The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Duckmanship. There should be no debate over the meaning of weaponized: a biological or chemical agent “put in a form that can be used effectively in a weapon.”

  Asked about “weapons grade” anthrax, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, replied: “You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent.” The scientist added, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.”

  Not quite. Coinage of this political aphorism is attributed to the labor leader Walter Reuther in the late 1930s, on how to identify a Communist: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it just may be a duck.”

  If it sounds like an old aphorism and works like an old aphorism …

  E

  Enchiladaville. The governor of California, Gray Davis, after meeting with President Bush about the energy shortage causing rolling blackouts in the Golden State, said, “The big enchilada, the thing that really matters, above all else, is temporary price relief.”

  The governor is wandering in a no-man’s-land between a whole enchilada and the big enchilada. A whole enchilada means “the entirety of a thing,” its synonyms “the whole ball of wax,” “whole nine yards,” “whole schmear” and the etymologically mysterious “whole shebang.” After Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, the former California governor Ronald Reagan said that Democrats, long the majority party in Congress, could no longer claim that divided government impeded progress. “The Democrats cannot fuzz up the issue by blaming the White House,” he said. “They’ve got the whole enchilada now.”

  The big enchilada is not a situation but a person. It is “the boss, the person of undoubted authority and influence, the one on top,” and from a law officer’s point of view, “the main target.” In a taped Watergate conversation in 1973, Bob Haldeman says of John Mitchell, the former attorney general, “He is as high up as they’ve got.” John Ehrlichman concurs, “He’s the big enchilada.” Queried about the coinage of this variant, Ehrlichman wrote me from jail a few years later: “I coined the phrase. I’ve cooked my own enchiladas for years. My California upbringing. Could have said ‘big fish’ or ‘top dog’ or ‘big cheese,’ I guess.”

  Governor Davis has been using big enchilada to mean, as he defines it himself, “the thing that really matters above all else”—the ne plus ultra, the “acme, ultimate” or “most profound degree.” In my view it confuses two distinct slang terms.

  An enchilada is a tortilla into which is rolled a mixture of meat or beans and seasoned with a sauce made of chili, a hot red pepper (the chil in enchilada). The entire thing can be eaten by a person of great influence in the dark.

  Your discussion of the whole enchilada included practically every variant. In fact, it might be said that you gave your readers the whole kit and caboodle. My immigrant mother loved this expression and made it her own, by combining Yiddish and English into de gantze caboodle.

  Sam Unterricht

  Hewlett, New York

  The End of Minority. The San Diego City Council last month voted to strike the word minority from official use.

  Ordinarily, I resist diktats about language from politicians (in which I am in a you-know-what), but in California, no racial or ethnic or linguistic group is in the majority. Does that make everybody a minority? Only to statisticians and demographers. First, a minority is a group, not an individual; you can say, “I am a member of a minority,“ but you strain the bounds of good usage when you say, “I am a minority.” This bound is strained frequently.

  Second, minority in the past half-century has taken on a meaning of “nonwhite.” Though white Jews, Muslims and Buddhists are also self-identified as minorities, the primary sense is clear: say, “I’m a minority American,” and everyone knows you mean you are black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian or whatever combination you told the census taker.

  The word gained that sense, says Fred R. Shapiro, who is editing the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, when the Supreme Court in the 1938 United States v. Carolene Products Co. referred in a footnote to religious, ethnic, national and racial groups as “discrete and insular minorities.” In 1949, the Journal of Negro Education first used the noun as an adjective in writing of “minority workers.”

  A turning point came when the Washington Post in 1977 reported, “Washington, the nation’s premier black city, with a minority population of more than 70 percent … ” The newspaper then asked itself, “A ‘minority’ population of more than 70 percent?” That it characterized as “racial math” and editorialized that it preferred the old, realistic math.

  In one of his final-week farewells, President Bill Clinton posed the profound question, “What will the terms majority and minority mean when there is no majority race in America?”

  He did not stay for an answer, but mine would be, Drop the racial sense of minority. They’re not crazy in San Diego.

  In the United States, non-Hispanic whites still make up the national majority. But more than half of the one hundred most populous cities have a nonwhite majority, which makes many whites a minority in their hometowns. That new minority is learning not to get waspish.

  Enjoy! A lissome Japanese waitress at the Yosaku restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, presented me with a bowl of Nabayaki Udon—thick noodles in broth with bits of chicken and shrimp—and then smiled and said, “Enjoy.”

  That is not a Japanese word. Indeed, that invitation to pleasure in eating is not an Asian attitude. According to my Times colleague Nicholas D. Kristof, author with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia, servers of food in Japan are likely to say honno okuchi yogoshi de gozaimasuga, “here’s a little something that will make your mouth dirty.” The idea is to apologize for the meal and to suggest humbly that it will not be enjoyable at all to the honored guest. The Chinese equivalent, as a mouthwatering repast is placed before the eater, is meishemma cai, or “this food is nothing much.”

  In American eateries, however, and in restaurants around the world that cater to English-speaking patrons, the new server’s imperative—Enjoy!—can be heard. The mock-stern but cheerful command is spreading like the Asian leguminous vine kudzu, rivaling the readily understood OK and the widely accepted no problem as a major American contribution to a universal language.

  Waiters (or servers, as the unisexy prefer to be called) in every culture have their national phrases to accompany the placement of a plate. Bon appétit, say the French, and the wish for a hearty appetite is expressed in Greek as kali orexi, in Spanish as buen provecho and in German as guten Appetit.

  A German waiter is as likely to say simply bitte, which usually means “please,” and the same idea is expressed in New York’s Russian Tea Room as pozhaluista. The closest translation of these would be the neutral comment of American hash slingers as they plonk down the plate: “There you go.”

  A British butler is likely to warn, “The plate is hot, Madam.” Until a decade or so ago, the Yiddish term was es gezunterheyt, “eat in good health”; the Gaelic equivalent is sláinte, “health.”

  But then along came the imperative, intransitive Enjoy! That exhortation has become so ubiquitous that in a Diner’s Bill of Rights concocted recently by Zagat’s restaurant survey, one of the inalienable rights of patrons was “for the waiter NOT to say ‘enjoy’ after the food is served.”

  How did it all begin? In his 1958 book, For 2 Cents Plain, Harry Golden wrote: “When my mother served our meals … she would always say, ‘Enjoy, enjoy.’ … The word enjoy was seldom used by itself. It was always repeated.” Accordingly, Golden’s next best seller was titled Enjoy, Enjoy! In 1968, the New York Times reporter Marylin Bender quoted the furrier Jacques Kaplan on the effects of inflation: “Whenever they felt money would lose its value, people would gorge themselves. It’s a dancing over the volcano attitude, an enjoy-enjoy philosophy.
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  Even as the dialectically duplicated verb lost its duplication on its journey to general usage, lexicographers noticed the way the hortatory Enjoy! did not transmit action to an object. Lillian Feinsilver wrote in her Yiddish dictionary in 1970 that enjoy as an intransitive verb “has become fairly common in recent years…. ‘Enjoy yourself ’ was abbreviated to the simple ‘Enjoy’ by the solicitous Jewish mother.” She noted the oddly intransitive usage by the violinist Mischa Elman: “I get a great kick out of life. I know how to enjoy.”

  Now, as a service to philological scholars, we examine the grammatical puzzlement contained in this seemingly simple food fiat. Enjoy yourself, meaning “have a good time,” is clearly reflexive, turning the verb’s action back on you, the understood subject. But the simple and now far more common Enjoy! poses the question: Enjoy what? The food? Yourself gorging the food? The object is indeterminate; the verb’s action does not know where to go.

  “When used solely in the imperative mood,” says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster’s New World Dictionaries, “the intransitive verb ‘enjoy ’ may well qualify as a ‘defective paradigm,’ whereby a word fails to exhibit the full range of expected inflections. How odd that a word of such felicitous intent seems to reveal itself only in the stern imperative.”

  Jeffrey McQuain, the new editor of the newsletter Copy Editor, calls the new use of Enjoy! “the implied intransitive” because it has no direct object but implies there should be one. He tracks the construction back to the ancient Eat! or the Italian Mangia! Mangia!

  “The implied intransitive is especially popular in sports shorthand,” McQuain says. “Coaches and fans yell their advice in the imperative mood without the subject (you) and without the object.” Thus, Bunt! could mean either “Bunt the ball” or “Bunt, you miserable hitter.”

  Beware the loss of clarity in the defective paradigm or the implied intransitive. Until recently, verbs could be transitive (I love you) or intransitive (I love). Ron Meyers of New York deplores the de-transitivizing trend, using as his examples “please wait while your credit card is authorizing“and “this book usually ships in three days.” What subject of the sentence is doing the authorizing or shipping? What object is the verb’s action being done to?

  Grammarians, lexicographers and all those living in syntax will find delectation in plunging into a deep, delicious analysis of this emerging phenomenon. And to those happy linguists we can only say …

  There are a lot of intransitive verbs in the language, and, when somebody tells you “Get lost!” you probably don’t wonder where you should get lost (since, of course, if everyone knew where, you wouldn’t be lost). What is wrong with enjoy, intransitive verb, meaning simply, “enjoy yourself; indulge in enjoyment”? There is nothing defective about a paradigm of a verb that, among many that have, has shifted from transitive to transitive/intransitive or even just intransitive.

  Laurence Urdang

  Old Lyme, Connecticut

  Your column leads in with a comment about how Japanese waitresses, uh, servers would never make a comment analogous to “enjoy” because it is non Asian, but instead would make some kind of self-deprecating remark that is comical to Western ears. Westerners love to trot out the whole Asian self-abnegation bit, but it is overblown.

  Sometimes one does encounter an echo of that self-deprecatory remark, but more likely your waitron will say something like “go-yukkuri dozo” (go ahead, relax, take your time) or just “dozo” (go ahead).

  Adam Rice

  Austin, Texas

  In your learned paper on the Rise of the Intransitive, you do not mention some of the predecessors of enjoy. By recent I mean of course those I have seen born and taking hold. Identify is one of them. One used to “identify oneself” with Dracula or some other favorite character. Again, to say he “converted to Catholicism” would have seemed strange before our blessed day. One said: “he was converted,” or “he converted himself,” or “became a convert.” I suspect that the intransitive grew out of “he converted to oil,” when “his furnace” is understood by the context. During the protests here against apartheid, universities and other philanthropies were urged “to divest,” that is, get rid of South African securities. “Divest!” sounds to me like the motto of the Strip-Tease Defense League.

  Matching the change in verb use is the reverse twist, as in rankle and boggle, now made transitive. It’s a pity in both cases. We need it rankles forthe festering thought of a slight or an insult, and the other for resisting, being reluctant, hesitating as the result of a shock. We have plenty of other words for the current boggle glued to “the mind” in the sense of discomfiting, bewildering, confusing.

  Jacques Barzun

  San Antonio, Texas

  Enroned. “I don’t want to Enron the American people,” said the Democrat Tom Daschle, defining the new verb in his next sentence. “I don’t want to see them holding the bag at the end of the day just like Enron employees have held the bag.”

  The workers who have been enroned (if we’re going to use the name as a general verb meaning “cheated,” drop the eponym’s initial capital, as we did with boycott and bork) are called Enronites. (This specific group of cheatees takes a capital.)

  Other energy-related companies, wrote Bethany McLean in Fortune, “disclaimed any sort of Enronesque behavior.” In forming an adjective, -esque strikes me as a more elegant suffix than -ish, as in enronish or the less critical enronlike. (Child-ish is “puerile, immature,” always with a pejorative connotation, while child-like is “innocent,” always endearing.)

  Michael Wolff, a columnist for New York magazine, committed a late hit on Tina Brown when her Talk magazine folded, describing the buzz-worthily glamorous editor as “a little enronish.” This caused the linguistically savvy Jim Sullivan of the Boston Globe to note that the adjective “enronish captures the spirit of the big magazine cannonball but not its style. It is clunky. Enronian rolls off the tongue. Someone responsible for large-scale destruction is then an ‘enronista.’ The process of destruction: enronism. The verb is simply the name, as in ‘He got enroned last Thursday.’ “

  Note the general agreement about the spelling of the verb. The o in En-ron is pronounced ah, as in “on,” and not oh, as in “throne.” When adding -ed after the single n, however, the word appears to invite the pronunciation rhyming with “enthroned.” Should we, then, double the n to produce enronned? No. If this has been worrying you, stop worrying. The analogy to follow is that of environ, as in Lincoln’s “I am environed with difficulties”—one n, pronounced ah, not oh. To enron has a lot more snap than the unimaginative to enronize.

  The suffix -on is considered by corporate image makers in the energy and technology fields to be a futuristic syllable—hence Exxon and Chevron, Raytheon and Micron. In the naming of the merged Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth companies in 1986, the consultants Lippincott & Margulies suggested Enteron, of Greek origin, which began with the first syllable of energy and concluded with the slick, with-it on. What’s more, a specialized industrial sense of enteron was reported to be “a pipeline system transmitting nourishment.”

  However, when it was pointed out to the directors that the common medical meaning of enteron was “alimentary canal, intestines, guts,” company officials hastily demanded that a new name be found evocative of energy and the future but with no suggestion of upset stomach or bowel movement. I confirmed this history of corporate nomenclature in a call to Mark Palmer, a spokesman for the bankrupt company. “Legend has it,” he added, “that they told the naming firm that they had twenty-four hours to come up with something else or they wouldn’t pay them a plug nickel—and they came up with Enron.” Palmer seemed relieved that was all he was being asked about.

  The namers did not worry about the association with football’s end run or the possible play on “take the money enron.” In future corporate naming, en- is very likely to be avoided as a prefix, and the suffix -on is off.

  Er, um (ahem).
A well-watched Russian newscast called Naked Truth is anchored by a woman with a serious expression who slowly strips as she recounts the major events of the day. The weather forecaster is topless. Above the AP article about this news uncoverage, the Seattle Times carried the headline “Russian Anchorwomen Do the Nudes, er, News.”

  At about the same time last year, the New York Times headlined an article about Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Senate using that same representation of a verbal delay: “The Wonk, er, Woman Behind Mrs. Clinton.”

  These are examples in headlines of the arch pause. In olden times, writers drew attention to puns, nice turns of phrase or metaphors that the inattentive reader might otherwise miss with so to speak, as it were or if you will. Now the preferred little alarm to awake the sleepy is the written er, um, uh, ah, well or, for extreme throat-clearing, ahem.

  The signification of the arch pause with an er or an um is rampant in journalese. It says, “Here comes a little witticism, you ninny,” as in this usage by Al Kamen in the Washington Post: “Loop fans will recall Tuesday’s item on Monica S. Lewinsky preparing to field questions from law students in Manhattan that night as part of an upcoming HBO special. It was quite an, um, affair.” That meaning of the pause—“Gee, but I’m being naughty here”—recently extended to the gardening pages of the New York Times: “The spring peeper, Pseudacris crucifer,” croaked Anne Raver in a delightful piece about frogs, “is one of the chorus frogs, so-called because of its joyful song heralding warmer weather and, ahem, the joys of mating.”

  Sometimes the arch pause says, “I am understating,” as in the Times columnist Gail Collins’s “The wounds of the primary campaign have, um, not exactly healed.” At other times, the writer, as if wondering, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” asks the reader’s pardon for having the audacity to wax metaphoric, as in my colleague Paul Krugman’s reference to “the renewed enthusiasm of Americans for huge, gas-guzzling vehicles—an enthusiasm, er, fueled by cheap gas.” In the same way, Andrew Coyne of Canada’s National Post wrote last month that an energy report’s “call for increasing capacity on interstate transmission lines is, er, well grounded.”