The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (43 page)

Yes, but why is a violet more modest than, say, one of Everett Dirksen’s favorite marigolds? A clue can be found in the poet John Byrne Leicester Warren’s 1893 poem about Circe, a beautiful witch: “Thou art the
shrinking violet,
half afraid”—and here comes the explanation—“That, in rathe April born, / Where icy winds complain, / Hardly unfolds her petals to the morn / Between the rainbow and the weep of rain.” Look up
rathe;
it’s not a misprint of
rather
but an archaic word meaning “exposed too early, as in a flower that blooms in still-frigid spring.”

That’s the source of the trope: the violet may appear to shrink from the cold because it often blossoms early. Is this just a conceit of poets and novelists? Let’s turn to a botanist. Dr. Wayt Thomas of the New York Botanical Garden gets to the root of the plant’s seeming shyness: “A possible answer is that violets often hold their blooms underneath, or partly underneath, the foliage, so that the otherwise showy flowers are hidden.”

However, President Bush should not use the metaphor too frequently. For freshness of imagery, I recommend “He’s no drooping cowslip!”

Props.
When at a loss for words (a good title for a collection of these columns), I walk around the Washington bureau of the
Times
as deadline time approaches, hands in my pockets, head down but with ears attuned, trolling for linguistic leads. Reporters, too busy at their terminals to converse at length with a passing language maven, toss the latest locutions in my direction, as one would throw scraps to a hungry hound.

“
Props
!” barked Kit Seelye, never looking up. I snatched at the possibilities of meanings for the plural noun: (1) A shortening of
propellers,
a means of propulsion in the pre-jet era; no, nothing new about that. (2) A shortening of
properties,
articles on a stage set, an item like Yorick’s skull in Hamlet’s hand; that has centuries of use in greenrooms. (3) Supports like tent poles, or aides that “prop up” a political candidate; that’s a current sense, but hardly on the qui vive or worthy of note. That leaves (4), (5) and (6): a shortening of
propaganda, propination
or
propaedeutics.

My next stop was the news desk, where young clerks and interns communicate with all the latest and most mysterious locutions. “If I were to use the word
props
in a sentence,” I said as if testing them, “what would you take it to mean?”

“Applause,” said one. “Kudos,” agreed another, apparently versed in classical Greek (which would have told him that
propaedeutic
means “about elementary instruction”). An editor, eyes fixed on his screen but always alert to his surroundings, gave a little grunt and then said, “Two hits in the last two months in the
Times
.” Without missing a beat, the helpful backfielder had searched the newspaper’s recent archives and in a flash found both citations. One of the clerks (never say “copy boy,” especially if she’s a young woman) reached into the mouth of a printer as it spat out two pages and handed me the research it would have taken Sir James Murray and his minions at the
Oxford English Dictionary
years to assemble a century ago.

“I’d like to give
props
to my dawg D.J. Jazzy Jeff,” the president of CBS Television, Leslie Moonves, told advertisers as reported by Jim Rutenberg of the
Times
last month, “for waking us all up this morning.” (When an interviewee pronounces the word
dog
as “dawg,” it is permissible in the more informal sections of the paper to render it as pronounced.)

This month, before her performance at a Battery Park festival helping to revitalize downtown New York, the singer Sheryl Crow offered her respects to the heroic Fire Department: “I want to give
props
to Ladder 9, Engine 33—my buds.”

From these examples it can be deduced that the verb currently most closely associated with the noun
props
is
give.
Now the etymologist rushes back to his library and plunges into other databases and slang booklets for early usages and semantic development.

In April 1992 (where have I been?) in a
Seattle Times
article on graffiti, latrinalia and hip-hop lingo, Marc Ramirez defined
to give props
as “to honor or owe respect to. Writers sometimes
give props
to other writers or crews in their pieces by including their tags or initials.” Three months later, the music industry phrase appeared in
Ebony
magazine: “
Give
him
props
.”

I have nondatabase resources. Definitions of two senses were provided in the fifth edition (1997) of “A Dictionary of Cal Poly Slang,” compiled by the students of intercultural communication at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, under the direction of Dr. Judi Sanders. One sense is “friends: I got
props
who can back me up if I need them.” The second, and ultimately dominant, sense is reported with the origin implicit: “Proper respect. The class gave me much
props
during the presentation.”

That’s it:
props,
coined on the West Coast in the music business, is a slang term for “proper respect” and is now sweeping the country, or at least my newsroom. (Consequently,
propination
means “a toast to someone’s health.”)

With a somewhat less hangdawg expression, I cruised the bureau again, giving
props
to the with-it clerks, until I heard shoes.

Jack Cushman, the weekend editor, mentioned that he heard someone say, “My wife has
shoes
with that.” That didn’t impress me (my wife has shoes with that outfit, too), but the editor repeated the word in a broader-context phrase: “Very worrisome
shoes
.”

Short for
issues
! Another significant lexical find. We have seen how the scholarly-sounding word
issues
has for a decade swept aside the prosaic
problems
and obliterated the euphemism
challenges
. Even the feminist slogan “You got a problem with that?” has been emended to “You got an
issue
with that?”

To retain its freshness or insidership, a voguism frequently has to mutate, usually by clipping the first syllable. (Your children refer to you as
rents,
not
parents
.) Thus do we now have the second syllable of
issues
acting for the entire word. How to express it in print? This does not work:
’sues
. Nor does this:
’ssues
. The printed word must reflect the pronunciation, which could be
shooz
or
shoes
.

In my judgment, the clipped form of
issues
is best expressed in print with an apostrophe to indicate the lost syllable, followed by the group of letters that most familiarly evokes the sound. Thus, if you wish to pay proper respect to issues of great moment while appearing to be in that moment, you can say, “I give
props
to
’shoes
.”

Props
(Cont’d)
. More than one hundred e-mailers responded to my column about
props,
a slang term with its origin in “proper respect.”

“I thought you were going to mention Aretha Franklin’s usage of the word on her 1967 hit single ‘Respect,’” observes Dan Williamson of the Department of Philosophy at San Jose State University. “I think she sings, ‘Give me my
propers
when I get home.’ Despite the somewhat down-and-funky implications, I could swear that’s really what yo’ music-biz pals are really thinking.”

Bernard Schneider of Falmouth Foreside, Maine, recalled that “during a recently aired Ed Bradley interview of the artist on
60 Minutes,
he inferred that her artistic plea for
propers
was for adoration and attention of a sexual nature.”

That torrent of informed correction drove me to J. Redding Ware’s 1909
Passing English of the Victorian Era,
which touches lightly on the term as “erotic.”

Reached during a tour that took her through Washington, Franklin is having none of that. Her use of
propers
(which many heard as
profits
) in the lyric was her own, not in the words originally written and performed by Otis Redding in 1965.

“I do say
propers,
” says the queen of soul. “I got it from the Detroit street. It was common street slang in the 1960s. The person’s saying it has a sexual connotation couldn’t be further from the truth. ‘My
propers
’ means ‘mutual respect’—what you know is right.”

Proteomics.
Remember the word urgently whispered into Dustin Hoffman’s ear in the 1967 movie
The Graduate
—the secret that would lead him on to great fortune? Of course you do: “
plastics!
”

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year’s word—the linguistic key to the future—was whispered into my ear by a great brain scientist: “
proteomics!
”

As in
genomics,
the study of the genetic material in the chromosomes unique to a specific organism, the accent is on the
om
. Pronounced “protee OM-iks,” the hot new word in the cutting-edge community means “the study of the way proteins expressed by genes interact inside cells, especially to determine differences in protein action between diseased cells and healthy ones.”

We need to know this, not so much to understand the sequencing of the human genome as to be able to drop the word into cocktail-party conversation.

(Nobody goes to
cocktail parties
anymore, because ever-fewer people are being served individually mixed cocktails, since it is easier for waiters to pass out glasses of wine; instead, we go to
receptions,
a word that conceals today’s standardized boozing. However,
cocktail
remains an adjective describing a perfect little black dress and
cocktail-party
lives on as a compound adjective modifying
conversation,
the phrase meaning “idle chat-ter.” I have digressed.)

The term
proteome
(“proteins that are encoded and expressed by a genome”) was coined in 1994 by Marc Wilkins, then a graduate student at Macquarrie University in Sydney, Australia. On the analogy of
genome/genomics
came the formulation
proteome/proteomics
. Reached in Sydney, Wilkins—now with Proteome Systems there—defines
proteomics
as “the study of proteins, how they’re modified, when and where they’re expressed, how they’re involved in metabolic pathways and how they interact with one another.”

Frankly, if I were a biotech genius faced with the challenge of coining a word for “the study of proteins expressed by genes,” I would have come up with the easier-to-say
proteinomics
. That has the smooth consonant
n
between the vowels
e
and
o,
as in
economics
. The
-omics
suffix is most comfortable following an
n:
you often heard
Nixonomics, Reaganomics
and
Clintonomics
but not
Fordomics, Carteromics
or
Bushomics
.

The
New York Times
reporter Nicholas Wade, soon after the widely hailed publication of evolution’s set of instructions, wrote in June 2000, “Understanding the role of every human protein—
proteomics
—will be one of the goals of the post-genome era.” (Are we post-genomic already? Genome, we hardly knew ye.) A
Times
business reporter, Sana Siwolop, followed up with an article about “an early leader in the field of
proteomics,
which many scientists generally regard as the next step after genomics research.
Proteomics
involves the large-scale study of the proteins that are made by genes.”

As I whispered the magical word denoting the lucrative field into every available ear in Davos, one listener nodded and whispered back, “
optical
semiconductor!
” His badge identified him as Michael Dell, the computer man. It seems that a regular
semiconductor,
like the chip in today’s computers, is based on electricity, but an
optical semiconductor
is based on light, of which nothing is faster. This fellow Dell thinks the phrase
optical
semiconductor
will be on everyone’s lips in a few years, and I pass it along here in case people betting on
proteomics
lose their shirts.