by Judy Jones
The nationalist Communists, by then known as the Viet Minh, didn’t waste any time. Keeping discreetly out of the way of the Japanese, they spread the faith in the villages and fortified their positions in the countryside. When Japan surrendered in 1945, Ho Chi Minh had consolidated enough power to declare himself head of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
This, however, was not what the Allies had in mind. Determined to restore European equilibrium by boosting France’s fractured self-esteem, they decided to give her back her colonies, sending the British to take over Saigon and Chinese troops to recapture the north. Enter, at this point, General Vo Nguyen Giap, soon-to-be hero, from the nationalists’ point of view, of two Vietnamese wars. Giap raided the local arsenals for the weapons left behind by the French and Japanese and made as much trouble as he could for the occupying French and Chinese forces. For the next few years the war in Vietnam consisted of inconclusive skirmishes and lots of military bungling on both sides, with the Viet Minh learning the hard way that conventional warfare was not their strong suit and the French continually trying to launch surprise raids on an enemy they couldn’t see.
The nature of the enterprise began to change in 1949, when the Reds took over China. Ho Chi Minh suddenly found himself with an ally at his back and a steady supply of artillery pouring in from both China and the Soviet Union. The United States began to talk about keeping the Communist threat within safe perimeters. Vietnam was suddenly everyone’s business. General Giap, for one, was heartened. Ho had long ago declared himself ready to lose ten men for every one of the invaders, and Giap made good the promise, launching a series of ferocious assaults that decimated his own forces but did, at least, have the effect of setting French nerves on edge and driving French troops back to fortified positions. Eventually, it also led them to make their fatal mistake.
Hoping to draw enough fire to exhaust the Viet Minh’s resources and weaken their position in the rest of the country, the French decided to play on the enemy’s aggressiveness by setting up fifteen thousand men in a defensive position at Dien Bien Phu, near the Laotian border of North Vietnam. Although the men stationed at the fortress could be supplied only by air, the French, who, by this time, were being heavily backed by the United States, were confident that they could hold out indefinitely. What they didn’t count on could, and did, fill volumes; for instance, the amount of Russian and Chinese heavy artillery that had gotten through to the Viet Minh, and the Viet Minh’s ability to use it; the dense vegetation surrounding the fortress, which made it impossible to see the enemy, much less destroy its supply lines from the air; and the United States’ refusal to respond to France’s last-ditch appeals for help by sending its own air power to the rescue. Dien Bien Phu was besieged for fifty-five days, beginning in March 1954; on May 7, the French surrendered completely. Although the Viet Minh had suffered more casualties, they had won the war. The French defeat led directly to the Geneva Conference, at which France was forced to grant independence to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, thereby ending her empire in Indochina.
In hindsight, the lessons of Dien Bien Phu seemed pretty clear, at least to some people. On the military level, it demonstrated the futility of depending on superior manpower and technology to overcome a well-armed, thoroughly entrenched guerrilla force fighting on difficult terrain and prepared to make outrageous sacrifices to defend a homeland. In terms of global politics, it showed just how much trouble a country could make for itself when it confused grandiosity with ideology.
The United States seemed, for a minute or two, to get the message. President Eisenhower had, after all, refused to get directly involved in the Vietnam conflict without the approval of Congress, and the Chiefs of Staff had already declared the whole territory of Indochina to be “without decisive military objectives.” But U.S. policy in the region had never been characterized by clear thinking or consistent action. Pretty soon Eisenhower was focusing more on his “falling dominoes” speech and the Red Terror than on what had just happened at Dien Bien Phu—this despite the fact that the Russians and Chinese had already stopped speaking to each other and it was unclear just where the Red Terror would be emanating from. When the Geneva Conference partitioned Vietnam into North and South along the 17th parallel, with the promise of free elections in two years to decide on possible reunification, Eisenhower decided to fight rather than let the Vietnamese, who were solidly behind Ho Chi Minh in the north and simply confused in the south, vote. JFK compounded the error when he started looking around for a way to reaffirm U.S. prestige in the wake of Sputnik and save face personally after the Bay of Pigs, and somebody happened to mention that things were not going well in Saigon. By the time Lyndon Johnson got into office, we were headed for Dien Bien Phu all over again. History repeats itself, some people like to point out—and not just in Vietnam.
In the Beginning Was the Prefix
Go ahead: Amaze your doorman, dazzle your periodontist, shut your prospective brother-in-law up for good with your dextrous and inventive handling of such mind-clouding prefixes as demi-, crypto-, and, yes, even meta-. After all, you mastered re-, pre-, and dis-, didn’t you?
Highest up is the man with arch- before his title, be it duke, bishop, or angel, each of whom towers over mere dukes, bishops, and angels, respectively; likewise your archrival gives you more trouble than all your regular rivals put together. The vice-person—president, admiral, consul, or, the only common such word written solid, viceroy—is next on the list; he’s the stand-in, the understudy, the one who is ready to fill in in an emergency or to succeed in the event of death. The co- fellow, whether author or conspirator, is all for common cause (and/or shared culpability); sometimes his partner will be in the ascendancy (as with a copilot, who always has Dana Andrews playing him when the pilot is Burt Lancaster), but more often power and responsibility are evenly divided, just as it was between the cocaptains of your high school football team. The paralegal, the paramedic, the paraprofessional in general—from a Greek preposition meaning “alongside of”—are not full-fledged, licensed, or in charge, nor, at the rate they’re going, will they ever be. But then some people thrive in the glorified-assistant role. (For the record, paratroopers have a different prefix to thank for their job title, the same one you see in parachute and parasol, a Latin verb stem meaning “protect, ward off”) And don’t let’s even consider dealing with the guys who are sub, as in subaltern and sublieutenant: Obviously, they don’t know who you are or they’d never even suggest it.
When Gore Vidal made media history by calling William Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” in front of millions of television viewers during the 1968 Democratic convention, he presumably meant that beneath Buckley’s conservative facade lurked a fascist trying to keep the public—or himself—from seeing his true colors. At least, that’s the way Buckley took it; Vidal later pointed out that what’d he’d actually called his archenemy was a “pro-crypto-Nazi,” in reference to Buckley’s defense of the Chicago police, who were at that moment battering demonstrators with gleeful abandon in the streets outside. This version would make the cops the Nazis-in-law-enforcement-officers’-clothing; Buckley merely a sympathizer and, possibly, only a quasi-Nazi himself. (This “less-than-a-full-fledged-Nazi” interpretation is bolstered by Vidal’s adding that, in fact, he hadn’t meant to use the term “Nazi” at all; had he not blown his cool, he said, he would have called his opponent merely “Fascist-minded.”) Because a crypto-Nazi has something to gain by keeping his real feelings hidden, and a quasi-Nazi probably isn’t sure just what his real feelings are, you don’t have to get out of the way of either of them quite as fast as you do some of those neo-Nazi organizations, whose members like to parade up and down Midwestern streets in modified Luftwaffe surplus, paint swastikas on synagogues, and bash the heads of whichever minority groups they feel are polluting the race these days. In other words, the neo-Nazi is, or likes to think he is, the real thing, updated. Last and certainly least, don’t worry at all about those fifteen-year-old pseudo-N
azi rockers who like to affect combat boots and Iron Crosses and who go around spouting a lot of racist rhetoric they picked up at the last heavy-metal concert; unlike neo-Nazi skinheads, who tend to have more frown lines and fewer teeth, these kids are just out to scare you in the hopes of being taken seriously for a change.
The thing that boasts proto- (from a Greek word meaning “first”) before its name, whether protozoan, protoplasm, Proto-Germanic (linguists’ jargon for the earliest form of a language, in this case German, that they’ve managed to reconstruct), or prototype. Vying with proto- for deftness at conferring precedence is another Greek word, archaeo-, which, while it’s not particularly active in spur-of-the-moment word formation, does manage to connote not only “beginning,” but “chief, ruler,” as well (cf. arch-, above), as in archaeology and archetype.
(To split hairs for a moment, while a prototype is an early form or instance of something that then goes on to serve as a model for a whole string of subsequent somethings, the thing that came first, an archetype, is all that and more: It’s not only as old as the hills, it’s ageless. Thus, as Macaulay pointed out, England’s Parliament is the archetype of representative assemblies; he could just as easily have said “prototype,” but his point was that Parliament’s still sitting there next to the Thames, a bit gray around the temples, perhaps, but a lady with no intention of retiring, and, what’s more, immediately recognizable from pictures of herself as a girl. Gutenberg’s printing press, on the other hand, is the prototype of the modern printing press—an early model that served and inspired an entire hemisphere—but it’s not the archetype of it: Few people would see a resemblance between the two, and no printer in his right mind would want to use the original.)
Those annoyed with this Greek jockeying for position will wish to make the acquaintance of Ur-, like “echt” a German traveler who occasionally puts up at the Connaught or the Harvard Club. Ur- means “original, earliest, primitive,” as in Urtext (also spell “urtext,” no cap, no italics, no hyphen, which lets you know the prefix is in the process of being naturalized), a text reconstructed from extant later texts. Thus, to present a symphony of Beethoven’s in urtext and in urperformance is to do it with obvious mistakes unrectified and with an orchestra of the size and proportions Beethoven wrote it for. As for everything that’s not proto-, archaeo-, or Ur-, consign it to oblivion with a toss of the head, a raised eyebrow, and a prefixed neo-: From Neo-Platonists to Neo-Nazis, who needs ’em?
The key prefix here is mega-, which, back in Greece, meant literally “million.” Thus a megaton bomb has a force equivalent to a million tons of TNT and megabuck is somebody’s idea of a funny way to say million dollars. (The related megalo-, indicating greatness or strength, without a specific numerical value, is what you get in megalomaniac and megalopolis.) Also worth noting: The opposing prefixes macro- (denoting largeness, length, or overdevelopment, as in macroeconomics, macrocosm, a.k.a. the universe; and macrobiotics) and micro- (denoting the reverse, as in microeconomics, microcosm, and microfilm). The former is still little enough known that the doorman may be impressed; the latter’s debased by centuries of overuse—though it still beats mini-.
All right, is a bimonthly magazine one that comes twice a month or one that comes every other month? There’s no real consensus out there, but take our advice and use bimonthly for the every-other-month one, and call the twice-a-month a semimonthly. Semi-, derived from the Latin, means “half,” or sometimes a bit less—but then so do demi-, from the French, as in demitasse and demimonde; and hemi-, from the Greek, as in hemisphere. If you’re indulging in creative prefixing, purists would have you choose, in any given situation, the prefix of the same nationality as the root you’re attaching it to, but that doesn’t account for demigod, among others. Of the three, semi- combines most freely, and when in doubt you can always fall back on good old native half-, as in half-wit, half-portion, and half-gainer. Note to absurdists and Anglophiles everywhere: The British word for a musical sixty-fourth note (and you knew they’d have one) is hemidemisemiquaver.
The stupidest mnemonic is all you need here, so voilà: hyper- has more letters, and it’s the one that means “over, too much,” as in hyperactive, hypertension, hyperbole, and just plain hyper. Hypo-, with only four letters, means “under, too little,” as in hypoglycemia (too little blood sugar), hypodermic (literally, “under the skin”), and hype (from the old slang for the kind of hypodermic injection we now call a fix). Both began life as Greek prepositions, and both traveled well. Hyper-, in particular, is an industrious, even promiscuous prefix. Which means that hypo less seen, less understood—may be a better one to be able to throw around.
Not all Greek prepositional prefixes are as graspable as hyper- and hypo-. For instance, we wanted to hold forth here on ana- and cata-, but forget it: While you can point out that they mean roughly “up” and “down,” that really doesn’t equip a person to savor “catalogue” or “Anabaptist.” Besides, as prefixes go they’re dead; only a scientist would use one to make a new word these days. Not so meta-, which currently is a hotter linguistic ticket than ever, our candidate for the prefixer’s prefix. While it has two “flat” meanings as a simple preposition—“with, among” (cognate with English “mid” and German “mit”) and “after, behind”—it’s come to be equated with pursuit, quest, and change, with the person, object, or idea that transcends all existing forms, with the restless and the ineffable. Actually, this grandeur on the part of meta- is the result of a little philological misunderstanding: Aristotlecalled the book he wrote on transcendental philosophy Ta meta ta phusika (“the things after physics”) because it followed his work on that subject, thereby ensuring that metaphysics would forever be equated with the transcendental, even though it was just a simple sequel. Not that that’s stopped anybody from devoting his life— or his ego—to such pursuits as metahistory (“A historian writes the history of a period, a metahistorian compares different periods in order to derive an essence,” as one scholar recently put it), metalinguistics, and even metaculture. With meta- in your pocket, you don’t ever have to feel stagnant, flaccid, or middle-aged.
Distinctions Worth Making
affect and effect
Promise to get this one down and we’ll spare you “lie” and “lay.” “Affect” is the verb most of the time; it implies influence: “Smoking can affect one’s health; how has it affected yours?” “Effect” is the equivalent noun: “Smoking has had an effect on me and on my health.” Sometimes, though (and here’s where the trouble comes in) “effect” is the verb. When it is, it brings a sense not of mere influence, but of purpose, even impact: “I must effect my plan to stop smoking”; “By not smoking, I have succeeded in effecting my complete recovery.” Of course, not drinking may also have affected your recovery—may have contributed to it, may have hastened it along—but here you’re claiming that stopping smoking was what really turned things around.
Two little problems: (1) the way one affects a jaunty air or an English accent; and (2) the so-called affect (watch that noun) in psychology: all the emotional stuff surrounding a particular state or situation. But don’t worry too much about them; concentrate on the difference in meaning above, which is where you stand to blow it if you’re going to blow it at all.
anxious and eager
Famous last stand of the language purists: You’re not anxious to spend a languorous evening with your oldest married friends, you’re eager to spend it. Unless, that is, you’ve been sleeping with one of them for the past three months. Then you are anxious.
assume and presume
When you presume, you take for granted that something is true; when you assume, you postulate that it’s true in order to go on to argue or to act. Presuming has tied up in it the idea of anticipation, of jumping the gun, of taking liberties; hence the adjective presumptuous. Assuming isn’t necessarily a swell thing, either (hence the adjective self-assuming), but at least it’s up-front about the fact that it has a chip on its shoulder
. So, was Stanley being rude when he said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” No, not really; after all, he’d been trailing the Scottish missionary and explorer for months, on assignment for a New York newspaper, and they must have at least furnished him with a photograph. On the other hand, had it turned out that the distinguished stranger standing on the shore of Lake Tanganyika was not Dr. Livingstone, but Dr. Doolittle, it’s possible Stanley might have wished he’d said “assume” instead.
authentic and genuine
Something that’s genuine hasn’t been forged; something that’s authentic tells the truth about its subject. In other words, you might, one Friday morning, regale your coworkers with the details of your Thursday night at the latest East Village nightspot, when you’d really stayed home and watched television again; such an account would be genuine (you are the author of it) but not authentic (you weren’t even in the East Village). Conversely, you might that same morning have been lucky enough to overhear, on the Madison Avenue bus, the account of somebody who had been at the club in question the night before, then repeated it verbatim to your coworkers; that account would be authentic (assuming the person on the bus was telling the truth himself) but not genuine, because you’d be passing off somebody else’s good time as your own.
canonical, catholic, ecclesiastical, ecumenical, evangelical, and liturgical
