The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (7 page)

Tied for second place, thanks to its repetition thousands of times on television, is his statement of Jan. 26, 1998: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” What made it memorable was not only its unequivocal tone but also its accompaniment by a wagging finger. More than the words, the stern digit fixes it firmly in the national memory.

A charge leveled by Hillary Rodham Clinton at her husband’s nattering, battering cottage industry of vilifiers makes it into the political lexicon. On Jan. 27, 1998, during the month that the most memorable Clinton locutions were launched, the first lady told a television interviewer, Matt Lauer of the
Today
show, that she and her husband were targets of “a vast, right-wing conspiracy.” (That is most frequently written without a comma between the adjective
vast
and the compound adjective
right-wing;
such an error is not attributable to Mrs. Clinton but to the vast right wing.)

“I didn’t inhale,” which was widely quoted in derision early in the Clinton era, seems to be on the decline in quoted recollection. Regarding the use of drugs, Governor Clinton of Arkansas said in 1992 that “when I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale it and never tried it again.” (The phrasal verb
experimented with
became the operative term in such admissions, giving the action an almost scientific connotation, rather than
smoked
or
used.
) It was the careful plea of guilty with an explanation—of smoking but not inhaling—that struck many as ludicrously clever, but the phrase was overtaken by “‘is’ is.”

Clinton enthusiasts are proud of “The era of big government is over,” spoken in his 1996 State of the Union address, a stunning statement from a Democrat, somewhat tempered by “but we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” This was described by his public-opinion aide, Richard Morris, as
triangulation,
the positioning of a politician above two contending ideologies, a geometric updating of “stealing the opposition’s clothes.”

Another Clintonism that those who remember his administration fondly like to recall is the campaign semislogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” This was a sign posted by his campaign manager, James Carville, and not a statement by the candidate. Clinton did say in his stump speeches, “My responsibility is to grow this economy,” which was effective though it drew the ire of grammatical purists who objected to the use of the intransitive verb
grow
in a transitive form.

Students of regional dialect recall with fondness Clinton’s use of Ozark expressions. The most memorable of these was spoken at a Feb. 15, 1992, rally where the Arkansas governor said that he hoped people would see him “working hard, reaching out to them and fighting until the last dog dies.” (As
’til the last dog is hung,
this has been traced to a 1902 novel set in Michigan.) Clinton also contributed this proverb to the political lexicon: “Even a blind hog can find an acorn.”

Perhaps the most poignant of the memorable Clintonyms was recalled by Uzi Amit-Kohn of Jerusalem. In a farewell to Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 5, 1995, after the Israeli leader’s assassination, Clinton said, “
Shalom, chaver,
“ which translates from the Hebrew as “Good-bye, friend” or “Peace, friend.”

These statements are hardly the relics of a forgotten age. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook, “There are no second acts in American lives.” And “show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.” And in
The
Great Gatsby,
his unforgettable “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

You mention Clinton’s “unique juxtaposition” of
is
with
is.
This brought to my mind my favorite juxtaposition of a form of being: “Let
be
be the finale of seem,” from Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” I just wanted to return the favor.

Dennis Lawson

Seymour, Connecticut

Codgertation.
Thirteen out of 100 Americans are over 65; only 4 of those 100 are “wired seniors,” keyed into the Internet. But good news for older readers of words in all forms comes in a new book from a couple of heavy hitters in brain science. No age group is coming online faster than the Social Security set, and a recent survey shows that especially goes for women.

When information in spoken form is presented rapidly, older people don’t understand it as easily as their children do. A fast-talking newscaster is not comprehended well by most older listeners and viewers (to whom advertisers’ messages are directed). But Guy McKhann, MD, of Johns Hopkins and Marilyn Albert, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, authors of
Keep Your Brain Young: The Complete Guide to Physical and Emotional Health and Longevity,
write, “Since you read at your own speed and can go back over what you read, speed has less influence on your understanding of written material.”

That explains an eye-opening development in the world of the Netties. “One advantage of the computer is that it depends on the written word,” write Albert and McKhann, who are happily married and read to each other every night. “Given the fact that vocabulary and reading ability do not decline and may even improve with age, it’s not surprising that the fastest-growing group of new computer users in the United States is over the age of 65.”

We’re allowed to read that again. Let it sink in. For information comprehension, the written word beats the rat-a-tat-tat of cable cubs and cuties any day. That’s why you see those letters crawling along the bottom of your screen.

Cold Case Squad.
What has become of Chandra Levy? The question about this missing person is triggered by the FBI’s grim refusal to accept the phrase
Cold Case squad
.

Last summer, before the nation’s attention turned away from the vanished congressional aide, Jim Stewart, a CBS reporter, said that “the FBI officially transferred the Chandra Levy investigation to its
Cold Case unit,
which has historically handled only the toughest of cases that have few clues….
Cold case
means cold leads, few tips and little to go on.”

The FBI responded with an angry news release referring proudly to its
Major Case squad
and coldly noting, “It is not correct to call this squad the
‘Cold Case’ squad.”

Following this up, I was informed by an FBI spokesman, “It has always been the
Major Case squad. Cold Case squad
is used by the media, not by us. The squad that we have in our office is called the
Major Case Homicide squad
. We do not call it a
Cold Case squad
.”

And as for you journalists who don’t accept our official law enforcement terminology—freeze!

Come Heavy.
What’s a
goomah,
and how does it differ from a
goombah
? Is the adjective
skeevy
somehow related to the slang noun for underwear,
skivvies
? Does the
come-heavy
Mafia talk on television give you
agita
?

These are words from the HBO television series
The Sopranos,
which I first turned to hoping to hear a rendition of the mad scene in
Lucia di Lammermoor
. The show is centered on a relentlessly foulmouthed fictional Mafia family with the surname of Soprano. My interest is in the writers’ adoption of a lexicon that is loosely based on Italian words, a little real Mafia slang and a smattering of lingo remembered or made up for the show by former residents of a blue-collar neighborhood in East Boston.

“
Goombah
is derived from
compare,
‘godfather’ or ‘dear male friend,’” says Frank Renzulli, co-executive producer and a writer of the show. “Southern Italians tend to make the
c
a
g,
so
compare
becomes
gompare
. Dropping the last letter is very Neapolitan, so it becomes
goompar
and then
goombah
.” Robin Green, another executive producer (it’s hard to figure from the titles who is the show’s
capo di tutti capi
), contrasts the “godfather” meaning of that word with
goomah,
which she defines as “mistress.” She adds, “The language we’re using is from the neighborhood, a street language that’s bastardized Italian—American forms of Italian words.”

I ran
goomah
past Jimmy Breslin, the
Newsday
columnist who wrote
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,
and he confirms the “alternative wife” sense. While I had him on the phone, I tried
come heavy,
which Jimmy defined as either “bring money” or “come armed”; the show’s legion of executive producers prefer the latter.

Agita
means “acid indigestion.” In that regard,
skeevy
comes from
schifare,
“to disgust.” The name of the mob leader’s boat is
Stugots,
which
Entertainment Weekly
defined as “idiot,” but which has a meaning closer to the Spanish
cojones,
“the courage symbolized by primary male sex characteristics.”

That should be enough to get you through a couple of episodes, unless the other endless, unoriginal obscenities get you down. HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, had a useful glossary of what the executive producers call their mobspeak on its Web site, but the understandably offended National Italian American Foundation all but
mock-whacked
the corporate brass who—suddenly afflicted with
agita
—removed the offensive page.

Compassion.
In the case of
PGA Tour v. Martin,
the Supreme Court held (7-2) that the game of golf would not be fundamentally altered if a handicapped contestant in a tournament was allowed to ride in a golf cart. Because the game was played in a place of public accommodation, the Americans With Disabilities Act applied, and the court upheld judges who directed the Professional Golfers Association to let the golfer Casey Martin ride.

Justice Antonin Scalia began his dissent with this sentence: “In my view today’s opinion exercises a benevolent compassion that the law does not place it within our power to impose.”

The term
benevolent compassion
puzzled Noam Cohen, executive editor of Inside.com and a former copy editor at the
New York Times
. Like many who assume that I am one to whom the high court’s decisions about language can be appealed, he wrote to me: “I was wondering what you made of Justice Scalia’s use of the term
benevolent compassion
. Isn’t that redundant? Can there be a ‘malevolent compassion’?”

My appellant—a member of an elite group of tautology-spotters that calls itself the Squad Squad—noted that
Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary
defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” Writes Cohen: “That would seem to have benevolence tied to its very nature. What’s weird is that the offending sentence was the first in Scalia’s particularly stinging dissent—he must have thought about it.”

I agreed; he must have. A judge noted for his pungently precise prose doesn’t modify a noun with a closely related adjective without thinking it through. What was his original intent? So I put it to Justice Scalia directly: “Was it, as the members of the Squad Squad suggest, redundant? Or were you differentiating from some other kind of compassion?”

“I am shocked and dismayed (shocked and dismayed!),” Scalia tonguein cheekily replies, “by the suggestion in your note of June 10 that my reference to ‘benevolent compassion’ can be absolved of redundancy only if I was ‘differentiating [that] from some other kind of compassion.’”

Note his bracketed
that,
which is a correction of the English in my note. By inserting
that,
he indicates that the verb
differentiate
should be transitive. I used it without an object; common usage has made that intransitive form correct, but it is not preferred in formal writing. I can defend my intransitive usage—gee, it was only in a scribbled note—but here I am on the defensive, which is surely what Scalia had in mind. (At least he bracketed a suggested correction rather than a humiliating [
sic
]. In return, I have not
sic
’d his use of “was differentiating” when the contrary-to-fact subjunctive called for
were
.)

“I shall assume,” he continues, “that such differentiation is impossible—that compassion is always benevolent—though that may not be true. (People sometimes identify with others’ suffering, ‘suffer with’ them—to track the Latin root of
compassion
—not because they particularly love the others or ‘wish them well’—to track the Latin root of
benevolence
—but because they shudder at the prospect of the same thing’s happening to themselves. ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ This is arguably not benevolence, but self-love.)”