The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (50 page)

This lays a shaky etymological basis for
trance
music, which was first cited in the
Guardian
in 1970 about shamanist tribal music played in Ethiopia. It surfaced again in the mid ’80s as a name for what Joe Brown described in the
Washington Post
as a combination of “electronic instruments with traditional acoustic sounds, creating a sense of well-being, even euphoria.” This New Age music was followed by a more distinct beat as an aid to meditation, and in recent usages of
trance dance
the beat has apparently taken over.

But do not take this as the latest in the musical vocabulary. A decade ago, the
Boston Globe
coined
mash-ups
to describe a mixture of styles in a kind of creatively corrupt collage. In the
New York Times
a few weeks ago, Neil Strauss referred to “the first significant new musical genre to be lifted out of the underground,” called “
mash-ups
or bootlegs,” mixing two or three quite different recordings by established stars, often in contravention of copyright law. Some bootleggers become furious at others who
mash up
their “white labels” with other bootlegs.

One practitioner of the
mash-up,
this time using rock and the voice of a famed television news anchor, is Mark Gunderson of Columbus, Ohio. He cheerfully told the
Houston Press
that he coined the name for the light-fingered stunt:
plagiarhythm
.

Shoveling Coalition.
Afghanistan’s “Northern
Alliance
” was a collection of ethnic groups with the joint purpose of opposing and defeating the Taliban. Its victory was made possible by the coalition of outside forces led by, and mainly made up of, U.S. troops and aircraft.

Is there a semantic difference between an
alliance
and a
coalition
?

Yes, and we’d better get it straight before the United States and its allies (or coalition partners) hit the next state harboring terrorists.

An
alliance
is a formal joining of long-term interests, usually expressed in a treaty (even when derogated in 1914 by Germany’s Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg as “a scrap of paper”). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and especially its English-speaking component, is informally but accurately called “the Atlantic
Alliance
.”

A
coalition
is a temporary alliance, an ad hoc arrangement between or among nations or groups to effect some immediate end. That describes the force assembled by the U.S. in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But when our NATO allies sought assurances from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last month that the war on terrorism would not extend to countries other than Afghanistan, he replied: “The mission determines the
coalition
. The
coalition
doesn’t determine the mission.”

Neither word properly denotes the collection of forces in the recent war in Afghanistan. It was a U.S.-initiated air-sea mission, with U.S. and British commandos on the ground as spotters and organizers for the ground troops of the Northern
Alliance,
which was really a local coalition; other nations offered grudging moral support or intelligence tips or a willingness not to shoot down our aircraft using their airspace. It was said that calling it a
coalition
was diplomatically useful, but the word to describe such unilateral cooperative intervention has yet to be coined.

To provide a service to world synonymy, I turned to Henry A. Kissinger for a differentiation of the two terms that do exist to describe unions of forces or nations in league.

“An
alliance,
” he responded, “is a group of states assembled for an agreed purpose with specific obligations to deal with that contingency.

“A
coalition
is a group of states avowing a common purpose, but which may leave the specific obligations it entails open and indeed subject for negotiation when the contingency to which the common purpose applies arises.”

Shtick.
Senator Joseph Lieberman was the newsmaker guest at the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Godfrey Sperling Breakfast, sponsored by the
Christian Science Monitor
. Before getting down to political business, the first Jewish candidate to be nominated for national office by a major party said, “Let me do
shtick
for a while.” He then engaged in some mild ethnic humor, just as he did at the Gridiron Dinner, where he told of watching a Jewish pornographic film titled
Debbie Does Neiman Marcus,
about which he said, “There was no sex, but I felt guilty anyway.”

Lieberman used the Yiddishism
shtick
to mean “comic routine; line of patter.” It is rooted in the German
Stück,
with an umlaut over the
u
.

(About umlauts: In this case, that mark of two dots above the vowel indicates that it is to be pronounced from the front of the mouth.
Uh,
as in the English
stuck,
comes from back in the throat;
oo,
as in
stooge,
is farther up front. An umlaut—pronounced “OOM-lout,” meaning “changed sound”—also separates the sound of a vowel from the different-sounding vowel that follows, as in reënter, though in English we tend to replace the umlaut with a hyphen. We will now re-enter the subject of this
Stück
. Like you, I have stumbled through life without knowing what an umlaut signifies and looked it up today only because language is my
shtick
.)

In the aforesaid “language is my
shtick,”
the sense of
shtick
is not the original “piece,” nor the extended “comic routine”; rather, it is the sense absorbed into the English language of “characteristic bit of business” or, more generally, “specialty.”

“Welcome to the season of
shtick,
” writes Holman W. Jenkins Jr., columnist for the
Wall Street Journal,
in an article deriding other pundits for knee-jerk narratives about the bursting of the stock market “bubble” coming as a complete surprise.

“For the purposes of the
shtick
… the small investor is an eternal rube who can’t be expected to have taken a skeptical view of the bubble,” Jenkins writes. “The devil theory of the bubble turns on the notion that investors got bad advice from Wall Street…. In fact, the
Wall Street Journal
’s first use of the term ‘Internet bubble’ occurred in 1995, four years before the Nasdaq peak…. The underlying message of the
shtick
is that the small investor is nothing but a victim and a twit.”

Asked for his definition of the Yiddishism, Jenkins replied, “A hackneyed act or comedian’s routine that’s getting a little tired.” Because he was adept at etymology, I asked for the origin of the economic sense of
bubble
. “The South Sea bubble,” he said instantly. “My best guess is that
bubble
in that financial context just naturally arose from the connection to the sea.”

For background on the South Sea bubble, Robert Menschel, the Goldman Sachs partner whose research for a book titled
Markets, Mobs, and Mayhem
has made him an authority on investor psychology, referred me to Charles Mackay’s 1841 work,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
. In it, the British historian detailed Holland’s “tulip-mania,” France’s “Mississippi madness” and the predations of England’s “South Sea Company.”

This last was formed in 1711 to exploit a monopoly on British trade with South America and the islands of the South Seas. Though unprofitable, the company traded its stock for government bonds and took responsibility for the national debt, triggering a wave of speculation, a spate of imitators and a belief that unlimited credit expansion could sustain prosperity. When mass mania subsided and stocks plunged in 1720, the ensuing failure of the banking system was characterized as “the bursting of the South Sea bubble.” The poet Alexander Pope wrote that “avarice creeping on, / Spread, like a low-born mist, and hid the sun.”

Now the word
bubble
is widely used to describe the run-up in the late ’90s of Internet and related technology stocks. It was given a boost in 1984, when Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, warned, “If you go into what I call a
bubble
boom, every
bubble
bursts.”

The financial usage of
bubble
was full-blown long before the 1720 South Sea Bubble, and it has no connection to sea foam. In fact, it conclusively predates the South Sea Bubble by at least half a century! The great Restoration comedies by Congreve, Etherege and Wycherly are rife with the word, as both noun and verb “to bubble” (to cheat or to trick) was common usage in England by 1675, when Wycherly wrote his salacious comedy,
The Country Wife.
Scams and financial hype were called “bubbles” at least as early.

In the sense of an ephemeral or deceptive illusion, “bubble” already appears prominently in
Macbeth
(1607). In Act I, Scene iii, Banquo says, “The earth hath bubbles as the water has, and these are of them. Whither are they vanished?” Macbeth answers, “Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted as breath into the wind. Would that they had stayed!” It’s quite possible that these lines drew pained chuckles from the wealthier members of his audience for Shakespeare may well have been punning on the financial sense of “bubble.” He might have had in mind the Muscovy Company (founded in 1555, which had never yielded the fabulous Russian fortune its 201 merchant shareholders had hoped for), and Sir Walter Raleigh’s expeditions (which cost Raleigh alone at least 40,000 pounds), of the Virginia Company, which had financed the Jamestown expedition just the year before
Macbeth
was produced
.

In any case, Shakespeare seems to have foreseen the lament of NASDAQ investors down to a T
.

Chances are, “bubble” wafted over to England from Holland, where the first modern stock market began around 1602. Joseph de la Vega, who described the Amsterdam exchange in 1688 in his
Confusion de Confusiones,
speaks often of “windhandle,” or “dealing in wind” (trading shares not in the speculator’s possession, as was done even then by short-sellers). What’s more, de la Vega writes of “inflating” stocks by offering to buy them above market price, just as “God with one breath breathed life into Adam.” This image—puffing up prices by blowing them full of air—seems the most likely origin of the financial term “bubble.”

Incidentally, Mackay’s
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
is a splendid read, but as history is notoriously unreliable. It has been superseded by much more trustworthy works like Charles Kindelberger’s
Mania, Panics and Crashes
(1978), Peter Graber’s
Famous First Bubbles
(2000) and the definitive
The South Sea Bubble
(1960), by John Carswell, a British polymath of Safiresque reach (my favorite book by him is his monograph on Coptic tattoos, I kid you not)
.

Jason Zweig

Investing Columnist

Money Magazine

New York, New York

Sidekicking.
When Vice President-elect Dick Cheney (only intimates call him Richard) took a strong public position on national missile defense, he was quick to add that he did not want to infringe on the turf of “my old
sidekick
Colin Powell,” the secretary of state-designate.

The
Washington Post
columnist Jim Hoagland, suspecting that the incoming vice president was asserting foreign-policy dominance, promptly popped him one: “Even the terminology betrayed Cheney’s ambitions and intentions. Gabby Hayes was Roy Rogers’s ‘
sidekick
.’ Rogers was not Hayes’s sidekick, just as Don Quixote was never Sancho Panza’s
sidekick
.”

Hoagland might also have cited George W. Bush’s comment during the campaign referring to Karen Hughes, then his communications director, as “my
sidekick
”; that suggests a relationship of principal to aide. Was Cheney dissing Powell or respecting him as a colleague?

The first citation of the old slang with a seeming western flavor was in a 1904 story by O. Henry: “Billy was my
side-kicker
in New York”; in 1906, Helen Green wrote, “The Red Swede … sat over a pint of champagne with Dopey Polly … and his
side kick,
the Runt.” (Such colorful nicknames are now frowned upon.) Some speculate that
side kicks,
two words, was a phrase derived from the outside pockets of an overcoat; in underworld slang, it referred to an accomplice.