The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time
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Do you go for that as I do? Let us pledge, then, to swap long words for short ones. At first, you may find it hard to join this cause, but it is not as hard as you may think to pick nouns that shine, to choose verbs that stun and to use fresh tropes that sing. The need is real and the good it will do will make your spouse proud and your work sell. No, the trend toward a taut style should not be scoffed at as just a blip—you can bet your life it will last for years. Think of it: crisp talk warms hearts, and prose packed with punch is sure to make you stand out in a crowd. Give it a shot.
I share your liking for short words. Nothing raises the goose bumps like Lady Macbeth’s: “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” or Churchill’s: “Blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
However, there is another factor that affects length of words: short words are generally of Anglo-Saxon origin, while longer words tend to come from Norman-French. In your last monosyllabic paragraph of about 130 words only eight are clearly of Latin, Greek or French origin; the rest are Anglo-Saxon.
This wonderful concoction called the English language is still an imperfect blend of the two main linguistic strains. If you closed your eyes and listened to the conversation in any barrack room on either side of the Atlantic, you could be excused for wondering if the Norman Conquest had ever taken place.
John Binsted
San Mateo, California
Kibosh. In denying a newspaper report that the United States had ordered a halt to accepting the surrender of Al Qaeda terrorists, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said, “To my knowledge, the U.S. did not nix, stop or put the kibosh on anything.”
Nix is “to refuse, deny,” from the German negative nichts. And the meaning of to put the kibosh on is widely understood: “to forbid, with unmistakable conclusiveness.” But what’s a kibosh ?
Nobody knows. It has been attributed to Yiddish and Gaelic, but with no citation. H. L. Mencken thought it was an Americanism, but irate British etymologists shot that down with an 1836 use by Charles Dickens in his Sketches by Boz spelled kye-bosk. Its origin remains one of the great mysteries of slang.
Let me suggest the Hebrew word kavash as a possible origin of the slang word kibosh. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, by Brown, Driver and Briggs, offers as its primary meanings to “subdue, bring into bondage.” I hope this puts the kibosh on the mystery.
Rabbi Ira J. Schiffer
Associate Chaplain
Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont
L
Language on Demand. Two new ways to deliver books are upon us. One is the e-book, which you can download from the Internet and squint at on your screen or print out on your printer. The other is the print-on-demand book, which you order over the Web or from a traditional bookstore and get a bound copy of in the mail.
This will mean that just about any literate person can become a “published” author. Online services already exist that—for a few hundred dollars—will take your digital manuscript and pictures and make them available to buyers for roughly the same price as bookstore books.
The Internet publishers turn down porn, hate stuff and guides to building H-bombs. However, they do not judge content for quality and cannot, for such a low publishing fee, edit copy. What will the coming wave of amateur authors do to the language? Will we be inundated with vanities in gibberish?
Maybe not. I punched up iuniverse.com and ordered Blow the House Down: The Story of My Double Lung Transplant, by Charles Tolchin.* I’ve known Charley since he was a kid with cystic fibrosis given little chance to live. His book is a stunning, moving, personal account of a young man’s bravery in action. Tolchin’s unprofessional writing is straightforward, colloquial and frill-free. He has produced an intimate memoir that grabs you and has found a new way to distribute it that reaches you.
Will such disintermediated prose encourage new authors or discourage writing discipline? We’ll see. Worth watching.
Laydown Dates. The book-publishing industry has its own new term for a variation of a release date: laydown. “This review copy is being sent to you,” Knopf Publicity notifies me, “with the understanding that you will not run your review before Tuesday, July 18—which is the National Lay-down Date for bookstores all across the country. (Official Publication Date is July 25.)”
A vision came to me of the National Laydown Date, a date that would live in the annals of relaxation. Hammocks would be handed out, busy intersections closed for pedestrians to stretch out and take a nap, yoga teachers enlisted for supervision of supine and prone meditators, all putting out of their slackened and refreshed minds the dread prospect of the inevitable National Standup Date.
Belay that dream: a laydown date is the day that a book officially goes on sale. It is used especially when the publisher wants to restrict any sale or revelation of the news in a book before it leaks. The publication date is a week or month after that, giving reviewers time to noodle the book around and buyers the feeling that they are getting the jump on their neighbors. Lay-down without the date means “distribution”: Publishers Weekly (where’s the apostrophe?) wrote recently about a Beatles book that “hits the stores with a worldwide laydown of 1.5 million copies.”
The reclining noun has a sinister use among arms merchants (an obliterating strike is a nuclear laydown) and can also be found in the lexicon of graphic artists, construction workers and railroaders. But its most prevalent use is in gambling, as the adjective in a laydown hand.
In poker, it’s the “showdown,” when all hands are laid open for all players to determine the winner. In bridge, a laydown hand is a winning hand placed faceup on the table all at once, rather than being played out. This bridge meaning has been extended to a general “sure thing.” A Boston economist told the Times, “The Fed has more reason to tighten than not—but it’s not a laydown .”
Some of us who respect reasonable embargoes resist marketing manipulation. Let’s say I go to a bookstore, the bookseller sells me a book and I spot a news story in it. Would I feel free to use it in a column no matter what its laydown date or publication date? You bet I would; that’s a lay-down.
In the world of salesmen, laydown has a far different meaning from those mentioned in your column.
It is usually used in the sense of, “That deal was a laydown; the guy answered the door with his checkbook in hand!” or “What a laydown! The first unit I showed them, they said, ‘We’ll take it!’”
As such, it is not really describing the “win-win” situation that a sale ideally should be; rather, it’s alluding to the prospect “laying down” (yes, it SHOULD be “lying down”) and submitting, i.e., letting the salesman “have his way” (I’m trying to be delicate here!). But it certainly indicates a deal that the salesman didn’t have to struggle to close.
Stuart Tarlowe
Rosedale, Kansas
You asked where the apostrophe is in Publishers Weekly. I suppose it’s in the same place the apostrophe is in the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Authors Guild, etc. I suggest that in each instance the members of the group making use of the organization do not own it but are members of it. Buy that?
Frank O’Donnell
Rockville Centre, New York
Left Coast. “If she was wearing a revealing top,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in a guide to the geographic origins of guests at a Conga Room party during the Democratic National Convention, “a short, tight micro-mini and strappy stilettos, if she had that come-hither look, she was definitely Left Coast.”
When did the West Coast of the United States become the Left Coast, and why?
The East Coast is rarely called the Right Coast; its only synonym is the Eastern Seaboard, as in “We ought to saw off the Eastern Seaboard and float it out to sea,” 1960s hyperbole attributed to Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who considered the Rockefeller-Dewey Northeast to be a hotbed of liberalism. (Seaboard means “land bordering a seacoast,” though “Western Seaboard” is an unfa
miliar term.)
The earliest Left Coast citation I can find, with the help of Fred Shapiro of Yale, is in the title of a 1977 Rolling Stone record review: “Wet Willie Left Coast Live.” Three years later, a New York Times writer put it in context: “If you’re standing in Texas looking north, as Texans frequently do, the Left Coast is where Hollywood is.” These usages had no political connotation.
In the mid ’90s, however, a liberal coloration emerged. The Denver Post noted that President Clinton “swayed to the left coast and invited gays into the military.” The combination of geographical and political direction was irresistible. “The Pacific Northwest was a center of so much outcry against the Reagan administration in the 1980s,” wrote Joel Connelly in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “that conservative pundits referred to the region by a derisive nickname—the ‘left coast of America.’”
As California has become more solidly Democratic, the name—with its political connotation—is most closely associated with that state. (Oregon and Washington are still up for linguistic grabs.)
Other nicknames for Los Angeles and Hollywood, home of the glitterati (an amalgam of “glitter” and “literati”), seem to be fading. “Tinseltown, with its reference to the silver screen and the glamour surrounding it, is at least mildly positive,” says Arnold Zwicky, visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford. “La-La Land, with its suggestion of kookiness, is (mildly, jok-ingly) deprecatory, and I don’t think I’ve heard Angelenos use it except in explicit self-mockery.”
La-La Land is a play on the initials LA, perhaps influenced by Lotos-land in “The Lotos-Eaters,” a poem by Tennyson: “In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined / On the hills like Gods together.” In his posthumous 1941 novel, The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a character describe Hollywood as “a mining town in lotus land .”
Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times tracked La-La Land back to a 1985 recording, “Land of La-La,” by Stevie Wonder, the pop-soul music star, with backup singers chanting el-lay every few bars. The only uses found before that were a 1979 Los Angeles Times lead, “Monday night in Lalaland is not like Monday night in, say, Washington,” and a 1984 reference in the Washington Post by the fashion columnist Nina Hyde, reporting on a bar that “encourages the cocktail waitresses to pour themselves into black super-clingy spandex pants, very LA-LA land, very Cher of a couple of years ago, very roller disco.” A second sense exists, only tangentially related to the city: a state of unreality, induced by drink, drugs or congenital dreaminess.
Whether used derisively by unappreciative visitors to the Golden State or used self-mockingly by residents, when the nicknames refer to a specific place, they are proper nouns to be properly capitalized: Tinseltown, La-La Land and now the Left Coast .
Legacy. Certain words and phrases become taboo in the White House. Out of the loop, amiable dunce, malaise and crook come to mind.
The Clinton White House, we are told by Glenn Burkins of the Wall Street Journal, is eager to make clear that it is “not being driven by a quest to establish” Clinton’s legacy. The interviewer reports that John Podesta, the chief of staff, “has banned the use of that word in the White House.”
That’s because the word, in its political sense, is most often being used in derision. “The Clintons’ legacy,” wrote the St. Petersburg Times as far back as 1996, “will be the attack and invasion of our justice system by social entrepreneurs.” Two years later, the columnist Stephen Chapman pronounced, “Clinton’s legacy is likely to be the enduring diminution of the office he holds.” In that year, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd suggested that “Bill Clinton’s biggest legacy may not be in politics, but in letters…. He has inspired one entirely new and remarkable genre: feminist erotic journalism.”
More charitably, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida recently said that free trade “is a place where Clinton can legitimately say that he has a legacy .” And when asked by a reporter, “How much of the president’s legacy is dependent on peace in Ireland and in the Middle East?” the White House spokesman Joe Lockhart replied, “His legacy will be decided, thankfully, not by us and not by any of the people who are scribbling in notebooks.”
That official rejection of legacy-itis may have led to the banning of the word itself in White House usage. Podesta probably winced when President Clinton, at a recent fund-raising gathering of American Indians, deplored United States negligence of their rights, adding, “This is the part of the historical legacy we want to be proud of.” However, it was not in the context of Clinton’s own historical bequest to the American people and could thus not be construed as a violation of the ban.
The Latin legare means “to dispute” and “to bequeath,” which is fitting when you consider how many bequests are disputed. Not in dispute, however, is the 1460 coinage by Robert Henryson, who writes of a widow’s “legacy and lamentation.”
Despite its ban, watch for what is sure to be the most overused word of the coming interregnum. An unwanted gift from a predecessor, parent or older sibling is derogated as a ha-me-down; a happier, lasting bequest is called a legacy with legs.
Legit. “Legitimacy is a word that we’ve tossed around an awful lot in the last few weeks,” Cokie Roberts said on ABC during the uncertain interregnum.
True, but the problem we’ve been having is with the verb form: is it legitimate, with the last syllable pronounced “mate,” as distinct from the adjective ending “mit”? Or is the verb legitimatize, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright uses it? Or should the word meaning “to make lawful” be shortened to legitimize, which my copy editor suggested I use in a recent column instead of legitimate ?
“The oldest form is legitimate,” says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster’s New World Dictionary, “which tends to be used in the historical sense of ‘to make a bastard child legitimate.’” This is not the specific sense that television’s talking heads use in discussing George W. Bush’s forthcoming presidency. For them, the sense is “to become widely recognized as being legal,” and the preferred form is the one used by Al Gore during the contested count: “The next president should be legitimized in an election in which every vote that is legally cast is counted.”
When Andrew Card, Bush’s designated chief of staff, said, “The Supreme Court ruling legitimizesmany of our concerns” about other, adverse judicial decisions, he was in the mainstream of usage. How can we be sure? A search on the Westlaw database shows legitimized running ahead of legitimated by six to one, with legitimatized with its extra syllable trailing far behind, and you can do your own recount.
Relatedly, Brian Williams of MSNBC sent me a message over the air re-cently: “If you’re listening, do a Sunday column on disenfranchised that’s being used incorrectly by both sides.”
I was listening and heard that question raised by other logic-obsessed colleagues in the news business: shouldn’t the opposite of enfranchise be disfranchise, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary likes, and not the unnecessarily longer disenfranchise? If common usage knocks a syllable out of legitimatize, why doesn’t it do the same to disenfranchise ?
It does not because language is not neat and tidy. The Old French enfranchir, its meaning originally “to make free,” which we now take to mean “to enable to vote,” is one word, despite Samuel Johnson’s dubious derivation two centuries ago. To show its opposite, the dis- goes in front of the whole word, on the analogy of disenthrall and disenchant. Loosen up, Brian and Merriam-Webster; go with the flow.
Ligging. Amorous Brits not yet ready to hook up traditionally get their kicks by snogging, their word for “smooching.” But they have another word for the lifestyle of the freeloader: ligging .
“The Cannes Film Festival may or may not be a shrine to cinema,” wrote Frederic Peugeot of Agence France-Presse last month, “but one thing it certainly is: an adventure playground for liggers.” He defined the noun as “the camp followers who have developed the skills of freeloading and gate-crashing to a fine art.”
Lig is a dialect variation of lie. Ligging was first spotted by the OxfordEnglish Dictionary in 1960—“the mere ‘ligging’ layabout.” The definition: “to idle or lie about; also, (slang) to sponge, to ‘freeload,’ to gate-crash or attend parties.”
This is a word from the mother country that zings home, and should be adopted in the colonies.
Livid. “One longtime friend of the president,” wrote Neil A. Lewis of the New York Times, “said Mr. Clinton was ‘livid, off-the-wall angry’ about the disbarment proceedings.”
Off the wall, hyphenated as above when used as a compound modifier of the word it precedes, is a figure of speech that shows staying power. It can mean “bizarre,” with a second sense of “being a few apples short of a picnic.” It should not be confused with an earlier phrase, up the wall, “into a fury,” now fallen into desuetude. Evidently off the wall, as used above, carries with it some of the fury associated with up the wall.
Less easy to figure out is the meaning of livid. It is a word that President Clinton used recently in response to a question put to him by a Justice Department counsel seeking his knowledge of illegal campaign contributions: “All I can tell you,” said Clinton, “is that I was livid about it.”
What color do you turn when you turn livid? Red with anger? Purple with rage? White with fury?