The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (27 page)

K

Keep It Short.
“The use of short words is an art,” writes Nat Bodian in the winter issue of
Publishing Research Quarterly,
published at Rutgers. “It takes a bit of time to think them up,” he tells us, “but once you learn how to make your thoughts known in short words and to write with them, you will find that they work well and, as a whole, they tend to make good sense.”

Why? “Short words are sharp, clear and to the point,” notes Nat. “They spark the thoughts of those who read them, and they urge them to read on. They let you say what you want, and they leave no doubt as to what you mean. So try to find ways to write in short words when you speak of or deal with books.”

His pick of best names for books?
Gone With the Wind, The Joy of Sex, Live and Let Die, A House Is Not a Home, The Prince of Tides, The Way Things Ought to Be, The Cat in the Hat
.

Do you go for that as I do? Let us pledge, then, to swap long words for short ones. At first, you may find it hard to join this cause, but it is not as hard as you may think to pick nouns that shine, to choose verbs that stun and to use fresh tropes that sing. The need is real and the good it will do will make your spouse proud and your work sell. No, the trend toward a taut style should not be scoffed at as just a blip—you can bet your life it will last for years. Think of it: crisp talk warms hearts, and prose packed with punch is sure to make you stand out in a crowd. Give it a shot.

I share your liking for short words. Nothing raises the goose bumps like Lady Macbeth’s: “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” or Churchill’s: “Blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

However, there is another factor that affects length of words: short words are generally of Anglo-Saxon origin, while longer words tend to come from Norman-French. In your last monosyllabic paragraph of about 130 words only eight are clearly of Latin, Greek or French origin; the rest are Anglo-Saxon.

This wonderful concoction called the English language is still an imperfect blend of the two main linguistic strains. If you closed your eyes and listened to the conversation in any barrack room on either side of the Atlantic, you could be excused for wondering if the Norman Conquest had ever taken place.

John Binsted

San Mateo, California

Kibosh.
In denying a newspaper report that the United States had ordered a halt to accepting the surrender of Al Qaeda terrorists, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said, “To my knowledge, the U.S. did not nix, stop or put the
kibosh
on anything.”

Nix
is “to refuse, deny,” from the German negative
nichts
. And the meaning of to
put the kibosh on
is widely understood: “to forbid, with unmistakable conclusiveness.” But what’s a
kibosh
?

Nobody knows. It has been attributed to Yiddish and Gaelic, but with no citation. H. L. Mencken thought it was an Americanism, but irate British etymologists shot that down with an 1836 use by Charles Dickens in his
Sketches by Boz
spelled
kye-bosk
. Its origin remains one of the great mysteries of slang.

Let me suggest the Hebrew word
kavash
as a possible origin of the slang word
kibosh.
A
Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament,
by Brown, Driver and Briggs, offers as its primary meanings to “subdue, bring into bondage.” I hope this puts the kibosh on the mystery.

Rabbi Ira J. Schiffer

Associate Chaplain

Middlebury College

Middlebury, Vermont

L

Language on Demand.
Two new ways to deliver books are upon us. One is the e-book, which you can download from the Internet and squint at on your screen or print out on your printer. The other is the print-on-demand book, which you order over the Web or from a traditional bookstore and get a bound copy of in the mail.

This will mean that just about any literate person can become a “published” author. Online services already exist that—for a few hundred dollars—will take your digital manuscript and pictures and make them available to buyers for roughly the same price as bookstore books.

The Internet publishers turn down porn, hate stuff and guides to building H-bombs. However, they do not judge content for quality and cannot, for such a low publishing fee, edit copy. What will the coming wave of amateur authors do to the language? Will we be inundated with vanities in gibberish?

Maybe not. I punched up iuniverse.com and ordered
Blow the House Down: The Story of My Double Lung Transplant,
by Charles Tolchin.
^*
I’ve known Charley since he was a kid with cystic fibrosis given little chance to live. His book is a stunning, moving, personal account of a young man’s bravery in action. Tolchin’s unprofessional writing is straightforward, colloquial and frill-free. He has produced an intimate memoir that grabs you and has found a new way to distribute it that reaches you.

Will such disintermediated prose encourage new authors or discourage writing discipline? We’ll see. Worth watching.

Laydown Dates.
The book-publishing industry has its own new term for a variation of a release date:
laydown
. “This review copy is being sent to you,” Knopf Publicity notifies me, “with the understanding that you will not run your review before Tuesday, July 18—which is the National
Lay-down
Date for bookstores all across the country. (Official Publication Date is July 25.)”

A vision came to me of the National
Laydown
Date, a date that would live in the annals of relaxation. Hammocks would be handed out, busy intersections closed for pedestrians to stretch out and take a nap, yoga teachers enlisted for supervision of supine and prone meditators, all putting out of their slackened and refreshed minds the dread prospect of the inevitable National Standup Date.

Belay that dream: a
laydown date
is the day that a book officially goes on sale. It is used especially when the publisher wants to restrict any sale or revelation of the news in a book before it leaks. The publication date is a week or month after that, giving reviewers time to noodle the book around and buyers the feeling that they are getting the jump on their neighbors.
Lay-down
without the date means “distribution”:
Publishers Weekly
(where’s the apostrophe?) wrote recently about a Beatles book that “hits the stores with a worldwide
laydown
of 1.5 million copies.”

The reclining noun has a sinister use among arms merchants (an obliterating strike is a
nuclear laydown
) and can also be found in the lexicon of graphic artists, construction workers and railroaders. But its most prevalent use is in gambling, as the adjective in a
laydown hand
.

In poker, it’s the “showdown,” when all hands are laid open for all players to determine the winner. In bridge, a
laydown hand
is a winning hand placed faceup on the table all at once, rather than being played out. This bridge meaning has been extended to a general “sure thing.” A Boston economist told the
Times,
“The Fed has more reason to tighten than not—but it’s not a
laydown
.”

Some of us who respect reasonable embargoes resist marketing manipulation. Let’s say I go to a bookstore, the bookseller sells me a book and I spot a news story in it. Would I feel free to use it in a column no matter what its
laydown date
or publication date? You bet I would; that’s a
lay-down
.

In the world of salesmen,
laydown
has a far different meaning from those mentioned in your column.

It is usually used in the sense of, “That deal was a
laydown;
the guy answered the door with his checkbook in hand!” or “What a
laydown
! The first unit I showed them, they said, ‘We’ll take it!’”

As such, it is not really describing the “win-win” situation that a sale ideally should be; rather, it’s alluding to the prospect “laying down” (yes, it SHOULD be “lying down”) and submitting, i.e., letting the salesman “have his way” (I’m trying to be delicate here!). But it certainly indicates a deal that the salesman didn’t have to struggle to close.

Stuart Tarlowe

Rosedale, Kansas

You asked where the apostrophe is in Publishers Weekly. I suppose it’s in the same place the apostrophe is in the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Authors Guild, etc. I suggest that in each instance the members of the group making use of the organization do not own it but are members of it. Buy that?

Frank O’Donnell

Rockville Centre, New York

Left Coast.
“If she was wearing a revealing top,” wrote the
Los Angeles Times
in a guide to the geographic origins of guests at a Conga Room party during the Democratic National Convention, “a short, tight micro-mini and strappy stilettos, if she had that come-hither look, she was definitely
Left Coast.”

When did the West Coast of the United States become the
Left Coast,
and why?

The East Coast is rarely called the Right Coast; its only synonym is the Eastern Seaboard, as in “We ought to saw off the Eastern Seaboard and float it out to sea,” 1960s hyperbole attributed to Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who considered the Rockefeller-Dewey Northeast to be a hotbed of liberalism. (
Seaboard
means “land bordering a seacoast,” though “Western Seaboard” is an unfamiliar term.)

The earliest
Left Coast
citation I can find, with the help of Fred Shapiro of Yale, is in the title of a 1977
Rolling Stone
record review: “Wet Willie
Left Coast
Live.” Three years later, a
New York Times
writer put it in context: “If you’re standing in Texas looking north, as Texans frequently do, the
Left Coast
is where Hollywood is.” These usages had no political connotation.

In the mid ’90s, however, a liberal coloration emerged. The
Denver Post
noted that President Clinton “swayed to the
left coast
and invited gays into the military.” The combination of geographical and political direction was irresistible. “The Pacific Northwest was a center of so much outcry against the Reagan administration in the 1980s,” wrote Joel Connelly in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
“that conservative pundits referred to the region by a derisive nickname—the ‘
left coast
of America.’”

As California has become more solidly Democratic, the name—with its political connotation—is most closely associated with that state. (Oregon and Washington are still up for linguistic grabs.)

Other nicknames for Los Angeles and Hollywood, home of the
glitterati
(an amalgam of “glitter” and “literati”), seem to be fading. “
Tinseltown,
with its reference to the silver screen and the glamour surrounding it, is at least mildly positive,” says Arnold Zwicky, visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford. “
La-La Land,
with its suggestion of kookiness, is (mildly, jok-ingly) deprecatory, and I don’t think I’ve heard Angelenos use it except in explicit self-mockery.”

La-La Land
is a play on the initials LA, perhaps influenced by
Lotos-land
in “The Lotos-Eaters,” a poem by Tennyson: “In the hollow
Lotos-land
to live and lie reclined / On the hills like Gods together.” In his posthumous 1941 novel,
The Last Tycoon,
F. Scott Fitzgerald had a character describe Hollywood as “a mining town in
lotus land
.”

Jack Smith of the
Los Angeles Times
tracked
La-La Land
back to a 1985 recording, “Land of La-La,” by Stevie Wonder, the pop-soul music star, with backup singers chanting
el-lay
every few bars. The only uses found before that were a 1979
Los Angeles Times
lead, “Monday night in
Lalaland
is not like Monday night in, say, Washington,” and a 1984 reference in the
Washington Post
by the fashion columnist Nina Hyde, reporting on a bar that “encourages the cocktail waitresses to pour themselves into black super-clingy spandex pants, very
LA-LA land,
very Cher of a couple of years ago, very roller disco.” A second sense exists, only tangentially related to the city: a state of unreality, induced by drink, drugs or congenital dreaminess.

Whether used derisively by unappreciative visitors to the Golden State or used self-mockingly by residents, when the nicknames refer to a specific place, they are proper nouns to be properly capitalized:
Tinseltown, La-La Land
and now the
Left Coast
.

Legacy.
Certain words and phrases become taboo in the White House.
Out of the loop, amiable dunce, malaise
and
crook
come to mind.

The Clinton White House, we are told by Glenn Burkins of the
Wall Street Journal,
is eager to make clear that it is “not being driven by a quest to establish” Clinton’s
legacy
. The interviewer reports that John Podesta, the chief of staff, “has banned the use of that word in the White House.”

That’s because the word, in its political sense, is most often being used in derision. “The Clintons’
legacy,
” wrote the
St. Petersburg Times
as far back as 1996, “will be the attack and invasion of our justice system by social entrepreneurs.” Two years later, the columnist Stephen Chapman pronounced, “Clinton’s
legacy
is likely to be the enduring diminution of the office he holds.” In that year, the
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd suggested that “Bill Clinton’s biggest
legacy
may not be in politics, but in letters…. He has inspired one entirely new and remarkable genre: feminist erotic journalism.”

More charitably, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida recently said that free trade “is a place where Clinton can legitimately say that he has a
legacy
.” And when asked by a reporter, “How much of the president’s
legacy
is dependent on peace in Ireland and in the Middle East?” the White House spokesman Joe Lockhart replied, “His
legacy
will be decided, thankfully, not by us and not by any of the people who are scribbling in notebooks.”