The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (37 page)

Two years later, Marla Donato wrote in the
Chicago Tribune,
“No matter how cool you are … there is always somebody even cooler than you—somebody who is
way cool
.” She defined
way cool
as “being rich enough to hire bodyguards to create your own constant, mobile, limited-access V.I.P. space.” A few years later, as we have seen, the usage cruised up to the offices of Merriam-Webster.

And, in due course, to network television. Katie Couric, on NBC’s
Today
show, said in 1999, “I recently spent some time talking to President Clinton in the Oval Office at the White House, which, I have to say, was
way cool
.” To which her cohost, Ann Curry, responded,
“Way, way cool,”
twice using the adverb
way
to modify the adjective
cool
. This exemplified the adverbial use of
way
as a general intensifier like
profoundly, indubitably, very
or
damn
.

A quick database scan shows a rush of usages in the past couple of years, from
way serious, way bad
to
way cute, way fun
. Last month,
Time
magazine, straining to be as with-it as
People
’s 1985 glossary, subheadlined,“The latest trendy drugs are …
chic, mellowing
and
way addictive
.” I spotted a billboard on the way (in its original noun sense of “path,” from the Latin
via
) to La Guardia Airport. Its only message: “
Way Fast
.” (At the bottom of the billboard is the word
Informix,
presumably the name of a software company or a dot-com shop or a new movie about the Irish troubles starring Victor McLaglen. Way soft-sell.)

We now have
way
as the intensifier of choice in the vogue-word set. It has grown steadily for nearly a generation, has separated itself from any hint of distance and is now
way, way
with-it. Will it replace
very,
as in the Johnny Mercer lyric “You’re much too much, and just too
very very
“? Hard to tell. But a copy editor long ago had this advice for writers who tried to strengthen feeble adjectives with
very:
“Change the
very
to
damn,
and somebody will surely cut out the
damn
.” Apply the same treatment to
way
.

You refer to Custer being a general in 1868; he was not. At the end of the Civil War, he was a major general of volunteers, but his rank in the regular army was much lower: at the time of his death in 1876 he was a lieutenant colonel. That he wanted people to call him general doesn’t change things
.

David Hawkins

Brooklyn, New York

As a Germanophile, I must dispute your etymology of “way,” that it developed “from its original noun sense of ‘path,’ from the Latin
via.
“ “Way” is the modern English descendant of the good, old Anglo-Saxon
weg,
an immediate cognate of the German
Weg,
and only related at the
Centum
level to the Latin
vehere.
Gnarly, isn’t it?

Brad James

Quakertown, Pennsylvania

Although I live in California (a linguistic researcher’s paradise in itself), I would say that the majority of people my age use “very,” “incredibly,” or “really” as a modifier twenty times for every “way” they use, and most likely if they say “way cool” it’s in an ironic sense. The more common slang version (probably used more on the West coast) would be “super,” “hella,” and “uber,” all prefixed to words. While “super” and “hella” mean approximately the same thing (equivalent to “very”), “uber,” which is mostly used by those from Los Angeles, is only used in situations of grand importance: “That guy is the hottest guy I’ve ever seen; he is an uber-hottie!” Additionally, there is a usage I’ve heard in conversation where people use
hella
to modify nouns to mean “a lot of.” For instance, when responding to “How are your finals going?” one might answer with, “Dude, I have
hella
-work to do tonight. I’ll be up until 3 a.m.”

Ryan Blitstein

Stanford, California

Nuance.
After George W. Bush said, “I do believe Ariel Sharon is a man of peace,” the Associated Press White House correspondent Ron Fournier noted that this was “widely viewed as a sign that he was endorsing Israel’s military action and backing off demands for an Israeli withdrawal. White House aides scoffed at those interpretations.”

“I think things can be
overnuanced,
“ responded the president’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer. The AP reporter countered in his story, “But
nuance
is the lifeblood of diplomacy.”

If not the lifeblood of diplomacy,
nuance
is its mother’s milk. (The difference between lifeblood and mother’s milk is
nuanced;
the adjective form that Al Haig, Reagan’s secretary of state, preferred was
nuancal,
but that delicate variation never made it into the dictionaries.)

The noun
nuance
started in the Latin
nubes,
“cloud,” which led to the French verb
nuer,
“to shade,” and then to the noun
nuance,
” a shade of color or variation in tone.” The essayist Horace Walpole captured the beautiful word for English in 1781, writing awkwardly, “The more expert one were at
nuances,
the more poetic one should be.” In today’s diplolingo, it means “a delicate distinction; a subtle shading or veiled variation that gives a hint of a shift in tone.”

President Bush has been castigated by reporters for not being
nuancal
enough. “In the diplomatic
nuance
of Mideast policy,” wrote Dana Mil-bank of the
Washington Post,
“Bush has really proved himself a geek.” (Merriam-Webster defines the origin of
geek
as “a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.” In current use, the slang term often refers to a computer whiz absorbed in technical arcana. It is unclear which meaning the reporter had in mind.)

Bush has shown himself to be aware of the meaning of the word
nuance
and applies it to diplomatic jargon. After this column reported
forward-leaning,
meaning “progressive” or “helpful,” to be in vogue at Foggy Bottom, Bush said of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I thought he was very
forward-leaning,
as they say in diplomatic
nuanced
circles.” And after saying in plain words, “The policy of my government is the removal of Saddam,” he added, “maybe I should be a little less direct and more
nuanced
and say we support
regime change
.”

Nudge That Noodge.
A political divide has opened into a cultural chasm between two old friends. “Al [Gore] and I have tremendous regard for this industry,” Senator Joseph Lieberman told entertainment moguls at a star-studded fund-raising event. “It’s true from time to time we will have been, will be, critics or
noodges
.” Having used the Yiddishism
noodge,
a noun meaning “pest, annoying nag, persistent complainer,” Lieberman went on to confuse the assembled glitterati by using the English verb
nudge
as if it were interchangeable with the Yiddish noun: “We will
nudge
you, but we will never become censors.”

To
nudge
is “to push mildly or poke gently in the ribs, especially with the elbow.” One who
nudges
in that manner—“to alert, remind, or mildly warn another”—is a far
geshrei
from a
noodge
with his incessant, bothersome whining.

Lieberman’s use of both the Yiddish noun and the English verb in the same paragraph, suggesting wrongly that they meant the same, resulted in the compounding of the error in a statement by his longtime across-the-lines soulmate, William J. Bennett.

“I did not realize that when Joe Lieberman and I,” stormed the author of
A Book of Virtues
and other best sellers,“were denouncing the filth, sewage and mindless bloodletting of the popular entertainment industry, calling it what it is—degrading and dehumanizing—we were just being
‘nudges.’
I am a virtual absolutist on the First Amendment, but Senator Lieberman and I were doing more than
‘nudging’
the entertainment industry; we were trying to shame them.”

Set aside the rights and wrongs, the hypocrisy or hyperbole, in this lusty exchange during the heat of a campaign. Consider only its demeaning of meaning.

From here in Semantic Damage Control Headquarters, cool heads are obliged to issue this advisory:
noodge
is primarily a Yiddish dialect noun that risks confusion with the English
nudge
when used as a verb. The meaning of
noodge
is not merely “a critic” but “a habitual, pesky critic.” The Yiddish noun
noodge
signifies a person, one who can sometimes prove useful but who is also not the sort you want around all the time. The English noun
nudge
is not a person but an action, often of the elbow to another’s ribs and frequently accompanied by a wink or a leer.

The Yiddish noun is only a noun; when the action of a verb is wanted, the phrase is to
give a noodge
. The English
nudge
is both a noun and a verb, first used in verb form by Thomas Hobbes in 1675 in his translation of the
Odyssey:
“I
nudg’d
Ulysses, who did next me lie.”

The pronunciation is different. Though some
noodges
will dispute this, in the Yiddishism the
oo
is pronounced as in
look
rather than the
oo
in
stooge
. Not in dispute is the English pronunciation of
nudge,
rhyming with
judge
and never even close to the Dickensian
Scrooge
.

You got that, Bennett?
Du herst,
Lieberman? Now shake hands and come out fighting.

The actual Yiddish for “bore, pest,” is, of course,
nudnik.
The verb is
nudyen,
and that, you’ll see right away, easily evolves to “noodgen,” hence, “noodge.”

Israel Wilenitz

East Setauket, New York

Nukes Again.
George W. Bush has a nuclear problem. Like Presidents Eisenhower, Carter and Clinton before him, he mispronounces the word
nuclear
. At the Naval War College earlier this month, he tripped over the word a dozen times with great authority, pronouncing it somewhere between Carter’s “nuke-ular” and Clinton’s “nu-ky-ler.”

The confusion is in the middle syllable of the three-syllable word. Instead of separating them as
nu, clee, er,
many who reach the Oval Office treat the first syllable as
nuke,
perhaps influenced by the bellicose verb in “We’ll
nuke
’em back to the Stone Age.”

A helpful speechwriter would write the word in the presidential reading copy as if there were only two syllables: “
new-clear
.” After all,
clear,
which some pronounce with two syllables, as
klee-uh,
often sounds close to a single-syllabled
cleer
.

This persnickety presidential pronunciation problem can be solved. Forget
nuke
. Think
nu
. Clear?

O

O Beautiful.
Returning in 1894 from an inspiring trip to Pikes Peak in Colorado, a minor New England poet named Katharine Lee Bates wrote a verse she titled “America.” It was printed the following year in a church publication in Boston to commemorate the Fourth of July.

Lynn Sherr, the ABC News correspondent, has written a timely and deliciously researched book about how that verse was written and edited and how it was fitted to a hymn called “Materna,” written about the same time by Samuel Augustus Ward, whom the poet never met. In
America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation’s Favorite Song,
Sherr reveals rewriting by Bates that shows the value of working over a lyric.

“O beautiful for
halcyon
skies,” the poem began.
Halcyon
is a beautiful word, based on the Greek name for the bird, probably a kingfisher, that ancient legend had nesting in the sea during the winter solstice and calming the waves. It means “calm, peaceful” and all those happy things, but the word is unfamiliar and does not evoke the West.
Spacious,
however, not only describes Big Sky country but also alliterates with
skies,
so Bates changed it.

The often-unsung third stanza contained a zinger at the acquisition of wealth: “America! America! / God shed his grace on thee / Till selfish gain no longer stain / The banner of the free!” Sherr writes that Bates, disillusioned with the Gilded Age’s excesses, “wanted to purify America’s great wealth, to channel what she had originally called ‘selfish gain’ into more noble causes.” The poet took another crack at the line that derogated the profit motive, and the stanza now goes: “America! America! / May God thy gold refine / Till all success be nobleness / And every gain divine!”

The line that needed editing the most was the flat and dispiriting conclusion: “God shed his grace on thee / Till nobler men keep once again / Thy whiter jubilee!” That cast an aspersion on the current generation, including whoever was singing the lyric. The wish for “nobler men” to come in the future ended the song, about to be set to Ward’s hymn, on a self-deprecating note.

In 1904, ten years after her first draft, Katharine Lee Bates revised the imperfect last lines of the final stanza. The new image called up at the end not only reminds the singers of the “spacious skies” that began the song but also elevates the final theme to one of unity and tolerance. Her improvement makes all the difference, especially in times like these:

Oh Oh.
A satirical form of intellectual sabotage took place at the
Boston Globe
twenty years ago. An editorial about President Carter’s economic plan was scheduled to be headlined “All Must Share the Burden.” This is one of the dullest, most hackneyed clichés in journalism, always followed by a mournful paean to responsibility.

Either a printer-prankster or an editorial writer who could not stand it any longer changed the headline at the last minute to “Mush From the Wimp.” This could have been a derogation of the president’s policy or of the chief editorial writer’s prose. The underground dissident was never caught, but editorialists ever since have been on the alert to this form of internal sabotage.

(I remember this vividly because it triggered a column about the origin of
wimp,
defined as “a person weepy as a drip and listless as a nebbish,” derived from
whimper
and influenced by the name
Wimpy,
for a sleepy-eyed lover of hamburgers in the comic strip featuring Popeye the sailor.
Wimp,
a derogation dreaded more by politicians than “ax murderer,” has since been edged out by
wuss,
a rhyming form of unprintable etymology. But I digress.)

Last month, in an editorial in the
Washington Post
supporting the Justice Department’s raid on a Miami home to seize Elian Gonzalez, the headline remained as intended: “The Elian Operation.” But the key line read: “Eight agents were in and out of the house in three minutes, carrying the boy in a blanket.
ohhoh
.”

When I asked Fred Hiatt, editor of the
Post
’s editorial page, about this strange insertion of
ohhoh
into the editorial, he muttered, “We think it was a mechanical error.”

I am prepared to accept this explanation from an embarrassed fellow opinionmonger, but am inclined to wonder: could
ohhoh
have been a prankster’s surreptitious editorial comment on editorial comment? If so, what does it mean?

The exclamation or interjection
oho
is defined in the
Oxford English Dictionary
as “an exclamation expressing surprise, taunting, exultation.” Its first recorded use was in 1369 as a shout to arouse a sleeper (some readers of editorials need this sort of antisoporific) in a passage by Chaucer: “This messenger … cried
O how,
a-wake anoon.” Shakespeare changed the spelling when he picked it up in his 1601
Twelfth Night,
with Malvolio telling himself, “
Oh ho,
do you come neere me now.”

Chaucer, in his 1386
Canterbury Tales,
also spelled the exclamation dif-ferently: “
A ha
the fox! and after him they ran.” This sense of the sound as “lo and behold” was taken up in the 1611 King James Bible thrice in Ezekiel, transliterated from the Hebrew
heach,
later translated by some as indicating “malicious joy.”

In current use,
oh-hoh
has been overtaken by
aha!
—its sense a “triumphantly derisive discovery of a minor subterfuge.” I asked the playwright Neil Simon about this a few years ago, and he came up with several meanings, from “a response when you know something but find it unnecessary to share” to “the first half of an uncompleted sneeze. “His most apt usage: “
Aha!
is said sarcastically to your daughter when she says she came home at 11 last night when you know it was 12:15.”

Now let’s take a different tack. What if the mechanical errorist at the
Washington Post
meant to represent typographically a sound of wry derision, as if to say, “Sure, that’s what you say”? That would be spelled
uh-huh
. (That meaning is also expressed in what Edward Bleier of Time Warner has termed the “double positive,” which turns the sense of the word around, as in “
yeah-yeah
.”)
Uh-huh
is also the sound of “I hear you, I understand” or the slightly more affirmative “Yeah, I guess so.” The earliest recorded uses of
uh-huh
were in the late 19th century by magazine fiction writers transcribing Negro dialect, more as exclamation than affirmation.

In contradistinction to that positive, if sometimes mocking,
uh-huh
is the clearly negative
uh-uh
. The first literary citation for this negation is in Dashiell Hammett’s 1930
Maltese Falcon:
“Do you know who he is?” asks Effie Perine, and Sam Spade replies, “
Uh-uh,
but I’d guess he was Captain Jacobi.”

Now for a final run at the possible meaning of the mysterious
ohhoh
in the
Post
editorial.

Dictionaries that have an entry for
oh
as “an expression of wonderment” fail to carry a definition of
oh-oh,
or the more staccato
uh-oh
. But almost every native speaker of American English knows
oh-oh
to mean “watch out” or “trouble ahead”; when our leading lexicographers read this, they will utter
uh-oh
and hasten to include the commonly exclaimed warning in their next revisions.

Could the phantom of the pressroom have meant “Watch out—the preceding opinion will draw a lot of mail”? Perhaps; we’ll never know unless somebody confesses. But a new generation of proofreaders is now alerted to avert mush from the wimp.

On the university campus where I found myself in the summer of 1946, one of the many clichés constantly bandied by veterans was
uh-oh.
It was always an underplayed warning that danger (at least of a sort) was immediately at hand. Thus an ex-B-17 pilot who two years earlier had looked out to see that a wing had fallen off would now utter
uh-oh
when a spigot attached to a beer keg produced a dry hiss instead of a rush of suds. Or an erstwhile infantryman who had recently seen enemy mortar fire walking its way in his direction, would now mouth
uh-oh
when a professor wrote an exam question on the board which bore no resemblance whatsoever to what had been in his lectures. By no means all veterans had faced such dangers, but all adopted
uh-oh
as a way of saying that they too had taken part in the great experience. Along with the Britishism, “I’ve had it” or “we’ve had it,”
uh-oh
was the big code word that summer and into the following fall.

Richard M. Wight

Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida

Of Wimps and Mush.
In an aside (watch out for those asides) in an article, I recalled a 1980 headline over an editorial in the
Boston Globe
that read “Mush From the Wimp,” which I presumed a prankster substituted for the cliché “All Must Share the Burden.” I am now informed by David Greenway, who retired last month as editor of the
Globe
’s editorial page, that it was not sabotage but a self-inflicted wound.

“It was the late Kirk Scharfenberg, editorial writer and later editor of the page,“writes Greenway,” who wrote ‘Mush From the Wimp’ over his editorial on President Carter’s economic plan. He wrote it as a joke, never thinking that the headline would ever see print.

“As you know, the copy editors write the headlines,” continues my colleague Greenway,“but in this case the copy editors let it through. The night editor caught it in midrun, and the headline was hastily changed to the clichéd ‘All Must Share the Burden’ as a last-minute sub for the rest of the run.”

Many years later, when Greenway became editor of the
Globe
’s editorial page, the paper criticized animal rights advocates who wanted to close down dogsled racing in Alaska. The headline chosen for its historic resonance:” More Wimps for the Mush.”

On the Hook.
In a parallel universe, I write a didactic political column. Recently, I sternly directed the president to get
on the hook
to Prime Minister Blair to coordinate positions on United Nations inspections of Iraq.

John Strother of Princeton, New Jersey, shot back, “Did you substitute
on the hook
for
on the horn
?” Kevin McNulty of Newark agrees: “A phone can be
on the hook,
but it must be
off the hook
to be used. Shouldn’t that be
on
the horn
?”