The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (21 page)

Several dictionaries define it as “the surface directly above or below the point at which a nuclear explosion takes place.” The location below the center of a nuclear detonation is, strictly speaking, the
hypocenter,
with the Greek
hypo-
meaning “under”; that word was soon overtaken by
epicenter
(the Greek prefix
epi-
means “on, over”), the outbreaking point on the earth’s surface above the focus of an earthquake. More dramatic than
epicenter,
still most often associated with quakes, is
ground zero,
evoking the image of a huge explosion.

In the past half-century, the meaning was extended to “the center of violent activity or sudden change,” and even to “the ultimate origin, very be-ginning,” as a near-synonym to the informal board-game phrase
square one;
as such,
ground zero
is lowercase. In its present, specific sense, as the name of the site of New York City’s terrorist attack, it means “the place where terrorists killed thousands of people working in the buildings that symbolized trade in the modern world.” That is a proper noun, to be capitalized; in this instance, I dissent from the style preferred by three major dictionaries as well as by the
Times
.

Gumming the Bullet.
As political bromides pile up, a salute to Jim Hoagland, associate editor and chief foreign correspondent of the
Washington Post,
for picking up on a little-used play on an overused metaphor—
biting the bullet
—stemming from Civil War pre-anesthetic field-hospital use, now meaning “facing up to a painful decision.”

Hoagland described the U.S. government’s reluctant toleration of the development of Iraqi weapons as “gumming the bullet,” a variation first noted by Nick Poulos in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
. That’s how to
galumph
through the thicket of clichés.

You wrote that “biting the bullet” stemmed “from Civil War pre-anesthetic field-hospital use, now meaning ‘facing up to a painful decision.’ ”

I believe you are wrong. The term is British and goes back to the 1850s when the British armies were issued new Enfield rifles. These rifles used a new invention—a paper cartridge that contained both the ball and the powder charge. To load the rifle for firing, the soldier would bite the bullet, tearing off the top of the cartridge. He would then jam the torn end of the cartridge down the barrel, exposing the powder for easy ignition.

So, what
biting the bullet
really means is “to prepare to take decisive action”—as in making ready to fire one’s rifle with serious intent.

M. Gregg Smith

Salem, Oregon

Gunman.
“President Boris Trajkovski,” reported the
Guardian
correspondent in Skopje, Macedonia, “vowed to continue the fight against the
gunmen
of the National Liberation Army.”

In Belfast, the Associated Press reported that “two
gunmen
fired shots at Catholic men smoking outside a community center.”

“Three Palestinian militants were killed” in an Israeli helicopter attack, reported ABC News. “In apparent retaliation, Palestinian
gunmen
killed an Israeli yesterday and set off two car bombs.”

Words have connotations. In the disputed territory known as the West Bank, an Israeli village is called a
settlement,
implying fresh intrusion; a small Palestinian town, even one recently settled, is called a
village,
implying permanence.

A word that terrifies many fair-minded editors is
terrorist;
it connotes criminality. Because it is said that one man’s terrorist is another man’s “freedom fighter,” journalists have reached out for other nouns, like
guerrilla, militant
or
paramilitary
.

The latest rush from judgment is
gunman
. In 1999, that word appeared once in the database I checked for every five uses of
terrorist
in connection with Israel; now it’s running about one in two.

Because the Associated Press stylebook has no specific entries on
terrorist
or
gunman,
I asked its editor, Norm Goldstein, about what went into the choice. “Words like
gunmen, separatist
and
rebel
are often more precise than
terrorist
and less likely to be viewed as judgmental,” he notes. “We often prefer the more specific words for that reason.” Nor does the
Times
stylebook have a guideline; its editors tell reporters to use “the most accurate and impartial term, especially in cases where the political merits are disputed.”

The United States Department of State has a guideline in Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d): “The term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets”—that means civilian or unarmed military—“by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”

Gunman
may be a useful catchall for journalists who do not want to appear less than objective by applying that standard of political intent and noncombatant victim. But in avoiding one problem, it engenders another: “Why do you suppose this gender-biased word is still in use?” asks Isaac Moses of Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Perhaps the lesson that violence is a particularly male occupation is not one that we want to impart to our little boys.”

In every other walk of linguistic life, sexism is being rooted out. Firemen are
firefighters,
policemen
police officers,
postmen
mail carriers
. But in current ultra-nonjudgmental parlance, there are neither
terrorists
nor
gunwomen
. A female terrorist using a gun goes by the name of
gunman
.

Doesn’t “gunman” go back in its terrorist usage to the Irish Troubles of 1916 and thereafter?

I think it was also used in frontier days—the kind James Fenimore Cooper wrote about, not the kind with cowboys—to refer to the number of military effectives an Indian tribe could muster, but I’m rusty on this one. (As in, “the Suwannee had 100 gunmen.”)

Somebody is sure to suggest
gunsel
as a potential gender-neutral term. You will recall, of course, that that is a misinterpretation of a line from
The Maltese Falcon.
“Keep that
gunsel
away from me,” Spade says to Gutman, referring to Wilmer, using a Yiddish pejorative for a homosexual. People of small Yiddish thought Spade was using a slang term for gunman, since Wilmer fancied himself one. The line was thus (gleefully, I’m sure) slipped past the Hays office for the Bogart movie.
^*

Thaddeus Holt

Point Clear, Alabama

H

Hark the Dark.
“
Darkly
nasty” is the blurb selected from
People
magazine in a Warner Brothers ad for
Death to Smoochy
. It quotes other major media outlets (the closely followed Westwood One Radio, not to mention Sixty Second Preview and the trendsetting KCAL-TV) calling the comedy “
dark,
demented and hysterical,” the “
darkest
movie ever” and “deliciously
dark
.”

Dark
is in the limelight because advertisers believe the deliciously moody description sells.
Bright
is eclipsed, though it lingers in toothpaste ads. Not since the poet Matthew Arnold wrote of “a
darkling
plain … where ignorant armies clash by night” and the novelist Joseph Conrad “penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of
darkness
” has this ancient adjective enjoyed such a revival.

The movies did it. Not the current Robin Williams-Danny DeVito epic, in which “Smoochy” is a fuchsia rhinoceros (the name derived from the German dialect verb
schmutzen,
“to kiss”; in American slang, the noun
smooch
now refers to any good-humored, occasionally wet expression of affection). The new look of
dark
springs from its use in the film criticism of the 1940s: the
film noir
. Lexicographic Irregulars will vividly recall a column five years ago on the renaissance of hip cynicism, moral ambiguity and sharply shadowed fatalism (“Film Noir Is My Bête Noire”), in which I argued that if a film was not
noir,
it was nowhere. However, the earliest citation of the phrase I could find in the databases was from 1958, and a call was put out for etymological assistance. The dossier on
dark
has slowly ripened to provide background to the word’s current, dazzling adjectival vogue.

Cast your mind back to the late 1930s and early ’40s hard-guy detective novels—Dashiell Hammett’s
Maltese Falcon,
Raymond Chandler’s
Farewell,
My Lovely
—and the bleak, menacing camera work of such directors as Fritz Lang in
Scarlet Street
and Billy Wilder in James M. Cain’s
Double Indemnity
.

“Some people connect the term
film noir,
” writes Kenneth Turan, film critic for the
Los Angeles Times,
“to the famous yellow-and-black
Série Noire
series of translations of American writers like Chandler and Hammett published by Gallimard.”

The film historian Marshall Deutelbaum of West Lafayette, Indiana, picks up that thread: “Following the end of World War II, French audiences discovered all at once what Hollywood filmmaking had been like during the war years, when no Hollywood films could be exhibited.” In a review by Nino Frank in
L’Écran Français
dated Aug. 28, 1946, the French critic wrote, “These
noir
films no longer have any common ground with run-of-the-mill police dramas.” In the same year, the critic Jean Pierre Chartier titled an article in
La Revue du Cinéma
“Americans Also Make ‘
Noir
’ Films.”

The
Time
film critic Richard Schickel wrote me in 1997: “Obviously the term made its way into English via the work of French movie critics whose regard for American genre films of all kinds influenced some of their American counterparts to start taking seriously a body of work that most middlebrow critics had previously dismissed as being impossibly lowbrow.

“Be that as it may,” Schickel added in this correspondence he must think was lost or ignored, “I join you in deploring the vague and trendy application of the term to other modes of expression. When I use it, I have a very specific movie style and attitude in mind.”

The new, extended
noir
(it means “black” but carries the connotation of “dark”) has shed its previous image of “somber, wicked, foul” even to the point of evil, exemplified by Satan, “Prince of Darkness.” In modern journalism, the columnist Robert Novak was given that sobriquet; he recalls being so dubbed in his 20s, when he was “very pessimistic about the state of the world,” but has lately been cheering up a little. (To go over the cliff on this tangent, Satan’s other name,
Lucifer,
is rooted in the Latin
lucem ferre,
“bearer of light”; go figure.)

As the copywriters for
Death to Smoochy
demonstrate, the new
noir
not only has a romantic, severely fashionable sense but an antic noncoloration as well.

A word of caution: the French treat the English word
film
as masculine, like
cinéma,
which takes the masculine adjective
noir,
not the feminine
noire
. In a parallel journalistic universe, a vituperative right-wing journalist wrote about a
film blanche;
this elicited a torrent of e-mail messages from multilingual readers of the
International Herald Tribune
correcting it to
film blanc
.

Having It All.
“Bush Will Tell Americans They Can Have It All” was the
Washington Times
headline about the presidential budget for 2001. A grumpy right-wing pundit followed a few days later with the phrase in participial or gerund form: “Having It All.” In both cases, the meaning was that the president’s message contained not merely something for everybody, but everything for everybody—tax cuts, debt reduction, increased spending, the works.

That all-at-once sense, particularly regarding material things, was the original meaning of the phrase. “She desired high rank and great wealth,” wrote the novelist Anthony Trollope in 1880. “With him she might have
had it all
.” Forty years later, Edith Wharton, in her
Age of Innocence,
wrote: “Pictures, priceless furniture, music, brilliant conversation…. And she
had it all
.”

Then “career women” adopted the phrase. In 1980, Joyce Gabriel titled a book
Having It All: A Practical Guide to Overcoming the Career Woman’s Blues
. Helen Gurley Brown, two years later, used the same title, defining it in the subtitle:
Love, Success, Sex, Money
. The phrase then meant “having a wonderful life that you create for yourself,” Brown recalls. “Later it came to mean the three big component parts for women—having a job, a man, children.”

The phrase underwent a semantic shift. “Twenty years ago, it was a triumphant phrase and also a demand—women were not going to be limited to a circumscribed set of rules,” says Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women. “By
having it all,
we were talking about doing all the traditional things, and on top of that a job in the waged work force, and for many of us, on top of all that political activism.”

Back then, the full feminine life was defined in Wendy Wasserstein’s play
Isn’t It Romantic
when a young woman asks her mother, “Do you think it’s possible to be married, or living with a man, have a good relationship and children that you share equal responsibility for, and a career, and still read novels, play the piano, have women friends and swim twice a week?” The mother replies: “You mean what the women’s magazines call
‘having it all
’? Harriet, that’s just your generation’s fantasy.”

Harriet’s mother was on to something. “About 15 years ago, I started hearing fewer women concerned with
having it all
and more concerned with having to do it all without help,” Ireland says. “The phrase has come to carry with it a sense of being overwhelmed, as you see on the T-shirt in the NOW store that says: ‘I am woman. I am invincible. I am exhausted.’ Today, we realize you can have it all, but in sequence. There’s been a kind of evolution in the meaning of the phrase.”

Not everyone accepts that evolved, sequential meaning. When the Bush White House passed the word that officials would make time for their families—even if it meant going home at 5:30—Marjorie Williams of the
Washington Post
called that “one of the capital’s sunniest self-delusions.” In the real world, she wrote, “official Washington is implacably, impartially hostile to family life…. To pretend otherwise is just to write one more chapter in the big book of lies titled
‘Having It All
.’”

Thus, the phrase now has a split meaning. To many feminists,
having it all
suggests varied experience in stages: no longer supermom doing all at once, but first a career, then a family, or vice versa. But to those in or covering political life, the phrase retains its earlier connotation, whether about working women with families or about presidential budgets: “everything at once.” I would like to offer greater lexical clarity, but you know what you cannot have.

Homeland.
“I was wondering if you know the origin of the word
homeland,
” asked Brian Reich, a student at Columbia University, “as in
‘Homeland Defense
’ and
‘Homeland Security
.’”

That zeroes in on a word with a history that rivals any for resonance in the realm of politics. Its origin in English comes quickly to hand: in 1670, Richard Blome wrote in his geographical treatise,
Travel and Traffick,
of merchants plying their trade between Scotland and Ireland as “Homeland Traders.” The
OED
’s definition makes a nice distinction between senses—“the land which is one’s home or where one’s home is”—before settling on the more general “one’s native land.”

But that’s the easy part. Now to the deliciously complex geopolitical connotations and semantic shadings of the word.

The first Zionist Congress, meeting in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, set the goal “to establish for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” Twenty years later, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour of Britain, eager to enlist the support of Jews for the Allies in World War I, wrote a letter to the Jewish leader Lord Rothschild that said, “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” In recording this in September 1918, an anonymous writer for the
British Political Science Quarterly
made the leap to today’s word when he noted Balfour’s “declaration, made Nov. 6 [1917], and since officially endorsed by France and Italy, in favor of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.” When David Ben Gurion and his fellow Zionists signed the declaration establishing the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, the Hebrew word
moledet
—translated as
homeland
—appeared four times.

In the meantime, the homely word
home
—in German,
Heim
—gained a more sinister connotation when it became a favorite of Fascists. In Austria and Germany in the late 1920s, the
home guard,
or
homeland defense forces,
were known as the
Heimwehr
or
Heimatschutz
.