The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Through the good e-offices of William O. Goggins, deputy editor of Wired magazine, I tracked down Ted Nelson, the coiner of hypertext, now a visiting professor at the University of Southampton in Britain. Though some trace his idea to a 1945 work by Vannevar Bush, the coinage was in an August 1965 paper by Nelson titled “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate.”

  Warming up before coming across with his definition, Nelson tells me he doesn’t like the use of intelligent as a combining form, “which generally means ‘stupid’—as in ‘intelligent cars,’ where the lights stay on after you leave to show your possessions to thieves, or ‘intelligent agents,’ which means remote programs that will be even less controllable than the ones you now buy.” (Yeah, like letters on my screen that turn blue, unasked. This is my kind of guy.)

  Nelson considers hypertext to be “the manifest destiny of literature—breaking out of the imprisoning four walls of paper.” By “literature” he means “media that we contemplate and keep,” including recordings, movies, sheet music and whatnot, “which can be nonsequential and par-allel.”

  In the old-fashioned written texts, Nelson writes, “thoughts have always tried to wriggle free, escaping through every possible loophole—into parentheses, footnotes, marginal glosses, headlines and subheads, headings and captions and parallelism of layout and structure—perhaps most magnificently in the Talmud, but effusively and gloriously in the last century’s books and magazines, dust jackets and medical texts with celluloid overlays.”

  He deplores the way “the tekkies want to colonize this as their own fiefdom, claiming these literary, artistic and cognitive realms as ‘technology,’ and the result is the broken and clumsy formats of the Web, with only one-way links, no version management, no principled reuse and no copyright solution.”

  Just as I was about to tap him on the shoulder to get to my question, he e-mailed, “OK, the definition already.” It is “nonsequential writing with free user movement.” Let’s figure that out: “nonsequential” means not along a time line or insistent that b follow a, but allowing the reader to use many different branches and explore alternatives along other pathways. You don’t like a happy ending? Veer off to one where heroes die of heartbreak. In Nelson’s definition, “free user movement” means “not constrained by forms like adventure games and computer-assisted instruction, where the writing may be nonlinear but the user has little or no explicit freedom.”

  That’s clear enough; my own prose about language is crisscrossed with parenthetical tangents that reflect the maze in a maven’s mind. But why call it hyper, which in medicine can mean “pathologically excessive”? (To hypertext at this point, that was what the Frenchman was indicating.) “Because hyper in mathematics means approximately ‘extended, generalized and multidimensional,’” answers Nelson. “Hyperspace means a space with more than three dimensions, and a hypercube is a cube in more than three dimensions. Nothing wrong with that!”

  Thus, Americans accused of being an arrogant hyperpower can, by means of hypertext, access the pejorative comments and contemptuous cartoons in all the nations of the tiers monde following France’s anti-unipolar lead and thereby get thoroughly hyper .

  I

  In a Persian Mirror. “With words we govern men,” said Benjamin Disraeli. To which we have a corollary: by proverbs we enliven copy. Adages never age.

  The insightful and gutsy reporting from Iran of Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times has led to a book, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran. Seemingly in passing, but actually to illuminate culture, she tosses in local proverbs.

  For decades, adage-trackers have sought the origin of what John F. Kennedy described only as an old saying: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The earliest pre-Kennedy use we have found so far is in a 1951 film, The Desert Fox, spoken by a German general. But Sciolino cites a Persian proverb that suggests its source may be in folk wisdom from another land and an ancient time: “Winners have large families, but losers are orphans.”

  She learned another saying from a filmmaker willing to discuss censorship while inside Iran, but never while abroad. Why, if Persians have the courage to complain of repression at home, are they reluctant to criticize the regime when abroad? “As my father used to say, ‘If your head breaks, it is better that it breaks in your own hat.’”

  A third proverb strikes the Western ear as arcane, referring as it does to a flaky confection of crushed sesame seeds in honey, but might be the sort of wisdom to impart to political candidates lagging in public-opinion polls: “Have patience, and I’ll make halvah for you from unripe grapes.”

  In Word Heaven. In his youth, your leering great-grandfather dated a chorus girl. Your grandfather, his leer slightly modified in the 1930s, dated a chorine. And what did your father call the dancer he dated, after both chorus girl and chorine gained a ditzy or lascivious connotation?

  If he was in showbiz, he called her a terp (from Terpsichore, the muse of dance) or a gypsy, and was invited, along with the cast’s families, to the rehearsal called “the gypsy run-through.” If he was a stage-door Johnny, Pops called the object of his affection what we call her today: a dancer .

  That’s because the choreographer Agnes de Mille changed the nature of the chorus in the 1943 musical play Oklahoma! The stereotype of the bored, gum-chewing, leg-pumping chorine was transformed into the reality of dancing actors and singers. Even the performers in A Chorus Line in 1975 were not labeled chorines or chorus boys; they were identified as members of the troupe or ensemble or just dancers and principal dancers .

  This raises the question (no, not begs the question, which has to do with circular obfuscation): where do words like chorine go when they fall into what Grover Cleveland called “innocuous desuetude”? We remember them; we know what they mean; but not even old fogies use them anymore. What happens to these ghostly darlings?

  “Whenever we edit a new edition of one of our dictionaries,” says Joe Pickett, executive editor of American Heritage, “we consider which words we should delete.” He’s like a cowboy forced to shoot a favorite old horse. “We have to be careful about what we consider to be a ‘dead word.’” People still find obsolete terms in old books and turn to the dictionary expecting to find their meanings.

  In 1998, Pickett was on the verge of eliminating chad to make room for one of the many new words rushing into the language: “What could be more insignificant than those little bits of paper punched out from cards used in an obsolete computing technology?” But because there was still occasional use involving elections, his lexicographers left it in—“and are we glad we did.” It became the hottest word of the year 2000.*

  What became of the noun motorcar, or the verb motoring? Roadkill, both of them, along with dreams of leggy chorines who were the bee’s knees in the rumble seat. And where is centigrade today, now that Anders Celsius’s last name has replaced it? Centi- became ambiguous when the metric system came along: did it mean one hundred or one-hundredth? And the last syllable—grade—could mean step or degree .

  Language mavens no longer use tautology; it has been thrust aside by redundancy (and when I am caught out erring along those lines, the Squad Squad has a pleonasm).

  Dictionaries have no labels for words that are still in use but seem to be breathing their last. When no use is recorded after 1755 (when Samuel Johnson published his dictionary), most lexicographers mark it “obsolete”; if the word is only occasionally used after that glorious watershed date, it’s marked “archaic.” But how are we to warn those who turn to dictionaries for guidance that industrialist is passé and financier hopelessly out of it?

  Whole phrases die, too. When I chastised the FBI recently for denying the existence of what every crime reporter knows is called the Cold Case squad, an e-mail message came in asking about another cold case: the Dead Letter Office. I called the Postal Service to see if the phrase was still in use and was told by its forthright spokesman, Gerry Kreienkamp, tha
t “we no longer have a ‘Dead Letter Office.’ We stopped using those words in 1994. There are three Mail Recovery Centers, in Atlanta, St. Paul and San Francisco, where letters with no discernible address for either the recipient or the sender are sent.” What if I mailed a letter addressed to the Dead Letter Office with no return address? Where would it be delivered? Long pause. “To one of our three Mail Recovery Centers, I suppose.”

  I like to think of these words and phrases as unforgotten angels in a Word Heaven, ready to revisit the language when the need for them arises. Hussy, for example, was originally a phonetic reduction of housewife and came to mean “a mischievous, ill-behaved woman.” As it faded from memory, Alan Herbert rose in Parliament to deliver his first, or “maiden,” speech to the House of Commons, by tradition a mild and deferential effort. When it came across as fiery and substantive, Winston Churchill promptly denounced this “maiden” as “a brazen hussy of a speech.” And so a delicious old word was saved; no such luck for chorine .

  The distinction that I—and, I believe, many of my colleagues-make between Obsolete and Archaic is that the former means that the word, expression, or sense is no longer in use, and the latter refers to a word that is essentially obsolete but is used occasionally to evoke a sense of times gone by. Words like pantywaist I should probably label as obsolete; a word like yclept, which crops up either facetiously or evocatively in speech and writing now and then, I should label as archaic.

  Laurence Urdang

  Old Lyme, Connecticut

  The phrase “brazen hussy” has been immortalized in the name of a variant of a common European plant, the Lesser Celandine (Ranunculus ficaria ). Some years ago the renowned English garden writer and plantsman, Christopher Lloyd, noticed plants with chocolate brown to bronze leaves. He christened them “Brazen Hussy” and they are now cultivated on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA, the name “Brazen Hussy” has also been applied to a cultivar of the Plantain Lily (Hosta) that has bright yellow leaves.

  Victoria Matthews

  Denver, Colorado

  Infamy. The first draft of President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to Congress for a declaration of war began, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history.” In his second draft, he crossed out “world history” and substituted a condemnatory word that was far more memorable: infamy .

  Though its adjective, infamous, was frequently used, the noun infamy was less familiar. It means “evil fame, shameful repute, notorious disgrace” and befitted the nation’s shock at the bloody destruction at Pearl Harbor, a successful surprise blow that was instantly characterized by the victim nation as a “sneak attack.”

  The word, with its connotation of wartime shock and horror, was chosen by headline writers to label the terrorist attack on New York and Washington that demolished the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a portion of the Pentagon. In newspapers and on television, the historical day of infamy was the label chosen, along with the more general “attack on America.”

  The killers were hijackers. This Americanism, origin unknown, was first cited in 1912 as to kick up high jack, which Dialect Notes defined as “to cause a disturbance”; ten years later, a book about hobos noted “hi-jacking, or robbing men at night when sleeping in the jungles.” In the 1960s, as terrorists began seizing control of airliners, the verb skyjack was coined, but it has since fallen into disuse.

  The suicidal hijackers were able to slip a new weapon through the metal detectors: a box cutter, defined in the on-top-of-the-news New Oxford American Dictionary as “a thin, inexpensive razor-blade knife designed to open cardboard boxes.” Barbara Olson, a passenger aboard the airliner doomed to be crashed into the Pentagon, was able to telephone her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson; she told him that the hijackers were armed with knives and what she called a cardboard cutter .

  These terrorists were suicide bombers, a phrase used in a 1981 Associated Press dispatch by Tom Baldwin in Lebanon about the driving of an explosives-laden car into the Iraqi Embassy. In 1983, Newsweek reported that “the winds of fanaticism have blown up a merciless throng of killers: the assassins, thugs, kamikazes-and now the suicide bombers .”

  Kamikaze is Japanese for “divine wind,” a reference to a storm in the 13th century that blew away a fleet of invading Mongols. In World War II, the word described suicidal pilots who dived their planes into enemy ships. English has now absorbed the word: Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal wrote last week that airline policy “was turned upside down by these kamikaze fanatics.”

  Hunt, like President Bush and many others, called these acts of murder-suicide cowardly. That is not a modifier I would use, nor would I employ its synonym dastardly (though FDR did), which also means “shrinking from danger.” If anything, the suicide bomber or suicide hijacker is maniacally fearless, the normal human survival instinct overwhelmed by hatred or brainwashed fervor. Senseless and mindless are other mistaken modifiers of these killings: the sense, or evil purpose, of modern barbaric murder is to carry out a blindly worshipped leader’s desire to shock, horrify and ultimately intimidate the target’s civilized compatriots.

  Another word that deserves a second look is justice. Both Senator John McCain and Bush adviser Karen Hughes called for “swift justice” to be meted out to the perpetrators, ordinarily a sentiment widely shared. But the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “There should be no talk of bringing these people to ‘swift justice.’ … An open act of war demands a military response, not a judicial one.”

  The leading suspect at the center of the terror campaign is Osama bin Laden. The bin, meaning “son of,” is not capped;Westerners have chosen not to capitalize the Arabic just as they have often chosen to capitalize the Hebrew Ben, which has the same meaning. This has nothing to do with correctness; it is strictly idiosyncratic convention, varying among regions and stylists. (When starting a sentence with bin Laden’s name, Times style calls for capitalizing it, which then looks like a mistake.) Bin Laden has been given a shorthand, bogus title, much like vice overlord, fugitive financier and drug kingpin: his is terrorist mastermind .

  The name of his organization, Al Qaeda, means “the base,” in looser modern Arabic, “the military headquarters.” His host in Afghanistan is the Taliban, a religio-political group whose name means “those who seek.” The Arab word talib, “student,” has been given a Persian suffix, -an, which is an unusual amalgam or was a mistake.

  The Taliban (proper noun construed as plural) harbor bin Laden and the base of his organization. That is now becoming a political verb with a vengeance.

  “We will make no distinction,” President Bush said, “between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” A key sense of the verb harbor is “to give shelter and concealment to wrongdoers.” The next day, Bush used the noun form creatively: “This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe, but they won’t be safe forever.” That was an extension of the noun’s present meaning of “place of shelter, haven, port” to “place where evildoers think they are out of reach of punishment.”

  Finally, the word terrorist. It is rooted in the Latin terrere, “to frighten,” and the -ist was coined in France to castigate the perpetrators of the Reign of Terror. Edmund Burke in 1795 defined the word in English: “Those hell-hounds called terrorists … are let loose on the people.”

  The sternly judgmental word should not be avoided or euphemized. Nobody can accurately call those who plotted, financed and carried out the infamous mass slaughter of September 11 militants, resistance fighters, gunmen, partisans or guerrillas. The most precise word to describe a person or group who murders even one innocent civilian to send a political message is terrorist .

  I can explain where the -an in Talib-an came from: -an is the regular animatemasculine plural ending in Pashto, the native language of the vast majorityof the Taliban. The close relationship between Persian and Pashto accounts for their having identical plural markers.

  Barbara Robso
n, PhD

  Arlington, Virginia

  Invest. “The Northern Alliance does not want to physically enter Kabul,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell on the Nov. 11, 2001,Meet thePress, expressing more of a diplomat’s hope than stating a fact. “So we think it’d be better if they were to invest—if I can pull an old military term out of my background—invest the city, make it untenable for the Taliban to continue to occupy Kabul, and then we’ll see where we are.”

  In the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol saw in Powell’s use of that military sense of the verb the essence of two different strategies that had riven the State and Defense departments in the first two months of war in Afghanistan. “The key word was ‘invest,’” they wrote, “by which Powell meant surround but not enter.” State’s priority was to create a new coalition government; Defense’s priority was to help the anti Taliban fighters take the city. The Pentagon’s view prevailed, and the city was entered rather than invested .

  It was not Powell’s first use of the verb in its military sense, cautioning the northern fighters. He told India Today two weeks before that “they want to at least invest Kabul. Whether they go into Kabul or not, or whether that’s the best thing to do or not, remains to be seen.”

  The verb’s original meaning is rooted in the Latin vestire, “to dress, clothe.” A vestment is a ceremonial robe; a vest is a sleeveless garment now worn more by stylish women than by male business executives.

  Now comes the connection with Powell’s meaning. The transitive verb to vest has since 1583 meant “to envelop a person with an article of clothing.” A couple of months ago, when the newspaper publisher Conrad Black became a member of Britain’s House of Lords, his induction was called an investiture as well as an ennoblement. Jonathan Swift, in his 1704 Tale of a Tub, extended the meaning with a metaphor: “They held the Universe to be a large suit of clothes which invests every thing.” This sense of the verb is defined by “to cover, to surround with a garment.”