The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (30 page)

The noun has come to be the place (or piece of furniture) in which this sort of leaning or reclining position is taken. In Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play
The Rivals,
Mr. Fag describes the city of Bath as “a good
lounge
.” In 1927, Ernest Hemingway noted “the cocktail hour,” which Graham Greene in 1939 placed in a “cocktail
lounge
.” A decade later,
Time
magazine reported the “metamorphosis of the old-fashioned corner saloon into the modern, glittering cocktail
lounge
.”

Thus, Powell’s concern for the controversial connotation of conspicuous conviviality is correct. The noun
lounge
reeks of booze, as any visitor to the United Nations Delegates’
Lounge
in New York can testify. Less justifiable for the name change at Foggy Bottom is the connotation of “toilet.” To call a restroom a
lounge
is to euphemize euphemism, to touch up the painting of the lily. Few people ask, “Which way to the
lounge
?” They prefer, “Is there somewhere I can wash my hands?” or “Whereza john?”

You don’t hear about
lounge lizards
anymore. That was a World War I derogation of lizard-lidded gigolos who hung about chichi bars and nightclubs in search of rich women to seduce and bilk. The phrase had a nice alliterative ring to it. Its nearest replacement today is directed to the position rather than the purpose of the lounging:
couch potatoes
. At the Department of State, they can be found staring at the screen in the Employee Service Center.

Have you observed yet another use of the word “lounge”? It is incorrectly,
though appropriately, used to name the piece of furniture, the seat of which
extends several feet. Thus,
chaise longue
has become, except for the very few
purists,
chaise lounge.

Madeline Hamermesh

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I was in the automobile business (sales) for several years. Anyone who would drive onto the new or used car lot and cruise around without getting out of
their car, just to check what was for sale without daring to make an overture of any kind of interest by setting foot on the ground, was known as a
lot lizard
(the bane of all car salesmen).

John S. Wilkins

Rosepine, Louisiana

M

M-commerce.
Lord knows, this department tries to keep up. But no sooner is the letter
e
fixed firmly in my mind in all its permutations as the key to the new electronic world (
e-commerce, e-mail, e-whatever
) than along come the jargoneers of digitese with another letter to thrust it aside. Here comes
m-commerce
.

M
is not for the million things your mother gave you, as the old song went. Rather, it stands for
mobile;
as the Internet speeds up transactions, mobility is where it’s at. (And
where it’s at
is no longer where it’s at, either; I am on the lookout for the latest phrase for what the French still call
au courant
.)

“
M-commerce
is
e-commerce
that’s done over mobile phones and other hand-held digital devices like personal digital assistants,” writes the
Business Times of Singapore
. “It covers buying and selling everything from stocks to flowers, using handphones and PDA’s.” (Just be careful of chewing gum while
m-commercing
on Lee Kwan Yew’s tight little island-you could wind up running from a cane.)

Though a British outfit named Logica claims coinage in 1997, the locution is now coming on stream. “Just when the language has begun to absorb the letter ‘e’ as a prefix,” notes Katie Hafner in the
New York Times,
“comes the latest twist on electronic money and the language of the digital age: mobile commerce, or
m-commerce,
which promises to turn your cell phone or hand-held organizer into an electronic wallet.” She quotes Richard Siber of Andersen Consulting as foreseeing the day when “
m-commerce
will be bigger than
e-commerce
.”

Dunno ’bout that. (That’s how impatient e-mail writers, rat-tat-tat justlike that, express “I am not so sure that linguistic prediction is well founded.” That may bring in a lot of
m-mail,
a locution coined right here and now.) Both phrases use
commerce
as the suffix;
electronic,
the source for the
e
-prefix, is a more general term than
mobile
and may subsume it. Thus we would have “mobile electronic commerce” as against stationary electronic commerce (the sort you’re involved with when ordering ki-wiburgers while parked), but that would bring us
m-e commerce,
too late for the “me generation.”

The key to mobile electronic commerce, as I get it, is the ability to peddle while pedaling, or to buy on the fly. “Rather than stand in front of a soda machine fishing for a dollar bill that is neither too faded nor too wrinkled,” writes Hafner, “you may someday simply dial the phone number posted on the machine.”

Here my with-it colleague has lapsed into an archaism.
Dial,
the noun, originally meant “the graduated face of a timepiece,” as in a sundial, rooted in the Latin for “day.” Some of us can remember when the verb to
dial
meant “to turn a disk with numbered finger holes.” This verb was generalized, as linguists like Sol Steinmetz say, into touching the numbers on a touch-tone phone that has no dial. (Another such new generalization is to
bookmark,
which meant “to place a marker in a book” but which has a newer sense of “to mark the address of a Web site.”)

Will the archaism to
dial
persevere in a dial-free age? Will we long refer to digits on the broadcast spectrum as “on your radio dial”? Will marketers of the deodorant soap have to rename their product? My guess is the verb will be replaced not by
punch, poke
or
jab,
which suggest dialing in anger, but by
key, press
or
tip,
as in “fingertip.” We are likely to
tip in
rather than dial the numbers. (Where am I? Back to the future.)

In a recent conversation in advanced digit-English with the
Times
’ new-media guru, Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of Times Company Digital, I was told that my column might someday, in audio or video form, be part of
streaming media
. That was satisfying; I like my prose to go with the flow. Writing in a 1995
Interactive Age
(you were expecting maybe Intrapassive Era?), Richard Karpinski defined
streaming media
as delivering “audio and video on demand, rather than requiring a user to download a file off the Web and play it back from a local drive.” In that way, the simultaneous display and transfer of sound and image can be watched and heard as the data flows in.

And now for some
shovelware
. A word association with
streaming media
leaps to mind:
screaming meemies
. This expression, origin obscure, was first defined in the
New Republic
in 1927 as a synonym for
drunkenness.
It soon came to mean “hysterics” like those in subsequent DTs, or delirium tremens. In World War II, allied soldiers applied it to the
Nebelwerfer,
a German multibarreled rocket mortar that went off with a series of high-pitched sounds.

Shovelware,
according to Eric Raymond’s Jargon File, is “a slipshod compilation of software dumped onto a CD-ROM without much care for organization or even usability.” Its source, I recall vividly, is the newspaper term “editing with a shovel,” applied to editors who fail to trim copy of extraneous paragraphs used by lazy writers who have a certain space to fill. It’s nice to see that the old “slug it ‘Slay’” lingo has found a place in the streaming, screaming media-meemie language of technology.

Your poor old mother probably worked hard enough trying to make a nice person out of you already, without adding to her burden.

If you are going to quote old tunes, get ’em right.

“M” is for the
many
things she gave you. Not “million.” How busy could
she have been? Nit nit nit nit nit nit nit nit nit nit. (Choose one.)

Bill Richards

Queensbury, New York

Millenarian.
On the subject of Greek coinage and the Espy playfulness: what shall we call a person who has lived in the second millennium?

“
Duomillenarian
has wrong connotations,” replies Frederic G. Cassidy,
^*
chief editor of the
Dictionary of American Regional English,
and “Greek is better in any case as more classical.” So with
DARE
’s classicist, George Goebel, the great lexicographer turned from Latin to Greek:
deutero
means “second” and
chiliast
refers to the biblical “kingdom of a thousand years.”

Thus,
deuterochiliast,
“a person of, or anything characteristic of, the second millennium.” Drop this coinage in a conversation; see if it clanks.

Mine Run.
Writing for the majority in a Supreme Court decision early this year, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg used a phrase about a Missouri judicial rule dealing with continuances: “like the
mine run
of procedural rules.” Steve Allen of Jersey City notes that
mine run
was used four times in recent years, three by Ginsburg, one by Chief Justice Rehnquist, and wonders, What does it mean?

The lexicographer David Barnhart spotted a 1994 use in the American Lawyer Newspapers Group—“in the ‘
mine run
’ of cases”—and James A.

Landau, a computer engineer who lives in Linwood, New Jersey, finds a recent citation of “ordinary,
mine-run
politicians” and adds, “You really ought to look up Robert E. Lee’s celebrated victory over the Union on Dec. 2, 1863.”

This variant of
run of the mill
and
run of the kiln
came out of the bituminous coal industry.
Mine run,
like its cousins, is an extraordinary way of saying “ordinary.” The
run
means “normal course,” a metaphoric extension of “stream, running brook,” like
Bull Run,
or the stream west of Chancel-lorsville, Virginia, that is a tributary of the Rapidan, where Union forces under Maj. Gen. George Meade took a long look across
Mine Run
and decided not to launch an attack against the Confederates. Northerners characterize the “battle of
Mine Run
” as “inconclusive”; Southerners treat it as a victory.

I suspect that
mine run
has gripped the legal profession because it is not as drearily ordinary as
run of the mill.

Mole.
In pursuit of the nuances of spookspeak, the arcane language of the intelligence “community,” I have been in correspondence with Aldrich Ames. He was the classic
mole:
a CIA employee secretly in the pay of the Soviet Union. His spying for cash led to Moscow Central’s execution of a dozen American sources.

“
Mole
is the best example of jargon created by literary or journalistic use,” Ames writes from his cell in the Allenwood Federal Penitentiary in White Deer, Pennsylvania. “Whether or not SIS [the Senior Intelligence Service] ever used it, it gradually entered use in the American community from John le Carré’s novels.”

A few weeks ago, the FBI arrested another American espionage official and accused him of serving for nine years as a KGB
mole
in its ranks. In an affidavit supporting the arrest warrant for Robert Hanssen, the Feds included a glossary of intelligence terms; though the government lexicographers did not dare to deal with terms as colorful as
mole,
they subtly corrected a recent error in this space. I had defined SCIF as an acronym for “secret compartmented information facility,” a room sealed and secured from prying eyes and ears. Got the
S
wrong; change that “secret” to “sensitive.”

An
agent in place
or
recruitment in place,
swears the FBI (an affidavit is, by definition, sworn; I swear by my definitions, too), is “a person who remains in a position while acting under the direction of a hostile intelligence service, so as to obtain current intelligence information.” The glossary differentiates this from an
illegal,
“who operates in a foreign country in the guise of a private person and is often present under false identity.”

Hanssen is accused of being an
agent in place,
as Ames was, who utilized a
dead drop,
defined by the FBI as “a prearranged hidden location used for the clandestine exchange … which avoids the necessity of an intelligence officer and an agent being present at the same time.” (A
dead drop
is a noun phrase;
drop-dead
is a compound adjective and is not spookspeak unless in a formulation like “Mata Hari took the SCI document to her
dead drop
in a
drop-dead
dress.”) When the location is marked by a chalk mark or piece of tape, it is considered “loaded” with stolen data or payment for same and becomes a
signal site
.