In cookery, isn’t there a role for “to cream,” meaning to puree until the product is as close as possible to the consistency of cream? Maybe a chef was the first one to threaten to “cream” an adversary, presumably, in such a hypothetical context, a cretin who had criticized his cooking or infringed on his domain.
John Strother
Princeton, New Jersey
I believe that in boxing circles—and other places too—the phrase is: “May the best man win.” You have grammarized it, for the sake of the children, I suppose.
Jacques Barzun
San Antonio, Texas
I was a tad surprised not to find “eat [someone’s] lunch” in your list. Ohwell, one cannot let the complete be the enemy of the excellent.
Saul Rosen
Rockville, Maryland
Clintonisms. “Bill Clinton is a relic of another age,” the essayist Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, “like the 20s party boy F. Scott Fitzgerald stranded in the landscape of the Great Depression.”
I rise today to our immediate past president’s linguistic defense. Let me tell you about the very articulate. They are different from you and me. The Lexicographic Irregulars, asked in this space to choose the phrases that Bill Clinton would be remembered by, responded with words that evoke an era of intense controversy and vituperation. Respondents included his critics and his speechwriters, those nostalgic for the time of prosperity and peace as well as for the days of whine and nosiness.
The most memorable Clintonism or Clintonym (a coinage of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre) chosen by a plurality of entries was a sentence that thrilled every semanticist, grammarian and syntactician in the nation: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
The words that raised parsing to a fine art were spoken under oath to a grand jury. They were about a statement made by the president’s lawyer during a deposition about the relationship with a White House intern, in which the lawyer asserted, “There is absolutely no sex of any kind.” Clinton pointed out that because his attorney had been speaking only in the present tense, the statement was true: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he explained, adding, “Actually, in the present tense, that is a true statement.” That is indisputable: during the deposition, no sex of any kind was taking place between them.
What made the sentence so memorable? Part was the exquisite nature of the literal reading, taken by Clinton critics to be an infuriating example of legalistic slipperiness. Another part was the unique juxtaposition of the quoted is with the unquoted is. The sentence would not have had the same puissance—indeed, it might not be destined for the next edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations—had it concluded with “the meaning of ‘is’ was.”
“I feel your pain,” an expression of compassion often associated with psychiatric jargon, was the runner-up in this sample (which has an accuracy estimated at plus or minus sixty points). The remark was ad-libbed at a March 26, 1992, campaign rally as part of a riposte to an AIDS activist who angrily accused the candidate of avoiding the issue. The candidate, who later became a champion of gay rights, came back with “I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally … go support somebody else for president.” He ameliorated that with “I know you’re hurting, but you won’t stop hurting by trying to hurt other people.”
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 les
s 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.)”
I suspect that my frequent plunge into etymology in this column has just been satirized, but maybe I flatter myself. He goes on in true Supreme Court style to restate the question at hand about benevolent compassion and to address it:
“But assuming the premise, is it redundancy to attribute to a noun a quality that it always possesses?” Scalia’s opinion: “Surely not. We speak of ‘admirable courage’ (is courage ever not admirable?); a ‘cold New England winter’ (is a New England winter ever not cold?); the ‘sweet, green spring’ (is springtime ever not sweet and green?). It seems to me perfectly acceptable to use an adjective to emphasize one of the qualities that a noun possesses, even if it always possesses it. The writer wants to stress the coldness of the New England winter, rather than its interminable length, its gloominess, its snowi
ness and many other qualities that it always possesses. And that is what I was doing with ‘benevolent compassion’—stressing the social-outreach, maternalistic, goo-goo character of the court’s compassion.”
Let me interrupt here to footnote the meaning and etymology of goo-goo, which some may mistakenly take as akin to gooey. This was the derisive appellation given by the New York Sun in the 1890s to local action groups calling themselves “Good Government Clubs”; New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt castigated fellow reformers who voted independent as “those prize idiots, the Goo-Goos.”
I have just returned from northern Greece, where I read, in the International Herald Tribune, your piece on my redundancy. It was a nice job, and I am flattered that you thought my analysis not only correct but also worthy of recounting.
By the way, I did not include the bracketed “that” as an intentional jab—it was just the way I was accustomed to using the verb “differentiate.” Honi soit qui mal y pense. The Latin etymology was likewise not an intentional parody: I happen to think it useful, and knew that you, of all people, would not consider it out of place. You were correct, however, that my reference to “off-the-cuff thoughts” was (shall we say?) something of an exaggeration.
I hope you will not think it ungrateful if I observe that you are wrong about my use of indicative “was” instead of the subjunctive “were.” “Were” would have been appropriate if my sentence had read “my reference ‘differentiating [that],’” etc. In fact, however, I wrote, “can be absolved”—and that takes a “was.”
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 6
