The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (45 page)

intuition
(n.), “knowledge that your salary won’t cover the cost of your children’s education” (Gail Elsant).

commute
(v.), “travel to and from work without speaking” (Mark Map-pen), topped by a second try,
trampoline
(n.), “legal claim made on the property of a homeless person.”

approbation
(n.), “fear of early release from prison” (Fred Bothwell) and “punishment that fits the crime” (Alice McElhone).

coordinates
(n.), “a couple of preachers” (Geraldine Nelson).

grammarian
(n.), “well-spoken grandmother” (from someone whose e-mail name is Cdella3; I respect any Cinderella’s desire for anonymity).

defibrillator
(n.), “lie detector” (Miriam Forman).

ineffable
(adj.), “a guaranteed Grade-A term paper” (Matthew Batters, who submits a noun,
vilification,
“the inexorable spread of Greenwich Village”).

warship
(n.), “adoration of the navy” (Sheila Blume, whose second entry,
suffragettes
[n.], “cheerleading squad for de Sade High,” is rejected with all suitable horror).

liturgy
(n.), “throwing the sermon on the sidewalk” (Emily Barsh).

judicious
(adj.), “Passover recipes” (Frank Corwin).

bashful
(adj.), “being harsh or abusive toward someone” (K. Gray).

alphabet
(n.), “the most aggressive wager on the table” (Andy Goodman).

miniscule
(adj.), “the odds of
minuscule
being spelled correctly” (John Foshee).

chestnut
(n.), “a male too interested in the female figure” (Claire Ball).

Finally a couple of redefinitions from Michael Edelman somewhere in e-mailville
: rebuffs
(n.), “polished athletic shoes,” and
kindred
(adj., changed to n.), “fear of family reunions.”

Keep ’em coming; it lightens up coverage of war words.

Redefinitions III.
In honor of Super Bowl XXXVI, here are some sports redefinitions.

superficial
(n.), “a really good referee” (Mel Siedband).

beleaguered
(adj.), “stuck in the semipros” (Eric Mencher).

contrapuntal
(adj.), “foolishly advocating passing instead of kicking on fourth down” (Alfred Greenberg).

hermit
(n.), “girl’s baseball glove” (Judith Werben).

saturnine
(n.), “baseball team that plays on weekends” (Ed Grimm).

truncate
(n.), “tailgate party given by compact-car owner” (anonymous).

wrinkle
(n.), “a small hockey arena” (Robert Forbes).

haiku
(n.), “signal to center from Japanese quarterback” (Tony Wight).

Enjoy the game. Hope a
nail-biter
is in the works.
Haiku!

Redefinitions IV.
There’s no stopping wordplay. Coiners of these redefinitions get nothing but eternal life in the data bank.

altruism
(n.), “the tendency to believe everything you hear” (Gary Parnell).

condescending
(n.), “a prisoner going down a flight of stairs,” and
liability
(n.), “the capacity for prevarication” (Ed Grimm).

madras
(n.), “an Indian sleeping mat” (Robert Forbes).

equinox
(n.), “a cross between a mare and a bull,” and
apology
(n.), “the study of primates” (Robert and Mary Rubalsky).

cantaloupe
(n.), “parental nonconsent” (Joan Jaquish).

destabilize
(v.), “let the horses out of the barn” (anonymous).

precursor
(n.), “a profane tot” (Leon Freilich).

Regime Changes.
Secretary of State Colin Powell laid it on the rhetorical line: the Bush administration “is committed to
regime change
” in Iraq. He repeated to the Senate that “a
regime change
would be in the best interests of the region.” That’s a euphemism for “overthrow of government” or “toppling Saddam.”

Why, then, did he not say “we intend to throw him and his motley crew of mass murderers out of Baghdad, replacing them with a government that will allow the Iraqi people free elections”? Because that sort of talk is undiplomatic or even impolitic.
Overthrow
and
topple
are hot, vigorous verbs;
regime change
is a cool, polite noun phrase suggesting transition without collateral damage.

A
regime
is a government you don’t like. (It can also be a strict diet of grapefruit and pasta, which you don’t like either, but that’s a different sense.) The
old regime
is always pejorative, coming from the French revolutionaries’ gleeful derogation of the government of the last Bourbon kings as
l’ancien régime
. The word’s coloration is negative; no politician seeking a “fresh start” or a “clean sweep” goes on to call for a
new regime
.

“If the case for
regime change
is clear,” writes Michael Eisenstadt in the
National Interest,
“the way forward is not. The debate in Washington about
regime change
in Iraq has become highly partisan.” (The title of his article is “Curtains for the Baath,” a play on the name of Saddam’s Baath political party; this suggests further headlines like “Going to the Mat with Baath,” “Baath Throws in Towel,” etc.)

Where did this euphemism begin? The earliest citation I can find in the Nexis data bank is in a 1980 Associated Press story predicting “risk to business from
regime change
.” After kicking around in foreign-policy journals for a decade, it was picked up by
Daily Variety
in Hollywood, as it followed “the
regime change
at MCA Music.” Diplolingo is now wresting the phrase back from the general usage.

Another military euphemism,
collateral damage,
was used above. This was not a subliminal plug for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest movie epic of vigilante revenge. It was an introduction to a phrase used in restrained apology for casualties among civilians or to destruction of other than military targets. It was also used by the mass murderer Timothy McVeigh—“there’s always
collateral damage”
—in dismissing contrition for the children his truck bomb killed in Oklahoma City.

The adjective
collateral,
“parallel,” came to mean “ancillary, subordinate”; as a noun, it is a pledge of security alongside a debt to ensure payment. The essential meaning is now “on the side of.” Where the adjective is used to modify
damage,
the meaning becomes “unintended, inadvertent.” It is in the same league of hesitant regret as
friendly fire
.

The phrasedick Fred Shapiro at Yale tracked it back in its current sense to a 1961 usage by Thomas Schelling in
Operations Research
magazine: “Measures to locate and design our strategic forces so as to minimize
collateral damage
.” Reached at the University of Maryland, where he is now a distinguished professor, Schelling says, “I used it because it seemed to be the common terminology.” He disclaims coinage of that and of
counter-force
and
second strike,
also often attributed to him; such modesty is rare. (When I coin something, I make sure all the nattering nabobs of negativism know it.)

In running the traps with Shapiro’s help at the American Dialect Society, I get word from John Baker that
collateral damage
was used in a British court in 1820. It had been cooking along quietly in legal usage until the 1990s, when it exploded into military parlance.

Retraction.
In Gore’s historic Second Telephone Call, Bush (snippily or not) asked if he intended to
retract
his concession. This was often reported as “called to
rescind
his concession.” Any difference?

Retract,
from the Latin
trahere,
“to draw,” means “to take back; to with-draw.” It is most often used now in connection with correcting misstatements and avoiding libel suits.

Rescind
’s root is
scindere,
“to split, divide,” and means “to revoke, annul, cancel, expunge, abrogate.” It has more of a legal connotation than
retract
.

Because a political concession is a gracious accommodation rather than a legal surrender of rights, the use of
retract
in this case was correct.

Riff and Raffish.
“POTUS Speaks” is the title of one of the early freshets in what will become a torrent of inside-the-Clinton-White-House memoirs. The acronym
Potus
(in newspaper style, capitalized and lowercase because it is longer than four letters) stands for the office to be occupied by the man we elected a couple of weeks ago.

I was present, if not at the birth of the acronym, then at least when the spoken word was in its infancy. As a new White House speechwriter in 1969, I noticed the letters on one of the labels next to the five buttons on a telephone extension in the Cabinet Room and wondered aloud, “Who’s this guy Potus?” A member of the White House Communications Agency (we pronounced WHCA “Whacka”) explained that since the Johnson administration, the phone line from the Oval Office was marked with the initials for “President of the United States.”

It stood to reason: A stark
Nixon
might have seemed presumptuous, and there wasn’t enough space on the label for
President
. An abbreviation like
Pres.
or
Prsd’t
would have looked funny;
Prez
was too jazzy and
Prexy
overly informal. Hence
Potus,
sported proudly on the telephone of all close-in White House aides. I left in 1973 and turned out a novel a few years later about a blinded chief executive; a problem was, what should the bachelor president’s love interest call him? A first name would seem presumptuous and “Mr. President” unromantic. Solution:
Potus,
which was suitably irreverent without being awkwardly familiar.

Time and technology march on. In real life a generation later, Monica Lewinsky told a grand jury that when the president called her from the Oval Office, the word
Potus
would appear on her caller ID. Similar acronyms have sprung up:
Scotus
is journalese for “Supreme Court of the U.S.,” and more recently, the first lady became known to staffers as
Flotus
.

Now to a word used in the memoir by Michael Waldman,
Potus
Clinton’s chief speechwriter. He describes the moment in his chief ’s first speech to Congress in 1993 when Clinton departed from the somewhat disorganized text. “He began to
riff,
” writes Waldman, “to ad-lib, to revise entire paragraphs. … [economic adviser Gene] Sperling and I were scanning our single-spaced copies of the speech. ‘He’s ad-libbing! He’s ad-libbing the State of the Union!’we shouted, and gave each other a high-five.”

Whence
riff
?
Rife
means “abundant,” probably associated with
riff
’s sense of “the belly”; much fashion attention is now focused on exposing the belly button, or navel, in the
midriff
.

But for our immediate purposes,
riff
originated as a jazz term, one meaning of which is an ostinato phrase, a musical figure, often syncopated, used throughout a composition at the same pitch. First cited in 1935,
riff
is a solo improvisation that, when often repeated, becomes identified with the player who can “leave that bit in” until it becomes part of a routine.

The meaning of the musical term was then extended to any rhetorical improvisation or flight of oratory, as in a
New Yorker
use in 1970 of “some lovely comic
riffs
.”

Now comes the confusion. “Putin Offers Help to Belgrade on Election
Riff
” was a headline in the
New York Times
. A simple typographical error, no? The intended word was surely
rift,
meaning “a split, division, fissure.” But a quick database search reveals dozens of uses of
riff
(perhaps influenced by
tiff,
“minor argument”) to mean
rift
.