Bodo Reichenbach
Arlington, Massachusetts
I am sure that we are agreed that coitus interruptus should be avoided by all means.
Lingua interruptus should also be avoided, because it is incorrect. It should be lingua interrupta, of course.
Gerardo Joffe
San Francisco, California
Date War. Language is expressed in writing with a series of symbols. When people cannot agree what the symbols stand for, all is confusion. We find ourselves gesticulating wildly in a Tower of Babel.
Ah, you say, but globalization and Internetting will fix all that. Computers inside a little translating bug in our ear will enable us all to understand one another instantly. Or English will become everybody’s second language until a universal language takes over someday.
Oh, yeah? (That’s based on the Sanskrit for “Izzat so?”) Then how come all the nations of the world, marching into the new millennium, can’t agree on what date of the month this is? A furious tug of war is going on between Europe and America that dwarfs the banana wars in importance, threatens the Atlantic Alliance and paralyzes the U.N. But nobody is willing to face up to the Date Debate.
What’s today? Unless we’re Chinese or Hebrew or some other civilization with its own calendar, we can all agree it’s the fifth day of the month of March in the year 2000. And we also agree that it’s easier to put that date in a combination of words and numerals:March 5, 2000.
Unless, of course, you’re in the military. Then it’s 5 March 2000, saving valuable commas needed for investment in missile research and—more to the point—nicely separating the numbers with a word.
But we’re all in a hurry; who wants to take all the time to write out the whole word signifying the month? Since March is the third month, we substitute the number 3 for the word’s interminable five letters. So March 5, 2000 is shown as 3/5/2000. (Unless you like hyphens—then it’s 3-5-2000. Or unless you prefer voguish periods, now called dots, as the Times Magazine finger-snappingly does; then it’s 3.5.2000, which has been further shortened to 3.5.00.)
This simple act of reducing a date to its shortest elements is the cause of the semiotic War Between the Continents now threatening to end globalization as we know it. “In the United States,” writes Dr. Alan D. Legatt of White Plains, New York, “a date written as ½ would mean Jan. 2, while in Europe it would mean the first of February.”
So today’s date—the fifth day of the third month in the run-up to our brand-new third millennium—is written in America as 3/5/00. (I’m a slasher, not a hyphenator or a dotter.) But in Britain and throughout Europe, those same numerals signify an entirely different date: the third day of the fifth month, or May 3, 2000.
Big difference. March goes out like a lamb; rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. Even worse, when President Bill Clinton sends a cheery note to Prime Minister Tony Blair and dates it 4/11, the Yank is thinking of April 11 but the Brit thinks it is November 4. This is sure to contribute to Anglo-American misunderstanding; if it leads to one leader standing the other up at a scheduled summit meeting, it could put a strain on the special relationship.
To resolve this problem before it discombobulates transatlantic e-mail and drives the editors of the International Herald Tribune to distraction, a nongovernmental organization that calls itself ISO has put forward a recommendation. The name is an acronym formed by the rejiggered initials of the International Organization for Standardization, headquartered in Geneva; ISO is rooted in the Greek word for “equal,” and this outfit seeks to get everyone to agree on the same symbols for the same things. To avert date warfare, ISO recommends that we all start with the year, followed by the month and finally the day. Today’s date, in ISO format, is 2000-3-5.
As they like to mutter in the Pentagon, I nonconcur. Who are these cookie-pushing cookie cutters of an unelected international bureaucracy to tell America’s native speakers that we must conform to the linguistic diktats of Continental Common Marketeers and sovereignty-grabbing European Unionists? Do the Brits think that English is a better language than Merkin? ISO may call me a lationist, but I reject this backdoor attempt to force American check writers to date our support of the IMF in a way alien to our ways.
If those one-worlders in Geneva are so het up about standardization, why don’t they adopt the American system? A millennium and a half from now, the standardeers will be writing the second of January in the year three thousand four hundred and fifty-six as 3456/1/2, while we will write it as 1/2/3456, which will be a real kick.
The Brits, on the verge of giving up their pound for the euro, are losing their regard for tradition, but when it comes to habits, Americans—even those who prattle about the need for great change at election time—hate change. It was hard enough for some of us to memorize the month-day-year sequence in the first place (if I have that order right); we don’t need to reprogram our minds just because some professional smoother-outers want everybody in the world to march in lockstep.
Hawks, finding geopolitical significance in this coming symbolic dust-up, will cry: if being a sole superpower does not give us hegemony in the writing of dates, why go to the expense of being a superpower at all? Doves, taking a less bellicose line, will coo: diversity is more precious than uniformity.
I say: By jingo, let’s stick to our slashes and hold fast to the American Way of Dating. To the standardizers, we should refuse to give a centimeter. Write today’s date as 3/5/00 and let the rest of the world complain about us being out of date, out of step, out of time and out of sorts. So what if we miss a few appointments? We will be striking a blow for dialectical uniqueness, iconoclastic individuality, national sovereignty and international confusion.
Only make it a convention to use Roman numerals for the month and everybody can go his own sweet way. Your jingoism in the matter of dating is worthy of Stephen Decatur.
Jacques Barzun
San Antonio, Texas
Diplolingo. The diplomatic oxymoron of the year was issued by the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, attempting to put the best face on a disappointing summit meeting between President Clinton and the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. “It’s a step forward,” said Mr. Mubarak, “although there was no progress.”
Dirigiste. “Financial markets and market-based economics,” declared the former treasury secretary Robert Rubin in the Economist’s millennial issue, “have replaced dirigiste economics….”
So in a special issue predicting events in 2000, he shot down the dirigible. (That is an arcane allusion to the midair explosion of the airship Hindenburg, tearfully described by a reporter in one of old-time radio’s most thrilling moments. The Latin dirigere means “to direct,” and a balloon capable of being directed by a pilot was dubbed a dirigible in 1885.)
“What are dirigiste economics?” asks Susan Neisuler of Newton, MA. (MA is the Postal Service’s arbitrary abbreviation for Massachusetts, not Maine; my style follows the more sensible New York Times style, which abbreviates Massachusetts as Mass. Maine is ME at the Postal Service and Me. at the Times; I write out the whole word.) “Should I be afraid of them?” Ms. Neisuler wonders, construing economics incorrectly as plural. “Is Robert Rubin making it up?”
No, Mr. Rubin was not making it up. Back in 1989 Barron’s was writing about the “French, who left to their own devices, would fashion Brussels into the capital of dirigiste economics.” Dirigiste is also used with things other than economics. At the end of January this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee he was encouraged by “forces emerging in Europe which will gradually bring down a lot of the dirigiste attitudes.”
If you’re a capitalist, or if you have no capital but believe in the creative force of untrammeled free enterprise, then you will be glad that the dirigistes are on the run. Their philosophy calls for “direction and control of the economy by the state.” The mildly socialistic phrase that preceded it was central planning, and the phrase that took it all the
way to the Soviet system was command economy, the opposite of market economy.
The earliest use I can find is in the Nov. 28, 1946, issue of Le Monde, when the writer summarized the American attitude toward France as “Be liberal or dirigiste. Return to a capitalist or a socialist economy. But take the decision and show us a serious program.” The English translation first appeared in Political Science Quarterly in September 1947 and soon was taken up on both sides of the Atlantic. The Economist in the same month denounced such control as fascistic: “Authoritarianism or stagnation—that is the choice which dirigisme thrusts on us.” Nor was the word limited to economics: in the earliest entry in the OED, from a 1951 Archivum Linguisticum, a roundheeled lexicographer sneered at “linguistic dirigisme, standards of correctness in a constantly evolving language.” (Now wait a minute: some of us think that kind of dirigisme is good.)
Another watcher of Rubinlingo, John Di Clemente of Tinley Park, IL (that’s a postocrat’s idea of an abbreviation for Illinois; I still write the old-fashioned Ill., which the postocrats think is sick), sends in a clipping from the Wall Street Journal quoting Rubin about restrictions on his lobbying the White House from his new banking job: “We’ll be belt and suspenders with respect to those.” Mr. Di Clemente wants to know: “What’s the connection between such haberdashery and ethics?”
Earliest use I can find of this locution is in the Dallas Morning News in 1987: “To qualify for the Scott Burns Belt and Suspender Bank List, a bank had to have primary equity capital amounting to at least 10 percent of its assets.” From the context, it appears that (a) this is not the first use of the phrase and (b) it refers to safety. Nor is the metaphor limited to finance: an 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision in 1997 described a government motion to compel testimony as “this belt-and-suspenders approach,” using the phrase as a hyphenated compound adjective.
I called Mr. Rubin at Citigroup, where his trousers are now most securely held up, to ask his definition of the metaphor. “It emphasizes cer-tainty,” he says. “When you’re wearing both, you’re doubly safe.” And so it is with stable banks and legal rights and ethical standards. In the lingo of newsies, my Times copy desk colleagues inform me, it means “overkill.”
I suspect the fairly recent U.S. usage of “belt and suspenders” is merely a transatlantic translation of the English “belt and braces” which I believe I have seen in pre-WWII British fiction (e.g., “I brought a knife as well as a gun because I’m a belt and braces man.”). Same range of signification and same register.
Daniel F. Melia
Department of Rhetoric
University of California
Berkeley, California
In Double Indemnity, the Billy Wilder classic from the late 1940s, Edward G. Robinson plays a crafty insurance manager. He is Fred MacMurray’s boss. After Barbara Stanwyck’s husband is murdered and dropped from a moving train, there is a witness to the event. He arrives at the insurance office to meet Edward G. Robinson, who is suspicious of the apparent suicide. Robinson calls the witness a cautious man. The witness asks why. Robinson replies that he is a “belt and suspenders man,” since he is wearing both.
Michael McTague
New York, New York
Don’t Go There. After I expressed my intent to explore an area that strikes terror of embarrassment into so many hearts, a colleague warned, “I wouldn’t go there if I were you.”
Linguistic exploration rejects such faintheartedness. We will now deal forthrightly with the cliché that has been embraced by the squirming squeamish: Don’t go there.
Its literal sense is of no concern. There, meaning “a place,” can be construed as an adverb modifying go or as a noun in its own right. But the figurative sense—of some undiscover’d country from whose bourn no shamefaced traveler returns—is what has gripped the bromide set.
It can mean “We’d better not talk about that.” Or “If our conversation reaches that subject, you will be uncomfortable and I will be chagrined.” Or “Now you’re getting into a touchy subject.” Or more severely, “Beware—you are approaching a taboo zone.”
Interviewing Dan Quayle, the former vice president, last spring before he withdrew from the presidential race, the Times reporter Melinda Henneberger noted this intelligent man’s abiding need to prove he was not stupid. “Waking up from a nap on the campaign plane, he asked what I was reading,” she wrote, “and it was Anna Karenina. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again a second later. ‘Russian, right?’ Then, a look of relief. Why, oh why, does he go there?”
Where is there in this figurative sense? It is not uncharted territory; on the contrary, it is a subject area all too well charted or remembered for its embarrassments by the person not eager to get back to that place.
“I suspect this may have had its origin in psychobabble,” writes Stephen Rosen of New York. “Where does it come from?”
Let’s go there. David Barnhart, editor of the Dictionary Companion that bears his name (I like that archaic locution), suggests that the proto-phrase for the expression is “I don’t want to go that route.” If so, the meaning has changed from “way of getting there” to “being there, unhappily.” The first lexicographic listing I can find is in Da Bomb!—the March 1997 dictionary of slang compiled by Judi Sanders’s intercultural communication class at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. It defined Don’t even go there simply as “Do not say that” and the shorter Don’t go there as “Don’t talk about it or mention it.” (That’s da bomb, by the way, is synonymous with the no-longer-so-cool cool.)
Tom Dalzell, the California slanguist, has no citation to offer but opines that “don’t go there started with black drag queens and then found its legs with Ricki Lake,” the talk-show host.
Barry Popik of the American Dialect Society found a 1994 usage of the imperative warning by the comic Martin Lawrence, talking to Entertainment Weekly about his Fox sitcom. “We started using the expressions ‘You go, girl!’ and ‘Don’t go there!’ ” Lawrence said, “and no one in television was doing that. No one. Now a lot of Fox shows are using the same stuff.”
Now that its roots and overusage have been exposed, we can hope for the early demise of the cliché. As Yogi Berra once put it, “That place is so popular that nobody goes there anymore.”
Referring to a popular restaurant, Yogi said, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” The eloquence is in the phrase, not just the thought.
Richard Schlesinger
New York, New York
Don’t Presume. Asked by one of his fellow candidates if he would commit to choosing a pro-life running mate, George W. Bush replied, “I think it’s incredibly presumptive for someone who has yet to earn his party’s nomination to be picking vice presidents.”
The cable commentator Laura Ingraham promptly picked up the error, pointing out that the word Governor Bush had in mind was presumptuous.
It’s a fairly common error, with both words based on the verb presume, from the Latin præsumere, “to take in advance.” That would now be put as “to take for granted,” as in “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” (If less certain, the newsman Henry Stanley would have used assume, “to suppose.” How did I get in darkest Africa?)
Presumptive means “probable,” based on a reasonable assumption, as in “Bush and Gore have been, for a year, the presumptive standard-bearers.” The meaning of presumptuous departs sharply from that, to “arrogant, assuming the unwarranted”—the presuming in that formulation to be unreasonable, not to mention uppity and pushy.
Few suffixes split the meaning so drastically from the root word. A subtler difference was examined some years ago, when a State Department spokesman denounced as contemptible an article of mine sneering at some feckless action of the then secretary. An alert reporter followed up with “Don’t you mean contemptuous?” To which the quick-thinking diplomat replied, “That, too.”
Doofusism. “Bush has been minimized and diminished by Hollywood liberals,” s
aid Lionel Chetwynd, a Hollywood conservative, about the new president, “and it’s reflected in all those Saturday Night Live sketches, which depict him as a doofus.”
The derogation doofus popped up in the ’60s and is usually thought to be an alteration of goofus, the noun form of goofy. However, the German doof means “dull-witted,” and there is this file entry in the Dictionary of American Regional English, harking to the ’50s: “As a boy growing up around adults who used German words, I heard ‘doofus’ a lot … to mean something like ‘you dumbass.’ “
The synonym dumb-ass made its third appearance in the New York Times two months ago when President Clinton was reported to have told Rolling Stone interviewer Jann Wenner, “And it was only then that I worked out with Colin Powell this dumb-ass ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing.”
The magazine immediately issued a correction, saying that its stenographer had erred in transcribing don’t ask as dumb-ass, which suggested that the president had repeated the phrase. The White House’s recording of the interview had been taped over, perhaps in a fit of frugality, and a Clinton spokesman was pleased to accept Rolling Stone’s apology.
Apparently the sensitivity to the possible use of the term stemmed from a notion that dumb-ass is a mild vulgarism referring to the posterior. More likely, it is a variant of jackass, the name of an innocent animal that bears the burden of frequent disparagement for stubbornness or stupidity.
Both as a modifier and as a noun, dumb-ass should be hyphenated as an aid to avert pronunciation of the silent b. Caution should be exercised in applying dumb to a person who is mute, because of the second sense of the word, meaning “unintelligent,” but as a noun, dumb-ass can be used without shame as a suitable synonym for doofus.
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 9
