The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  I care not what semantic course others may take; as for me, give me current meaning or give me death. Time for the Supremes to bow to the inexorability of common usage, a kind of Tenth Amendment of language change. Most people take federalism to mean “dominated by the federal government,” much as the empire-building Hamilton intended. In this, Chief Justice Rehnquist is behind the times.

  Thus, the headline words “in Blow to Federalism,“ which meant “anti-central government,” were correctly up to date; it would have been even better stated as “in Blow to Federalizing.” Norma Loquendi’s final decision is remanded to the court for reversal.

  You used the phrase, “certiorari accepted,” in apparent mimicry of the Supreme Court’s exercise of its discretionary jurisdiction to review lower-court decisions. In asking the Court to consider a case, a lawyer files a petition for a writ of certiorari; such a writ would direct a lower court to certify the record of a case for review (certiorari = that it be certified). If four members of the Court vote in favor of the petition, the Court “grants” a writ of certiorari, an action often shortened to “cert. granted.” Thus, certiorari is not accepted or rejected, it is granted or denied.

  Again in apparent imitation of judicial locutions, you declare that “Norma Loquendi’s final decision is remanded to the court for reversal.” When the Supreme Court decides against a lower-court decision, it does not send the case back for reversal; it reverses the decision itself and then remands the case to the inferior court. A common formulation would be that “the decision below is reversed and the case remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion”; this diplomatic form of words leaves the lower court with a measure of latitude in deciding how to deal with the reversal.

  J. William Doolittle

  Washington, D.C.

  You assert that the word “federalism” was “coined in 1788 by Patrick Henry.” This appears to be a well-researched assertion, perhaps derived from a search in the American Memory database, pointing to Henry’s usage of “federalism” on June 6, 1788. The citation improves upon the Oxford English Dictionary’s 1793 dating and the June 14, 1788, first use in the Dictionary of Americanisms.

  A search in the Accessible Archives database, however, yields an earlier example of this word. A December 26, 1787, “letter from a gentleman in Salem” quoted in the January 16, 1788, issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, includes the following sentence: “For before the federalism of a HANCOCK, a BOWDOIN, a DANA, a KING, and many other illustrious characters, who are members of the convention, anti-federalism must droop, and recoil in silent shame.”

  Fred R. Shapiro

  Editor, The Yale Dictionary of Quotations

  New Haven, Connecticut

  Finagle. Reporting from the recent Arab summit meeting in Beirut, Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times wrote that some participants could be found wandering through the smoke-filled hotel lobby talking to “reporters who finagle their way through dragnet security.”

  The use of that apparent Yiddishism in covering an Arab event struck me as amusing. I turned to Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish for a rundown on finagle—and could not find it.

  That’s because it is not a Yiddishism. (Funny, you don’t look English.) Like mishmash, which dates to 15th-century English, the verb finagle is a word that sounds Germanic. It rhymes with bagel, from the Old High German verb boug, “to bend.” (A store in Boston calls itself Finagle a Bagel.)

  The verb appears occasionally in the Times, especially in the entertainment sections, not in quotation marks. Describing the movie Family Man: “the plot allows him to finagle his way back to Wall Street.” Describing Richard Wagner’s Ring operas: “You cannot pursue power without sabotaging love; you cannot have love without relinquishing power. Wotan tries to finagle this.”

  That’s because it is not slang, but a once-special term now in such general use that it has shed its dialect status. One proposed origin is in the southwest English shires: fainaigue, “to cheat; to renege on a debt; to deceive by flattery,” perhaps associated with the Old French fornier, “to deny.”

  However, the Dictionary of American Regional English speculates that it may be an eponym from Gregor von Feinaigle, a “German proponent of mnemonics who lectured (and was often ridiculed) in England and France.” (It’s an easy way to remember his name.)

  Finagler first appeared in the United States in 1922. In current use, the element of outright cheating has faded; its primary sense is no longer “to obtain by trickery or dishonest means.” Deft deception now dominates: finagle, as we use it today, is “to slyly gain entry or advantage; skillfully to employ a devious scheme to achieve one’s ends.” A finagler is one who knows the ins and outs of power brokerage and favor exchange, who finds ways to exploit the weaknesses of others, who knows how to use indirection to gain leverage and win some small but useful advantage.

  A crook he’s not; a devious schemer the finagler remains, drawing minor opprobrium for his methods as well as a tut-tutting admiration for his ability to deliver results.

  In chemistry at Brooklyn College in the fifties, to use “Finagle’s Constant” was to create data to support a predetermined result. It’s also interesting that “finagle” rhymes with “inveigle,” which has meanings, or at least connotations, that overlap “finagle.” See if you can finagle to inveigle Hegel out of his bagel.

  Martin Smith

  Ypsilanti, Michigan

  Fire That Wall. The hot new word in primary politics this season is firewall.

  Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, told the Gannett News Service that in thirteen state contests after the New Hampshire primary, “virtually every one of those states presents the possibility of a firewall.” (In a parody in the Weekly Standard, Rove was shown to be conducting “Operation Firewall.”)

  “In the past week,” said Dan Schnur, John McCain’s communications director, “you’ve started to see the Bush people talk about Michigan as a firewall.”

  The word clearly has a Bush connotation. In a United Press International dispatch in 1989 about the political genius of the GOP’s Lee Atwater, it was noted that “what clinched the nomination was a political firewall Atwater constructed with the pack of Southern primaries on Super Tuesday.”

  Jeffrey Birnbaum wrote in the Wall Street Journal just after that 1988 campaign that Bush’s strategy “was to lock into place a political firewall in the Midwest to prevent any late surge by Democrat Michael Dukakis.”

  In political parlance, the word means “an unassailable political barrier; a front-running state campaign denying a creditable showing to a challenger who must do well in that area for his or her underdog campaign to sur-vive.”

  The word is also used more generally. The Alliance for Worker Retirement Security accused President Clinton of trying to “break the traditional firewall between Social Security and income taxes.” The Washington Post noted in 1987 that Reagan officials said they were “committed to nurturing the contras as a firewall against Communism.” The word is stronger than bulwark and not as rickety as rampart; it has replaced the earlier seawall.

  In his 1951 Dictionary of Americanisms, Mitford Mathews cited a 1759 transaction of the Moravian Historical Society regarding the proper way to build a house: “the chimney and firewall shall be made strictly according to the draft.” The wall built to prevent the spread of fire was extended metaphorically to a barrier against anything harmful. More recently, in computer lingo, a firewall is a security system set up to protect a network from direct attack by hackers through the Internet; in politics, it is now the preventive preferred by strategists who, if the firewall fails, turn to damage control.

  In an aircraft with the engine in front, the firewall is the fireproof barrier between the engine compartment and the crew/passenger compartment. In flying, it is sometimes urgently necessary to go to full power, which is done by pushing the throttle(s) all the way in (or forward), i.e. towards the firewall, hence the verb “to firewall”
the engines.

  Professor Steven H. Weintraub

  Louisiana State University

  Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  Fog of War. “The early days of any battle introduce what’s called the fog of war,“ said Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, “and we’re still looking through that fog to find the truth.” Senator Hillary Clinton used the same military metaphor: “We need to cut through the bureaucratic and turf battles…. We need to cut through the fog of war here at home.”

  They were speaking of the frustrating investigation into the source of anthrax in the mail. This picked up on the repeated uses of the phrase at the embattled Defense Department regarding the air campaign in Afghanistan. Asked if he could be sure that Osama bin Laden would not try to escape to another country, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied: “I can’t be sure of anything in life. In the fog of war, it is a confused picture on the ground. Half of the 24 hours is darkness, there’s a bit of a problem with dust in that region and weather’s going to get bad soon. You can’t be sure of anything.” General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, later chimed in with “In the fog of war, things happen that you don’t expect.” Twelve years before, a predecessor of his at that job, Admiral William Crowe, extended that uncertainty principle; he said that his Pentagon officers “hear a lot about the fog of war, but they’ve also learned that the fog of peacetime is rather mind-boggling as well.”

  This fog originally crept in on the little cat feet of Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian strategist whose 1832 book, On War, guided generals of many nations through the wars of the 20th century. Using the direct literal translation of the 19th century, his words were “The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not unfrequently—like the effect of a fog or moonshine—gives to things exaggerated dimension and an unnatural appearance.” (In the same book,Vom Kriege in German, published one year after his death, Clausewitz wrote, “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” Few books are immortal-quotation twofers.)

  In a two-front war such as we are now experiencing, the phrase is also used to recall past periods of confusion and apprehension and to offer per-spective: “Right after Pearl Harbor,” said Representative Lindsey Graham of South Carolina after the anthrax scare forced the House of Representatives into recess, “this country was in a bit of a fog of war. It took us a while to get up and running. But over time, we got our footing.”

  My colleague in columny down the hall, Maureen Dowd, found a way to turn the phrase around. She evoked the terrorist danger from spores and viruses sprayed in a fine mist: “We know about the fog of war. Now we learn about the war of fog.”

  Foot/Hoof in/and Mouth. We need a cure for the confusion surrounding the common name for aftosa.

  “In Britain today,” reported Peter Jennings on ABC six weeks ago, “the government has now confirmed twelve separate cases of hoof-and-mouth disease.” For his American audience, he explained, “We call it foot-and-mouth disease here.”

  He may have it turned around; for example, in a 1978 Supreme Court decision about waste disposal, Justice Rehnquist, not yet chief justice, wrote in dissent that New Jersey must “treat New Jersey cattle suffering from hoof-and-mouth disease.” Noting that, Timothy Crowley of Tulane Law School adds, “I have never seen a hoofed animal with a foot.”

  The confusion extends further. A year earlier, a dispatch from the Wall Street Journal’s Marcus Brauchli in Shanghai gave the two terms a different differentiation, noting that the fast-spreading disease was “known as hoof-and-mouth in cattle and foot-and-mouth in hogs.” That may not be correct, either.

  To the origin: the earliest citation in the OED is from an 1862 Edinburgh Veterinary Review: “Cows affected with the foot-and-mouth disease.” When that nomenclature crossed the Atlantic to the United States in 1869, Harper’s Weekly put it that Liverpool was informing the State Department that “a contagion called murrain, or hoof-and-mouth disease, has broken out.” The Dictionary of Americanisms lists hoof-and-mouth as an Americanism, citing an 1884 use here and defining it as “the foot-and-mouth disease.”

  As foot predominated in Britain, hoof had the usage edge in the U.S. In the 1963 western movie Hud, starring Paul Newman as a cattle rancher, hoof was the word employed, causing Bill Cosby to do a comedy routine he called “Hoof and Mouth,” reviewing the movie from a cow’s point of view.

  But the U.S. Department of Agriculture has always resolutely followed the British Ministry of Agriculture’s preference for foot, and leading American dictionaries have gone along. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage directs us unequivocally to use the foot, sternly warning “not hoof-and-mouth.” (The Times also prefers the plural hooves, but it behooves me to use hoofs.)

  I’m sorry about those lexicographical and official diktats about striking hoof, because further confusion is caused by the shortening of and after foot, which is often heard as in. We never hear ham ’n’ eggs as ham in eggs, but we do hear foot ’n’ mouth as foot in mouth. That’s because of a similar expression, to put your foot in your mouth, defined as “to commit a gaffe” or by the bureaucratic locution “to misspeak.” The expression is rooted in Jonathan Swift’s 1738 “The bishop has put his foot in it” and was carried forward when a 1984 collection of stories by Saul Bellow was titled Him with His Foot in His Mouth.

  In the early ’50s, when Eisenhower Defense Secretary “Engine Charlie” Wilson showed a lack of sympathy for the unemployed by saying he preferred bird dogs to kennel dogs, he admitted that some of his cabinet colleagues “seem to think I have foot-in-mouth disease.”

  That play on words has since been used often to deride the tendency of politicians to commit verbal blunders. In 2001 at the Gridiron Dinner, where political figures and journalists poke fun at themselves and one another, President George W. Bush acknowledged his habit of tripping over his tongue with the line “You know that foot ’n’ mouth disease rampant in Europe? I’ve got it.” Such wordplay will become muted as concern rises about the possible spread to the U.S. of the real cattle, sheep and swine disease.

  Relatedly, another cattle affliction is raising even greater worries: bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known formally by its initials BSE and more widely as mad cow disease. Unlike foot-and-mouth disease (which the French call la fièvre aphteuse after its virus and the Germans call Maul- und Klauenseuche, “jaws, muzzle or snout and claw, paw or hoof “), BSE can be transmitted to humans, in rare cases.

  Mad cow, probably bottomed on mad dog, was coined or first used in 1988 by David Brown, then agricultural correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph and now editor of the Daily Telegraph. He chose mad because “the cattle went from being very placid and calm to raging beasts, suddenly berserk.” He recalls that the name “took off very slowly” but then “just cranked itself up.”

  I have been told, no reference, that the change in the nomenclature occurred because horses have hooves but do not get the disease.

  Bernadine Z. Paulshock, MD

  Wilmington, Delaware

  Forward, Lean! In Warsaw, George W. Bush used a vivid figure of speech in responding to a question about European reaction to his plans for an American missile defense: “I was very pleased to see how forward-leaning many nations were during our discussion.” A week later, he repeated the compound adjective in answering a question from Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal about global warming: Bush found a “different attitude” among European Union leaders, who were “a little more forward-leaning“ about it.

  That word-picture of a crouch of cooperation, or a tilt toward tomorrow, appeals to him. On the eve of his second mission to Europe, asked about his desire to include in NATO the democratic countries nearest Russia, the president said, “We ought to be very forward-leaning toward those countries.”

  What does this fast-spreading trope mean? Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press
secretary, uses it in the sense of “premature”: “I think it’s just a tad forward-leaning to call that quite a ‘proposal’ at this time.” George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, uses it to mean “open,” as in his core dump of five million pages of old classified documents: “It reflects my commitment to be as forward-leaning as possible in releasing information that with the passage of time no longer needs to be protected.”

  A quite different sense is “aggressive”: a former Justice Department prosecutor, asked by two Times reporters about the present reluctance to bring charges against Iranian officials in a major terrorist bombing case, demanded to know, “Why haven’t we been more forward-leaning on Iran?” This picks up on an early definition by Morton Kondracke in a 1987 New Republic, holding that the Reagan National Security Council staff was peopled with hyperactivists: “subordinates who were ‘forward-leaning’—bold, imaginative and aggressive.”

  Yet another meaning is “advanced,” as in Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania’s applause for the Bush administration’s “forward-leaning 21st-century energy plan.” Vice President Dick Cheney gave it a sense of “eager” when asked about his boss’s appearance of remoteness from the press when relaxing on his ranch: “We’ve been criticized for being too forward-leaning. Now you suggest maybe we’re too laid-back.” I have been bending over backward here to permit the reported usage to determine the hot modifier’s primary meaning. Time now for a semantic judgment.