The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (42 page)

The tuned-in reader will have observed the use of
diva
applied to female stars. (
Star
went out with
dietitian
.) This is rooted in the Latin
diva,
“goddess,” and until recently has been primarily applied to female opera singers, usually temperamental
prima donnas
. With
star
and even
superstar
passé, and
goddess
limited to “sex goddess,” the old
diva
once again took center stage.

Old-time rock is also enjoying a revival, especially as sung by U2. Most of the veteran group’s new fans think the name a play on “You, too?” rather than on a high-altitude American spy plane that could read the license plates on cars entering the Kremlin (and that, like rock music, is still oper-ational; words and parachute by Francis Gary Powers). Numerals are a vital part of many names of musical groups. Besides
U2
and
2 Live Crew,
we have
Sum 41, blink-182, 3 Doors Down
and
9 Inch Nails
.

A bluegrass winner is “O Death,” by Ralph Stanley, which offers a chilling evocation by a man begging to be spared a little more time. Such serious bluegrass songs, some evoking and providing comfort for the 9/11 mood, contrast mightily with such derogatory ditties we used to strum: “I’d Rather Pass Another Kidney Stone Than Another Night With You” and a feminist favorite, “Shut Up and Talk to Me.”

Dig it or deplore it, the music industry is a fecund source of lexical terms—if you can make out the words.

I was delighted to see attention given to the song “Frim Fram Sauce.” However, I was disappointed that you neglected to mention the author of that song, Joseph Ricardel
.

Vincent Ricardel

New York, New York

Shafafa
is an Arabic word which means lace, what belly dancers wear, and refers to partial nudity.

Heskel M. Haddad, MD

New York, New York

Blessings on thee, verbal man, for spelling out that wonderfully incomprehensible word “ussin-fay.” After years of poring through old Nat King Cole sheet music, we had given up ever seeing it in print. For a time, we thought it might be the name of some nightmarish recipe called “the Awesome Fate,” but Diana Krall’s recent rendition of the song proved that false
.

We do feel, however, that you may be trying too hard to link each silly name to an actual food item. We like to think the song depicts a woman of moderate means (who has grown up on “fish cakes and rye bread”) sitting in a fancy restaurant, trying to order exotic dishes and fumbling over the names. In that case, “frim fram” loosely translates into, “y’know, that wonderful sauce I had one time that went with the whatchamacallit fish.” And the same could be said for “shafafa” (although that could possibly be a gross mispronunciation of “chiffon”). The use of the Pig Latin “ussin-fay” for “fussin” fits right in with this interpretation
.

Diana Krall says it’s all about sex, and that’s certainly the way she sings it. But Carmen McRae, in her 1983 rendition, says it’s all about attitude and a heaping plateful
.

Floyd Gumble and Carol Adamson

Carmel, New York

I love that Frim Fram sauce! I think I have solved the mystery of “shafafa on the side.” I think shafafa is from Arabic, i.e., a Semitic triconsonantal root (there’s an Israeli place name “Beit Shafafa”), naturalized into some African language (the way Swahili does a lot of). The root “sh-f-f” yields meanings of either “lips”—your lips on the side—or “diaphanous garments, filmy clothes”—Give me that teasing deception, courting [“fussin roun” as in Thurber], and your lips [or sexy clothes] on the side
.

Leslie S. B. MacCoull

Society for Coptic Archaeology

Tempe, Arizona

Pound Sand.
When Tony Blair called George W. Bush on the day after September 11 to pledge his support, the British prime minister said he assumed the United States was considering an immediate response. According to a report in the
Sunday Age
of Melbourne, Australia, giving an anonymous Blair adviser as a source, Bush replied, “We’re thinking about that,” but he did not want to “
pound sand
with millions of dollars in weapons” to make himself feel good.

Historians a decade hence will probably be able to determine if President Bush actually used that expression in a call that was surely recorded by both men. But two insider accounts of the week following the attacks on the U.S. show that it was in active use in the White House. According to Bob Woodward and Dan Balz of the
Washington Post,
Andrew Card, the chief of staff, asked rhetorically in a Camp David meeting on September 15, “What is the definition of success?” The reporters then paraphrased Card’s answer: “He said it would first be proving that this was not just an effort to
pound sand
—as the president had repeatedly made clear.” In
Time
magazine’s version of the same meeting, “A quick cruise-missile response was ruled out as ineffective. White House chief of staff Andy Card called this the
‘pound sand’
alternative.”

From this we can deduce that the president in all likelihood did use the phrase that tense week, perhaps repeatedly. What did he mean by it?

Following the clue of context, the Bush administration usage of
pound sand
means “waste time, act ineffectively,” influenced by the expression used pejoratively by bomber pilots about meaningless missions, “making the rubble bounce.”

That is a variant of the phrase’s original meaning. “I find it interesting,” e-mails Wayne Butler from Marblehead, Massachusetts, “that writers in family newspapers would use such phrases as ‘turn in the barrel’ and
‘pound sand’
when the origin and/or complete phrase is so well known.” (That was after I had written that it was somebody’s “turn in the barrel,” forgetting that the phrase originated in the punch line of a dirty joke. I apologize for blanking out on that; the phrase seems to have crossed into general usage from its sexual origin, similar to today’s innocent use of
wuss
for “one who is unmanly” or
schmuck
for “jerk.”)

In the same way,
pound sand
has escaped its earlier scatological association. Along with
go pound salt,
the imperative now has the dismissive sense of “buzz off; go jump in the lake”; it has lost its taboo connotation of “do something humiliating to oneself.”

As used earlier by politicians, the phrase is not taboo. When Clark Clifford in the last days of the 1948 election campaign told his boss, President Harry Truman, that a
Newsweek
poll of fifty reporters gave him no chance of beating Tom Dewey, the man from Independence replied: “I know every one of these fifty fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to
pound sand
in a rat hole.” This salty derogation of the media was recalled by the first President Bush toward the end of his calamitous campaign in 1992; when he saw a sign that read “Annoy the media, elect Bush!” he laughed and said, “I feel like Harry Truman when he talked about fifty reporters, and he said not one of them knows enough to
pound sand
in a rat hole.” (The elder Bush’s assessment of media wisdom was not as accurate as Truman’s.)

Truman did not coin the phrase. In volume 4 of the great
Dictionary of American Regional English
(
DARE
), the origin is tracked to someone’s refusal to give a recommendation. A
Dialect Notes
issue of 1912 records “He wouldn’t know enough to
pound sand
in a rat hole; so don’t get him.” The same source provides a variant recorded in 1923: “Don’t know enough to
pound akerns
in a woodpecker hole.”

This takes us into the world of metaphoric ignorance.
DARE
asked Americans across the nation how they would end the sentence “He hasn’t sense enough to …” Among the most colorful answers were “to pour water [or sand] out of a boot with directions on the heel and the toes cut”; “to lap salt and drool”; “to pack guts to a hog”; “to tie his own shoelaces”; and “to find his rear end with both hands and a road map.” By far the most frequent was “to come in out of the rain,” with “to
pound sand
down a rat hole” finishing a strong second.

That’s been the primary sense for years. However, the sense that is now becoming predominant, replacing stupefying stupidity, is “wasting time by doing something pointless.” A 1975 usage found by
DARE
is “The lumber didn’t come, so the carpenters
pounded sand
all afternoon.”

That was the meaning of the phrase used by the president to the prime minister, and by the White House chief of staff to the crisis group assembled at Camp David—if all the backgrounders are true and the reporters are not
pounding sand
.

Predator’s Adjective.
In finding that Microsoft violated antitrust laws, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson cited the 1890 Sherman Act, which requires the plaintiff to prove “that the defendant has engaged in
predatory
or anticompetitive conduct.”

He ruled, “Viewing Microsoft’s conduct as a whole also reinforces the conviction that it was
predacious
.” The
New York Times
headline writer preferred the more familiar adjective in the act, and went with “
predatory
be-havior.”

Which is it? The Latin root is
praedari,
“to prey upon.” Since 1589,
predatory
behavior has been characterized by pillaging, plundering and robbery. Edward Gibbon, in his 1781
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
wrote of a general who “recalled to their standard his
predatory
detach-ments.”

Predacious,
more often spelled
predaceous,
came along in 1713 to be applied to animals. Samuel Johnson’s friend and acolyte Mrs. Piozzi wrote in 1789 of “one
predaceous
creature caught in the very act of gorging his prey.”

Today,
predacious
is almost always applied to the savagery of animals;
predatory,
which appears in databases one hundred times more often, describes the plundering or rapacious action of humans, extended to the monopolistic action of corporations.

Ironically, Microsoft’s
Encarta
dictionary loosely defines both adjectives first as pertaining to animals; not so in the
Oxford English Dictionary
or
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate,
and their sequence of definitions is clearly backed up by my usage count.

Therefore, I say the judge erred in choosing
predacious;
Bill Gates’s practices may be monopolistic, but to judge them to be savagely animalistic goes overboard.

Preshrunk Flower.
In introducing Don Rumsfeld as his choice for secretary of defense, President Bush the Younger emphasized the designee’s policy strength and ability to hold his own in council: “You bet General Powell’s a strong figure and Dick Cheney’s
no shrinking violet
. But neither is Don Rumsfeld.” The phrase runs in the family; shortly after his election, President Bush the Elder said of the then newly chosen House Republican whip, Newt Gingrich: “I don’t think he needs any lectures from me. He’s not going to suddenly become a
shrinking violet,
but we don’t want that.”

Asked about the man selected to be Bush’s secretary of veterans affairs (the government mistakenly puts no apostrophe after veterans), the retired commandant of the Marine Corps, Charles Krulak, said of Anthony Principi: “Tony is no
shrinking violet
. He’ll tell it like it is and do what’s right.”

Why has this metaphor, used only in negation, become so vital to the vocabulary of the new administration? More to the linguistic point, when did violets gain their reputation for congenital shrinkage, and why?

The earliest use that my researcher, Elizabeth Phillips, can find is the 1827 play
Sylvia,
by George Darley. In it, the fairy queen Morgana says to the spirit Floretta: “I’ve seen thee stand / Drowning amid the fields to save a daisy, / And with warm kisses keep its sweet life in. / The
shrinking violet
thou dost cheer; and raise / The cowslip’s drooping head.”

The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his 1860
The Marble Faun,
used the flower in a simile stressing shyness: “An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets.”