if a Saudi monarch were to go against
the Arab street,
he would soon find himself dead.

“Does this
Arab street
phrase refer to the person (or suicide bomber) in the street,” asks Bianca Carter of Slingerlands, New York, “or is there a broader meaning?”

The
street,
from the Latin for “paved path,” has many metaphoric senses. Financiers use it to mean Wall Street, the home of the New York Stock Exchange; those thrown out of work use
on the street
to mean “unemployed” (and in a recession, many in the financial Street are on the street). To those in prison,
the street
means “outside,” the place to live in freedom. To those hunting for bargains,
street
becomes an attributive noun modifying
price,
meaning “what it actually is selling for, no matter what the price tag says.”

In political usage, to get to the point,
the street
began in 1831 as “the man in the street,” or average person. In the 20th century, that meaning changed to “those demonstrating in the street.” That sense spread to a more general “popular opinion” but often still carries a connotation of “the incendiary emotions of the mob.”

The first use of
the Arab street
I can find is in a December 1977 issue of
American Political Science Review
. “The existence of nuclear weapons in the region,” wrote Steven J. Rosen, “will induce moderation and a revolution of declining expectations in
the Arab ‘street.’
” Though it does not seem to be working out as Rosen hoped, the phrase he spotted caught on. A decade later, G. H. Jansen in the
Los Angeles Times
recalled that during the Suez crisis of 1956, “
‘the Arab street’
in every Arab capital pulsated with popular demonstrations.” The quotation marks then disappeared as the phrase took hold in the language and gained complexity:

“There was not one but many different
Arab streets,
“ wrote David Pollock in 1992. Professor Samer Shehata of Georgetown agrees: “The term
Arab street,
which is not used in the Arab world, divides countries into just two factions, but it’s much more complicated than
the Arab street
versus the authoritarian regime.”

“The phrase used to be
‘the Arab masses,’
” recalls a Middle East expert who prefers to remain anonymous because he is passing along only an impression. “With the eclipse of the Soviet Union, that phrase disappeared because
Arab masses
has too much of a Marxist-Soviet-Communist tilt to it, and it was replaced by
the Arab street
.”

Does
the Arab street
reflect popular opinion in the Arab world or just the opinion of extremists carrying banners and burning flags? Is there a silent majority that is not in agreement with demonstrators, as there often is in the West? Nobody can say for sure, but the phrase, as used by Secretary Powell, means “the opinions of people governed by an autocratic regime and unable to express their views through elected representatives.”

It should not be confused with
street Arab,
a derogatory term for “urban vagabond, homeless urchin,” as used in 1887 in Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes tale: “I therefore organized my
street Arab
detective corps,” which later evolved into fans styling themselves “the Baker Street Irregulars.”

Asymmetry.
“
Asymmetric warfare,
“ said Maj. Gen. Perry Smith, retired, “is the term of the day.” President Bush evidently agrees: “We need to rethink how we configure our military,” he told his first primetime news conference, “… so that we more effectively respond to
asymmetrical
responses from terrorist organizations.”

The prime user is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. After noting recently, “We really are going to have to fashion a new vocabulary” to describe the new kind of warfare, he told reporters that he had long been talking of “
asymmetrical
threats” like “terrorism and ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, cyberattacks.” When Tim Russert of
Meet the Press
tried to pin him down further with “What are
asymmetrical
methods?” Rumsfeld came up with the same examples but not a definition.

Let’s begin with
symmetry,
meaning “in balance; in proportionate arrangement,” often implying a beauty that flows from such regularity. The middle syllable is
met,
its root in the Greek
metron,
“measure,” which acts as a fulcrum in a nicely balanced word. William Blake used it most memorably in his 1794 poem “The Tyger,” concluding, “What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful
symmetry
?” (Making the last syllable, which sounds like
ee,
rhyme with
eye
was poetic license.)

Asymmetric
(or
asymmetrical,
equally correct, so I use the shorter one) has the obvious dictionary definition of “not symmetric” and the slang meaning of “out of whack,” but a less pejorative sense is developing: “off-beat, intriguingly unbalanced.”

Asymmetrical warfare
is defined by the Defense Department as “countering an adversary’s strengths by focusing on its weaknesses.” Michael Krepon wrote in the May-June 2001 issue of
Foreign Affairs
that “
asymmetrical warfare
allows a weaker opponent to level the playing field by unorthodox means.”

The earliest citation of the phrase I can find, and one that suggests earlier military use, is by Robert Fox, a reporter for the
Daily Telegraph,
in 1991. He quoted a British commander, Lt. Col. Mike Vickery, who compared the coming allied attack on Iraq to an unconventional maneuver by the 14th Hussars in the Peninsular War, as the English under the future duke of Wellington drove the French out of Spain: “The regiment was detailed to move round the flanks, sneak round the back, you might say, to harry the rear and baggage train. It was what today we call
asymmetric warfare
.” (A trophy of that unconventional engagement in 1813 was a solid silver chamber pot given by Napoleon Bonaparte to his brother Joseph.)

In the past decade, the phrase was applied to war that might be waged against a superpower. Clinton’s defense secretary William S. Cohen, in a farewell speech in January, defined it as “indirect, but highly lethal, attacks on our forces and our citizens, not always from nations but from individuals and even independent groups.”

Until recently, the meaning was limited to the application of surprise force by a terrorist against a stronger force’s vulnerability, but ever since the Sept. 11 attack, Pentagonians have been applying
asymmetric warfare
to the kind of commando and anti-guerrilla techniques, drawing heavily on intelligence data, to be used against Taliban forces in Afghanistan—using non-superpower strength to go after a weaker foe’s vulnerabilities. The idea is to fight
asymmetry
with
asymmetry
.

Lopsidedness (from
lop,
“to sever”) is in fashion, too: “Only squares will be wearing straight hems next spring,” writes Holly Finn in the
Financial Times,
“but fear not. Done well, an
asymmetrical
hem looks sexier.”

Attention All Alliterators.
“Apt alliteration’s artful aid”—Charles Churchill’s famous foray was not wholly alliterative, since not all the first letters are pronounced the same way—is alive and well on the political scene.

You need at least a triple to qualify as an apt alliterator. At a conference of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described his centrist alliance with a fellow centrist Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman, as “the Kosher-Cajun Caucus.”

According to the man who taught me English in sophomore year at prep school, the Charles Churchill phrase you quote, with or without its flaws, would not represent alliteration. For alliteration, the initial letters have to be consonants. When the initial letters are vowels, the gimmick is called assonance.
^*

John Strother
Princeton, New Jersey

B

Baldfaced.
As the 2000 campaigners practice their endgamesmanship, each side accuses the other of
baldfaced
lies. In some instances, the accusers prefer
barefaced
lies, and in a Virginia race, the mouth-filling modifier has come out sounding like
boldfaced
lies.

Where does the truth lie? (Yes, in this instance, the truth does
lie;
unless your subject is a hen,
lay
must have an object.)

It seems that the unadorned
lie
no longer has its old puissance. Time was, that word was so inflammatory as to need a euphemism:
fib
was the slang gentler,
prevarication
the bookish term. But to score as an emphatic charge, it now needs an adjective. “That’s a
dirty
lie” used to have a ring to it, but that adjective is now almost exclusively applied to jokes and lyrics. “
Damned
lie,” once popular, is too closely associated with statistics.

The denunciator has a menu from which to choose:
outright
is forthright,
blatant
has a ring to it,
flat
is sharp (though it is often mistakenly replaced by
flat-out,
which lacks the disapproving connotation) and
flagrant
lends itself to mispronunciation by stumbling speakers as
fragrant
.

What is a designated finger-pointer to do when this anti-dissembly line turns out no insightful inciting to outrage? Into vituperation’s void steps
baldfaced,
giving the lie to the new listlessness of the overused
lie
. At the request of Robert and Claudia Wasserman of Remsenburg, New York, let us deconstruct the campaigners’ favorite counterpunch intensifier.

Shakespeare coined first
barefaced
and then
boldfaced
. The first referred to beardless youth: “Some of your French Crownes have no hair at all,” Quince tells Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
as he casts a play, “and then you will play
bare-faced
.” The meaning of
barefaced
was clearly “without whiskers,” which led to senses of “unconcealed, open.” In time, this innocent lack of disguise took on the color of shamelessness. In Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
(1760), we have, “See the
barefaced
villain, how he cheats, lies, perjures, robs, murders!” (This is the sense today’s political campaigners have in mind.)

A year after his 1590 coinage of
barefaced,
Shakespeare, in
Henry VI, Part 1,
had Lord Talbot speak of “proud desire of
bold-faced
Victory” after he rescues his son, John, on the French battlefield; that meant “confident,” a sense that soon turned into “impudent,” as confidence so often does. Not until 1884 did the Italian printer Giambattista Bodoni use
boldface
to describe a darkly thick, or bold, typeface, which looks
like this
and is easily distinguished from lightface type.

From
bare
and
bold
to
bald:
the etymology of
baldfaced
should interest angry animal rights advocates. All the early uses referred to animals: in 1648, “a
bawld-facd
heighfer”; in 1677, “a sorrel Mare …
bald-faced
”; and in 1861, “our
bald-faced
hornet.” And of course, the symbol of America was “the
bald
eagle.” In its original sense,
bald
did not mean “hairless, shiny-pated, cueball-like, suedeheaded.” It meant “white.” The top of our symbolic eagle’s head is not featherless; the last time I patted one, its head and neck were covered with smooth white feathers. In the 13th century, the
balled coot
was a water bird with a white mark on its forehead, lingering in the lingo today in the simile
bald as a coot
.
Baldfaced
whiskey was a 19th-century Americanism for pale, raw liquor, and a
boiled, biled
or
bald-faced
shirt was a cowboy’s go-to-meetin’ white shirt. The Celtic
bal
meant “a white mark,” and the Sanskrit
bhala,
“forehead,” from the Indo-European
bhel,
“white, shining.” Had enough? At bottom, it’s white. That’s why horses with white markings on their noses are often called Old
Baldy,
same as the snow-covered mountain.

In current use, then,
baldfaced
lie is the most popular because it sounds most resounding;
barefaced
lie continues to run strong with no connotation of any pursuit of the hirsute; and
boldfaced
lie sounds like a printer’s error. In every case, kill the hyphen.

Barnburner.
“I know where the
rats in the barn
are,” shouted Al Gore on the stump in Muskegon, Michigan. “And you know what? The
rats in the barn
know that I know, and that’s why they’re coming out trying to stop us.”

He repeated this lively rural phrase in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and it was broadcast far and wide in coverage of the Democratic campaign. (Perhaps it subliminally evoked the split-second use of the word
rats
in a GOP television spot.) It has the sound of an old Americanism, but is nowhere to be found in the dialect dictionaries.

“Don’t ask Congress to
rid your barn of rats,
“ wrote William Raspberry in the
Washington Post
in 1993. This was the sinister meaning that Gore evoked, but when coupled with
old,
the phrase has another, almost affectionate, sense. “Once you … get to be an
old rat in a barn,
“ Representative Willis Brown of North Carolina told an Associated Press reporter asking about term limits, “you do not want to be dislodged.”

The figure of speech was cornered again when Zell Miller of Georgia—this month elected a U.S. senator but in 1998 departing the Statehouse—said in an aw-shucks way that he and those governors who accompanied him into retirement were nothing but “
old rats in a barn
.”

The invasive rodent has still another sense in its tail: to
have a rat in the garret,
according to the
Century Dictionary,
is “to be slightly crack-brained: same as ‘to have a bee in one’s bonnet.’ “

How do you rid your barn of rats? One drastic approach is to burn the barn down. In a sermon in 1629, Thomas Adams said, “The empiric to cure the fever, destroys the patient; so the wise man, to burn the mice, sets fire to his barn.” This related metaphor was heard on MSNBC just before the election, as the anchor Brian Williams said: “By all accounts, we have a
barnburner
of a presidential election on our hands. That would make this
barnburner
eve.” That was a use of
barnburner
in one current sense: ripping along as excitingly as “a house afire” or some such spectacular event.

A more traditional sense is “one who is uncompromising, rigidly principled”—who sees politics as the art of the impossible.

The
Barnburners
in the early 1840s were the reformist, radical faction of New York State Democrats led by former President Martin Van Buren, who adamantly opposed slavery. They were given that derisive nickname by the Hunkers (so called because they “hunkered” or “hankered” after national office), who favored the annexation of Texas, which extended slavery westward.

The Hunkers ridiculed Van Buren’s antislavery stand “in the manner of the Dutch farmer who burned his barn to destroy the rats.” In 1848, Van Buren’s
Barnburners
bolted the Democratic Party to join the Free-Soilers, and Van Buren’s candidacy delivered election victory to the Whig Zachary Taylor. That uncompromising, abolitionist coalition later named itself Republican.

In the recent contest, Ralph Nader, in rejecting Democratic compromises on issues central to many liberals, could be said to have been the
barnburner
. Some Democrats recalled Adlai Stevenson’s admonition in 1952 in a different context, warning of excess in combating subversion: “We must take care not to burn down the barn to kill the rats.”

In 2000, Al Gore did not propose to burn down the barn, nor did he say precisely who the unwanted inhabitants were, but he did make it clear he knew where the metaphoric rats could be found.

Bated Breath.
“The people of Congo,” said Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, last month in his capital of Lusaka, “are waiting with
baited breath
for a positive outcome of the Sun City talks.” That’s how Agence France-Presse spelled the adjective modifying the noun
breath.

The same week, the
Independent
newspaper of London, recapping memorable quotations of Margaret Thatcher in a review of her new memoir,
Statecraft,
chose this famous 1980 example: “To those waiting with
bated
breath
for that favorite media catch phrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say:You turn if you want to—the lady’s not for turning.” (That was a rhyming reference to the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 play about a woman’s resistance to a witchcraft trial,
The Lady’s Not for Burning.
)

Meanwhile, Reuters reported from Tokyo that “shares edged up by midday as investors waited with
baited breath
for a government package.”

Which is correct in modifying
breath-bated
or
baited
? A search of the Dow Jones database covering the past twenty-five years shows 5,520 uses of
bated
and 1,289 uses of
baited
. In a world of toleration and permissiveness, both are thus correct, right? Wrong. A mistake is a mistake, and there is no
i
in
bated
. (Contrariwise, you cannot leave out the
i
in “
baiting
a hook,” from the Old Norse
beita,
“to cause to bite,” which will work on fish if you
bait
the hook properly.)

What’s the basis of
bated,
which we never hear in the present tense? It is a clip of
abate,
from the Old French
abattre,
“to beat down,” and now it means “to moderate, subside, reduce, ebb.” In connection with breathing, it means “shorten” or “hold.” When you
abate
your breath, you hold it in anticipation of some breathtaking event.

The coiner was Shakespeare in his 1596
Merchant of Venice,
in which Shylock says to Antonio, “Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, / With
bated breath
and whispering humbleness, / Say this: / ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last?’ ”