The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (47 page)

Run the Table.
“It may be tougher for Mark Green to
run the table
than a lot of people realize,” wrote Bob Herbert of the
Times,
drafting an op-ed column about the Democratic nominee in 2001 for the New York mayoral election.

“I don’t think any of us went in thinking we were going to
run the table,
” said Michael Strahan, the New York Giants defensive end, referring to a string of pro football victories last year that led some fans to believe the team could finish the season as Super Bowl champions.

On election night in last year’s presidential race (was it only last year?), the phrase’s attraction won over, in rapid succession, Dan Rather of CBS (“Gore … virtually has to
run the table
of states that are still undecided”), Jeff Greenfield of CNN (“George Bush now has to
run the table
”) and Tim Russert of NBC (“If Gore wins Florida, Bush has to
run the table
and win Iowa, Nevada, Oregon, Wisconsin …”).

Where is this metaphoric table, and who runs it? Does it have, as some readers suggest, a poker origin? Because I was accused in my youth of having a “pool-hall pallor,” my hunch was that the origin was the table covered by green felt. I aimed an etymological cushion shot at Tom Shaw, managing editor of
Pool and Billiard Magazine
and co-author of
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pool and Billiards
. (The book does not profess to be a comprehensive guide; the adjective
complete
modifies
idiot,
the reader, not the
guide
.)

“To
run the table,
” defines Shaw, “is to clear the table of all the balls and thereby to win the game. The phrase began to be used about forty years ago, but the usage picked up in the last decade or so.”

To run the lexicon of this sport’s table:
billiards
comes from the French
bille,
“stick,” which is called a
cue,
from the French
queue,
“tail.” The long stick, which reminded some early users of a tail, can be used to make a ball hit another ball in a form of the game known as
carom billiards,
played with only three balls by real hustlers on a table with no pockets. A more popular variation is known as
pool,
using fifteen object balls to be knocked into the table’s pockets.
Pool
is from the French
poule,
“hen,” in which the winner takes the bets of all the players, thereby scooping up “the pool.” This sense is the same used in the winner-take-all-stakes betting called “the office
pool,
” also used as a modifier in journalism’s “
pool
reporters.” The meaning is “combined resources,” though the connection with chickens is obscure.

A famous variation of pocket billiards, or pool, is
snooker,
played with twenty-one smaller balls, mostly red. In the 19th century, a
snooker
was a newly joined and easily fooled British cadet; the name was applied to this form of pool in 1875 by subalterns in India. It is now a verb meaning “hoodwink, dupe,” as if at a pool table by a table-running hustler.

In “Run the Table” you said, “The phrase began to be used about 40 years ago …”

I recall at the University of Virginia in 1950 seeing an exhibition of pocket billiards by Willie Mosconi. He did “run the table” consistently. He won the U.S. pocket billiard championship nineteen times between 1941 and 1956, “running the table all the while.” His highest run (in an exhibition) was 526 balls
.

We did use the phrase at that time. For instance, we had one fraternity brother about whom we joked that at any Sunday buffet, he would “run the table”—that is, of course, to eat everything in sight
.

Although the U.S. men’s pocket billiards championship began in 1878, the present competitive form of the sport known as “straight pool” did not become the official game until 1912. However, I’m sure that the winners from that date on won by “running the table.”

Charles A. Carroll

New York, New York

Your lexicon of billiards is inadequate, to put it mildly. “Carom” in English is “cannon.” British billiards is played with three balls on a table without pockets. One scores by potting a ball, going off, or by a cannon—hitting both the other two balls with your ball. In France, billiards is played on a table without pockets and one scores only by various types of cannon
.

The verb “snooker” has a specific meaning. At times in the game one has to hit a particular colour. If one is prevented because other balls are in the way, one is “snookered.” The equivalent in old-fashioned match-play golf was “stymied.” Both words can be used figuratively. One can deliberately “lay a snooker” for an opponent. A player extracts himself from a snooker by coming off the cushions or swerving the ball (difficult)
.

Ken Mackenzie

Levallois-Perret, France

First, cloth that covers billiard tables does not contain any felt. The cloth uses a combination of wool and nylon or in some cases 100% wool
.

The next, I wonder if your use of the word
hustler
in describing carom billiards players is appropriate, indeed what you intended to imply. A hustler is a person who tries to induce another player to gamble over the outcome of a billiard game by not revealing his or her true skills. It is a derogatory term; and indeed, one billiard writer described it as being little more than petty thieves. Carom billiards is the most complex, fascinating and difficult of all the cue sports; and those few who still play this beautiful game are far removed from the world of the hustler
.

Finally, in regards to the term
snookered,
in the billiard world this term is used to describe a situation when a shooter finds the cue ball in a position from which he cannot make a direct hit on the intended object ball; he is
snookered,
not deceived, just blocked from a direct route to make a legal shot
.

Richard L. Hehir, MD

Syracuse, New York

Ruok? I’m Gr8!
Between the superstar Britney Spears and the 13-year-old singer Brittney Cleary, nobody will ever spell France’s northwestern region of Brittany correctly again. But Miss Cleary, of Nashville, in her song “I.M. Me,” has engaged in text messaging, a combination of initialese and the euphonic use of the alphabet that deserves scholarly attention.

WAN2TLK? In e-mailese, BRB stands for “be right back,” IMHO means “in my humble opinion” and LOL signifies “laughing out loud.” That’s merely initialese. But it gets livelier: “anyone” is shortened to NE1, XLNT flashes “excellent,” “thanks” is snipped to TX and “be seeing you” to BCNU. G2G means “got to go.” WERV U BIN? RUOK? (To my knowledge, texmess lacks a message for “I can’t go on with this because I have to do my homework.”)

The cartoonist William Steig pioneered this technique in books beginning in the ’60s. His angry man shouts at a woman, “URODS!” She yells back, “URSN9!” My favorite is his little green men from Mars labeled NMELEN.

It also comes from license-plate tomfoolery. A man in white shorts asks 10S NE1? A polite driver’s plate shows XQZ ME. An optimist: IM42N8. A Wonderland rabbit: ML8 ML8.

E-mailese may be old wine in new bottles, but it’s not a fad because it won’t go away. Give it a HAND, initialese for “have a nice day.”

How R U? It’s good 2 B back home after the dogs and I spent last year out West. Every day I look out the window and C the birds. The trees and flowers, 2. G but there R lots of trees and flowers. I called my new friend J in Las Vegas last week. Xcuse me, but I have 2 go 2 the bathroom and P. That’s because I just drank a cup of T. Last night I got hungry so I 8 a sandwich. Y don’t you write me a note if you get a chance?

If this is the direction e-mail is taking the language, then I want no part of e-mail
.

Robin Holske

Boscawen, New Hampshire

You describe a variety of “so-called text messaging” and you state that the earliest example of that art dates from the 1960s
.

I recall an example that antedates your example by a wide margin; that is, if priority is important
.

This bit appeared in the Sunday comics of the
Detroit Times
when I was ten or twelve years old:

Barney Google, a long-ago comic strip character, is seated at a table in a restaurant and he asks the waiter, “FUNEX”? The waiter replies, “SVFX.” Barney then asks, “FUNEM?” The reply is “SVFM.” Barney then says “OKMNX.”

For some time thereafter OKMNX became a reply among my schoolmates.

Benjamin Pecherer

Lafayette, California

S

Save the Prunes.
Has
prune
become a dirty word? The California Dried Plum Board, formerly the California Prune Board, is in the midst of a campaign to change the age-old name of its product.

“Unfortunately, the stereotype among the women that we’re targeting,” says Richard Peterson, executive director of the former prune association, “is of a medicinal food for their parents, rather than a healthful, nutritious food for women who are leading an active lifestyle.” (He means “an active life.” And “medicinal food” avoids the word
laxative
.)

Urged on by Sunsweet, which has been stewing about the way the word’s connotation has been harming its black-wrinkled-fruit market, the United States government is going along with the language manipulators. The Food and Drug Administration noted that the anti-prune-name lobby promised to “coordinate a unified transition of product names, beginning with dual labeling that would include both names (prunes and dried plums) on labels to educate consumers who do not know that prunes are a type of dried plum.”

To protect those consumers ignorant of prune-plum nomenclature, Christine Lewis, the labeling official in the FDA’s Center for Food Safety, wrote last year that she would hold the then Prune Board to its pledge to “track consumer awareness of the fact that dried plums are, in fact, prunes.”

After the consumer has been force-fed the change for two years, the word
prunes
—even the poetic alliteration
pitted
prunes—will disappear forever.

But our fact-driven labeling czar is no pushover: “We do not concur,” she wrote, “with the alternate name ‘
dried plums
’ used on other foods such as prune juice, canned prunes and prune butters.” Perhaps that is because the term
dried plum juice
is a contradiction in terms too grotesque for even the federal government.

In last year’s supplemented application to the FDA, the then Prune Board noted precedents in the changing names of foods: the
kiwi fruit,
for example, never got off the ground when known as “the Chinese goose-berry”;
hazelnuts
used to be called “filberts.” The
garbanzo bean,
with its romantic Spanish heritage, is shoving aside the familiar term “chickpea,” while the
wiener
or
frankfurter
is better known and hawked in the United States as the “hot dog.” But those were rooted in regional or dialectical differences, not deliberate attempts to impose linguistic change.

“Prunes by any other name would taste the same,” wrote the AP farm reporter Philip Brasher, alluding to the Shakespearean Juliet’s rose, “but they might sell better.” The then Prune Board might make its case about the name’s negative connotation by citing a line in
Henry IV, Part 2:
“He lives upon mouldy stewed prunes.”

On the other hand, in direct rebuttal to the mouldy market research about the antipathies of young women to plums in their dried state, Pom-pey in
Measure for Measure
says: “Sir, she came in, great with child, and longing … for stewed prunes. Mistress Elbow … being great-bellied, and longing, as I said, for prunes….” This proves that pregnant women—making up a market not to go untargeted—have been drawn to prunes for at least four centuries.

That is not to overlook the wrinkle problem. Prunes are undeniably associated with wrinkles, which we can call “character lines” all we like, but nobody wants to look like the old Dick Tracy character Pruneface. In a review of
Once Bitten,
a 1985 spoof of vampire films, the
Seattle Times
wrote of the character played by Lauren Hutton, “She’ll turn into an old
prune
if she doesn’t get a transfusion of virgin blood soon.”

Accordingly, the industry can ask: if apricots, when dried, can be called
dried apricots,
why can’t plums, when similarly freed of moisture, be called
dried plums
? The etymological response: the plum grows on a tree named the
Prunus domestica
. The root of that roundish fleshy drupe we call a
plum
is the Latin
prunum
. We’ve been calling a
prune
a
prune
since 1345, and the name is sure to outlast the California Dried Plum Board, if not the name
California
itself.

Not everyone in that power-deprived state is targeting the language. I asked the California Raisin Marketing Board if the raisin growers will soon petition the Food and Drug Administration for permission to label their product
dried grapes
.

“Never!” shot back Judy Hirigoyen, director of marketing for the raisin combine. “We think it’s cool to have wrinkles.”

On top of your splendid and sufficient blasting of
dried plums,
there is a second overwhelming objection. As we learn in Dickens’
Little Dorrit,
Mr. Dorrit’s daughter’s governess discovered circa 1857 that the way to give a pretty shape to the lips of growing girls was to repeat certain words, namely:
Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes
and
prism.
Should prunes be outlawed or become obsolete, the formula would fail. Its rhythm and completeness are the secret of its worldwide success
.

Jacques Barzun

San Antonio, Texas

The reference to prunes in
Measure for Measure
does not really relate to a pregnant woman’s being attracted to the fruit. Pompey’s comment is an insult, indicating that Mistress Elbow has a venereal disease. Prunes were considered good medicine for such ailments
.

Kenneth Greif

Waterbury, Connecticut

In Cleveland, where I used to live, the plums of the type that are made into prunes are sold as “fresh prunes.”

Sam Thorton

Huber Heights, Ohio

Say What?
“Why don’t you incorporate a running endnote feature on anachronisms in movie scripts?” suggests Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor of the
New Yorker
. (I tell him how to edit his magazine; he tells me how to write my column. Our readers benefit mightily.) My anachronism file is limited to the classic example of Cassius’s mention of a clock striking in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar,
set in a time before clocks had been invented. Fortunately, Hertzberg includes a specific example to enliven his broad policy guidance.

“Movie art directors go to incredible lengths to make sure the details are right in period films,” he notes. “Yet the dialogue is often studded with ear-stinging anachronisms. I noticed this most recently in the new Woody Allen movie about the 1930s jazz guitarist Emmet Ray.”

He referred to a scene in
Sweet and Lowdown
in which the actor Sean Penn is in a car with a group of black musicians; one of them, after making an observation, adds, “
You know what I’m sayin’?
”

“The phrase
you know what I’m saying?
” Hertzberg writes, “a substitute for
y’know?,
is a hip-hop coinage never heard before the 1980s, I believe.” Close, but no cigar. (That’s probably a carnival phrase used after a failure to ring a bell in a test of strength, but I wish I had a citation, you know what I’m sayin’?) In the summer of 1978, it was noted in this space, “The summarized continuation, or indication of a continued series, has long been a staple of kids’ talk:
et cetera et cetera
was followed by
blah-blah-blah
and more recently by
and all that stuff;
the current locution is
you know what I’m saying?
”

During the past generation, the meaning of the vogue phrase changed from “and similar examples” to “will you give me some assurance, verbal or by some nonverbal signal, that you comprehend at least part of what I have been trying to tell you?” This new meaning is also expressed as
y’unnerstan’?
but
you know what I’m sayin’?
is far more prevalent, with 3,000 citations in the Dow Jones database since that first one in print in 1978.

In 1996, the Texas columnist Joe Bob Briggs surveyed the range of hot reassurance interrogations-from the ubiquitous
you know what I’m sayin’ here?
to the older
you get my drift?
—and wondered, “Did we go through some kind of national anxiety attack where the entire population decided that nobody was listening?”

The phrase is also a form of white noise, or meaningless sound to fill up a moment between phrases. When the British heavyweight boxer Julius Francis was beaten decisively by Mike Tyson in January 2000, the human punching bag told an interviewer: “I tried in there,
you know what I’m sayin’?
I tried.”

Although the question was posed for hundreds of years, its emergence in the popular culture in this meaningless sense was surely, as Hertzberg believes, a phenomenon that began only a generation ago. Its use in a film set in the 1930s is thus an anachronism, a word rooted in Greek for “error in chronology.”

For those moviegoers who spot such ear-stingers, and whose recourse until now was only to mutter, with Hamlet, “The time is out of joint”: “O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.”

Say What? II.
In imperial Japan before World War II, members of the “thought police”—
Shiso Keisatsu
—fanned out to suppress dangerous thinking in the populace. The thought police were disbanded by General MacArthur when he imposed freedom of speech on occupied Japan. The name of the group was later chillingly immortalized by George Orwell in his 1949 novel
1984
.

Enter now the
time police
. This dread group of moviegoing vigilantes is dedicated to suppressing anachronism now so freely engaged in by screenwriters.

Anachronism
is the placement of a word of the present in the mouth of a person of the past. The newly organized
time police
have asked me to help them put a stop to it because the practice is subverting our society’s orderly sense of sequence.

“In
Schindler’s List,
” writes Eric Myers of New York, “in the space of ten seconds, the character played by Ralph Fiennes refers to a
scam
twice, then says, ‘Who’s
scamming
who?’ This, in Germany during World War II?”

I would have focused on “who’s
scamming whom
” and missed the anachronism, but he’s right:
scam
is carnival lingo for “trick, deception, swindle” and probably did not cross into general slang until the early ’60s.

Timecop Myers, after thus dispensing of Steven Spielberg, turns his attention to Woody Allen: “In
Bullets Over Broadway,
he has a distraught John Cusack moaning, ‘I’m very
conflicted
!’ I don’t think anybody used that kind of psychobabble in 1928.”