The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (23 page)

Thirty-five percent of the innumerable participants in the survey chose some form of this onomatopoeic verb, from
haar
and
haw
to
harf
and
hauch
. The
hauch
form, three readers noted, is from the German
hauchen,
“to exhale.” (A related verb for the same action, according to Hans Van Wouw-Koeleman of Old Bennington, Vermont, is the Dutch
ademen,
derived from the Sanskrit
atma,
“spirit, breath.” People everywhere have been blowing on glass for a long time.)

An important subsection of the aspirate
-h
category is
huff
. The most famous use of this verb is in Joseph Jacobs’s 1890
English Fairy Tales,
perhaps using the great 19th-century lexicographer James Halliwell as the source, when a wolf seeks to intimidate three little pigs with “Then I’ll
huff,
and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.”

The wolf was a fox in an 1813 version, whose house-blowing was foiled by three little goslings, and is not to be confused with an unrelated story about three little kittens who lost their mittens. The wolf was not characterized as big, bad until 1933. In a Disney
Silly Symphony
animated cartoon, the songwriters Frank Churchill and Ann Ronell enlivened the tale of the three little pigs with the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” To many Depression-era moviegoers, the wolf symbolized hard times, and the piglets’ triumphant defiance of the huffing and puffing was taken as an expression of resolute optimism, similar to “Happy Days Are Here Again.” (Even today, when stock market bears
huff
and puff their pessimism, some analysts reply, “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.”)

The fairy-tale marriage of
huff
and
puff
followed the pairing of the two rhyming verbs in John Phillips’s 1678 parody of Virgil’s
Aeneid:
“And
puff
and
huff
and toyl and moyl.” (I refrain from citing an earlier scatological pairing; the coolest guess at the origin of
huff
is the
OED
’s “imitative of the sound of a blast of air through an orifice.”)

Controversy rages among etymologists over the meaning of
huff
. “I believe the big, bad wolf
huffed
when he was inhaling,” e-mails Tim Gaston. This is based on logic; how can one
puff
out without first having
huffed
in? The century-old
Century Dictionary
defines the verb
huff
as “to swell; puff; distend,” but adds that
puff
does not mean “blow”; rather, it means “to puff up, inflate.”

Inhalation is also suggested by the phrase
to be in a huff,
or to be
huffy;
that is, to be swelled up with anger or arrogance. Many years ago, when I was building model airplanes with my cousin Bobby Siegmeister, we became happily cross-eyed from the smell of the glue; today, sniffing glue or aerosol gas, a dangerous activity, is known as
huffing
.

Therefore, I reject to
huff
as the preferred verb meaning “to blow on one’s glasses to moisten them with vapor.” Actors and orators will dispute this rejection, arguing heatedly that making the sound of the aspirate
h,
as in
ha-ha-ha,
engages the diaphragm and should be associated only with exhaling. Let ’em; prescriptive usagists ain’t cream puffs.

Other entries in the moisturization derby included
blow, breathe, mist,
steam, expire, phumph, yawn, whoo
and
pft-too
.

And the winner is … (A digression. In the Academy Award presentations, we never heard the familiar phrase “And the winner is.” Instead, every celebrated presenter, marching in linguistic lockstep, said, “And the award goes to.” That is because the academy, ever sensitive to hurt feelings, decreed that there were to be no
winners
. Why? Because, as the MC, Steve Martin, noted, “God forbid anyone should think of this as a competition.” Use of
winner
would suggest that those nominees who did not receive the award were
losers,
and in Hollywood nobody is to be more reviled than a
loser
. In the enforced absence of the word
winner,
the tight-lipped or sobbing stars who were not called up to the stage are supposed to be considered
nonawardees
. They’re
losers,
he said huffily.)

And in the usage contest for “verb to describe the way water-deprived Magoos clean our glasses,” the winner is—

Hurr III.
“The best way to clean a lens,” advised
Time-Life
’s 1970
Photographer’s Handbook,
“is to blow away dust, then ‘
fog
’ the glass with your breath.” John P. Knight of Seattle sends that citation with “I remember my father showing me how to
fog up
my glasses when I was 11.” Jonathan Carleton of Santa Fe, New Mexico, thinks it is “on the analogy of physicians of a former day passing mirrors under comatose patients’ noses to see whether they ‘
fogged
the mirror,’ that is, were breathing.”

Fully 45 percent of the votes, or hotly aspirated assertions, were for
fog
or
befog
. Those of us who
hurr, huh, breathe
and
spit
are in a vanishing minority, but at least we can all see where we’re going.

Fog
is fine, but I would put
fog up
into the same unnecessary pigeon-hole as
listen up.

Victoria Matthews

Denver, Colorado

Hyper.
Forget
cyber;
Norbert Wiener’s once-modernistic combining form is passé. And
super
is positively archaic, no longer the “soupa” used by teenagers munching subs. Get with the hot prefix of our times:
hyper
.

This El Supremo of prefixes has in the past generation become a term in itself: we have clipped
hyperactive
to the simple
hyper,
its meaning ranging from “excitable” to “keyed up” to “frantic.” More recently, this Greek word for “over, above, beyond” has gained mastery in the worlds of diplomacy and communication.

Though the United States seemed content with being the world’s only superpower, that word did not have a pejorative enough connotation for the French. In February 1999, France’s foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, called the U.S. a
hyperpower,
which he defined as “a country that is dominant or predominant in all categories … attitudes, concepts, language and modes of life.” He elaborated later that “the word superpower is no longer sufficient to describe the United States. That’s why I use the term
hyperpower,
which American media think is aggressive…. We cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single
hyperpower
.”

The diplomat probably bottomed his coinage on
hypermarché,
in English
hypermarket,
which means “a large supermarket.” The French president, Jacques Chirac, aware that Védrine’s term implied American arrogance, assured Craig Whitney of the
New York Times
in December 1999 that “when Védrine said America was a
hyperpower
there was nothing pejorative about it.” Whitney noted that this was because Chirac “knew it sent American officials into overdrive.”

After Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began introducing herself to him as “hyperMadeleine,” Védrine adopted Chirac’s amelioration, insisting, “
En français,
‘hyper’
n’est pas péjoratif
.” The opposite is true; it is an accusation of hegemony, carrying what he admits is “
la connotation
pathologique
.” Why did Védrine make it the essence of France’s attitude toward the U.S.? Only because, he claims, it’s a more original word than
superpower:
“
Superpuissance, c’est banal
.”

The old word
text
is apparently also considered banal or hackneyed in a world where the written word is only one part of the vast communications scheme. Hence the rise of
hypertext
.

Most of us think of a
hypertext
link as the letters that come up in blue on your computer screen, often preceded by www. (Whoops! As I just typed the three
w
’s followed by the instruction to the copy editor “unitalics,” the letters turned blue, as if suddenly deprived of oxygen. Why do I have to wrestle with my word-processing program for control of the color of my own text? Who owns which?) You click on the
hypertext
link and get shot to someplace else, which often offers other links inviting you to get lost in hyperspace.

Through the good e-offices of William O. Goggins, deputy editor of
Wired
magazine, I tracked down Ted Nelson, the coiner of
hypertext,
now a visiting professor at the University of Southampton in Britain. Though some trace his idea to a 1945 work by Vannevar Bush, the coinage was in an August 1965 paper by Nelson titled “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate.”

Warming up before coming across with his definition, Nelson tells me he doesn’t like the use of
intelligent
as a combining form, “which generally means ‘stupid’—as in
‘intelligent
cars,’ where the lights stay on after you leave to show your possessions to thieves, or
‘intelligent
agents,’ which means remote programs that will be even less controllable than the ones you now buy.” (Yeah, like letters on my screen that turn blue, unasked. This is my kind of guy.)

Nelson considers
hypertext
to be “the manifest destiny of literature—breaking out of the imprisoning four walls of paper.” By “literature” he means “media that we contemplate and keep,” including recordings, movies, sheet music and whatnot, “which can be nonsequential and par-allel.”

In the old-fashioned written texts, Nelson writes, “thoughts have always tried to wriggle free, escaping through every possible loophole—into parentheses, footnotes, marginal glosses, headlines and subheads, headings and captions and parallelism of layout and structure—perhaps most magnificently in the Talmud, but effusively and gloriously in the last century’s books and magazines, dust jackets and medical texts with celluloid overlays.”

He deplores the way “the tekkies want to colonize this as their own fiefdom, claiming these literary, artistic and cognitive realms as ‘technology,’ and the result is the broken and clumsy formats of the Web, with only one-way links, no version management, no principled reuse and no copyright solution.”

Just as I was about to tap him on the shoulder to get to my question, he e-mailed, “OK, the definition already.” It is “nonsequential writing with free user movement.” Let’s figure that out: “nonsequential” means not along a time line or insistent that
b
follow
a,
but allowing the reader to use many different branches and explore alternatives along other pathways. You don’t like a happy ending? Veer off to one where heroes die of heartbreak. In Nelson’s definition, “free user movement” means “not constrained by forms like adventure games and computer-assisted instruction, where the writing may be nonlinear but the user has little or no explicit freedom.”

That’s clear enough; my own prose about language is crisscrossed with parenthetical tangents that reflect the maze in a maven’s mind. But why call it
hyper,
which in medicine can mean “pathologically excessive”? (To
hypertext
at this point, that was what the Frenchman was indicating.) “Because
hyper
in mathematics means approximately ‘extended, generalized and multidimensional,’” answers Nelson. “
Hyperspace
means a space with more than three dimensions, and a
hypercube
is a cube in more than three dimensions. Nothing wrong with that!”

Thus, Americans accused of being an arrogant
hyperpower
can, by means of
hypertext,
access the pejorative comments and contemptuous cartoons in all the nations of the
tiers monde
following France’s anti-unipolar lead and thereby get thoroughly
hyper
.