The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Ryan Blitstein

  Stanford, California

  Nuance. After George W. Bush said, “I do believe Ariel Sharon is a man of peace,” the Associated Press White House correspondent Ron Fournier noted that this was “widely viewed as a sign that he was endorsing Israel’s military action and backing off demands for an Israeli withdrawal. White House aides scoffed at those interpretations.”

  “I think things can be overnuanced,“ responded the president’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer. The AP reporter countered in his story, “But nuance is the lifeblood of diplomacy.”

  If not the lifeblood of diplomacy, nuance is its mother’s milk. (The difference between lifeblood and mother’s milk is nuanced; the adjective form that Al Haig, Reagan’s secretary of state, preferred was nuancal, but that delicate variation never made it into the dictionaries.)

  The noun nuance started in the Latin nubes, “cloud,” which led to the French verb nuer, “to shade,” and then to the noun nuance,” a shade of color or variation in tone.” The essayist Horace Walpole captured the beautiful word for English in 1781, writing awkwardly, “The more expert one were at nuances, the more poetic one should be.” In today’s diplolingo, it means “a delicate distinction; a subtle shading or veiled variation that gives a hint of a shift in tone.”

  President Bush has been castigated by reporters for not being nuancal enough. “In the diplomatic nuance of Mideast policy,” wrote Dana Mil-bank of the Washington Post, “Bush has really proved himself a geek.” (Merriam-Webster defines the origin of geek as “a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.” In current use, the slang term often refers to a computer whiz absorbed in technical arcana. It is unclear which meaning the reporter had in mind.)

  Bush has shown himself to be aware of the meaning of the word nuance and applies it to diplomatic jargon. After this column reported forward-leaning, meaning “progressive” or “helpful,” to be in vogue at Foggy Bottom, Bush said of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “I thought he was very forward-leaning, as they say in diplomatic nuanced circles.” And after saying in plain words, “The policy of my government is the removal of Saddam,” he added, “maybe I should be a little less direct and more nuanced and say we support regime change.”

  Nudge That Noodge. A political divide has opened into a cultural chasm between two old friends. “Al [Gore] and I have tremendous regard for this industry,” Senator Joseph Lieberman told entertainment moguls at a star-studded fund-raising event. “It’s true from time to time we will have been, will be, critics or noodges.” Having used the Yiddishism noodge, a noun meaning “pest, annoying nag, persistent complainer,” Lieberman went on to confuse the assembled glitterati by using the English verb nudge as if it were interchangeable with the Yiddish noun: “We will nudge you, but we will never become censors.”

  To nudge is “to push mildly or poke gently in the ribs, especially with the elbow.” One who nudges in that manner—“to alert, remind, or mildly warn another”—is a far geshrei from a noodge with his incessant, bothersome whining.

  Lieberman’s use of both the Yiddish noun and the English verb in the same paragraph, suggesting wrongly that they meant the same, resulted in the compounding of the error in a statement by his longtime across-the-lines soulmate, William J. Bennett.

  “I did not realize that when Joe Lieberman and I,” stormed the author of A Book of Virtues and other best sellers,“were denouncing the filth, sewage and mindless bloodletting of the popular entertainment industry, calling it what it is—degrading and dehumanizing—we were just being ‘nudges.’ I am a virtual absolutist on the First Amendment, but Senator Lieberman and I were doing more than ‘nudging’ the entertainment industry; we were trying to shame them.”

  Set aside the rights and wrongs, the hypocrisy or hyperbole, in this lusty exchange during the heat of a campaign. Consider only its demeaning of meaning.

  From here in Semantic Damage Control Headquarters, cool heads are obliged to issue this advisory: noodge is primarily a Yiddish dialect noun that risks confusion with the English nudge when used as a verb. The meaning of noodge is not merely “a critic” but “a habitual, pesky critic.” The Yiddish noun noodge signifies a person, one who can sometimes prove useful but who is also not the sort you want around all the time. The English noun nudge is not a person but an action, often of the elbow to another’s ribs and frequently accompanied by a wink or a leer.

  The Yiddish noun is only a noun; when the action of a verb is wanted, the phrase is to give a noodge. The English nudge is both a noun and a verb, first used in verb form by Thomas Hobbes in 1675 in his translation of the Odyssey: “I nudg’d Ulysses, who did next me lie.”

  The pronunciation is different. Though some noodges will dispute this, in the Yiddishism the oo is pronounced as in look rather than the oo in stooge. Not in dispute is the English pronunciation of nudge, rhyming with judge and never even close to the Dickensian Scrooge.

  You got that, Bennett? Du herst, Lieberman? Now shake hands and come out fighting.

  The actual Yiddish for “bore, pest,” is, of course, nudnik. The verb is nudyen, and that, you’ll see right away, easily evolves to “noodgen,” hence, “noodge.”

  Israel Wilenitz

  East Setauket, New York

  Nukes Again. George W. Bush has a nuclear problem. Like Presidents Eisenhower, Carter and Clinton before him, he mispronounces the word nuclear. At the Naval War College earlier this month, he tripped over the word a dozen times with great authority, pronouncing it somewhere between Carter’s “nuke-ular” and Clinton’s “nu-ky-ler.”

  The confusion is in the middle syllable of the three-syllable word. Instead of separating them as nu, clee, er, many who reach the Oval Office treat the first syllable as nuke, perhaps influenced by the bellicose verb in “We’ll nuke ’em back to the Stone Age.”

  A helpful speechwriter would write the word in the presidential reading copy as if there were only two syllables: “new-clear.” After all, clear, which some pronounce with two syllables, as klee-uh, often sounds close to a single-syllabled cleer.

  This persnickety presidential pronunciation problem can be solved. Forget nuke. Think nu. Clear?

  O

  O Beautiful. Returning in 1894 from an inspiring trip to Pikes Peak in Colorado, a minor New England poet named Katharine Lee Bates wrote a verse she titled “America.” It was printed the following year in a church publication in Boston to commemorate the Fourth of July.

  Lynn Sherr, the ABC News correspondent, has written a timely and deliciously researched book about how that verse was written and edited and how it was fitted to a hymn called “Materna,” written about the same time by Samuel Augustus Ward, whom the poet never met. In America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation’s Favorite Song, Sherr reveals rewriting by Bates that shows the value of working over a lyric.

  “O beautiful for halcyon skies,” the poem began. Halcyon is a beautiful word, based on the Greek name for the bird, probably a kingfisher, that ancient legend had nesting in the sea during the winter solstice and calming the waves. It means “calm, peaceful” and all those happy things, but the word is unfamiliar and does not evoke the West. Spacious, however, not only describes Big Sky country but also alliterates with skies, so Bates changed it.

  The often-unsung third stanza contained a zinger at the acquisition of wealth: “America! America! / God shed his grace on thee / Till selfish gain no longer stain / The banner of the free!” Sherr writes that Bates, disillusioned with the Gilded Age’s excesses, “wanted to purify America’s great wealth, to channel what she had originally called ‘selfish gain’ into more noble causes.” The poet took another crack at the line that derogated the profit motive, and the stanza now goes: “America! America! / May God thy gold refine / Till all success be nobleness / And every gain divine!”

  The line that needed editing the most was the flat and d
ispiriting conclusion: “God shed his grace on thee / Till nobler men keep once again / Thy whiter jubilee!” That cast an aspersion on the current generation, including whoever was singing the lyric. The wish for “nobler men” to come in the future ended the song, about to be set to Ward’s hymn, on a self-deprecating note.

  In 1904, ten years after her first draft, Katharine Lee Bates revised the imperfect last lines of the final stanza. The new image called up at the end not only reminds the singers of the “spacious skies” that began the song but also elevates the final theme to one of unity and tolerance. Her improvement makes all the difference, especially in times like these:

  America! America!

  God shed his grace on thee

  And crown thy good with brotherhood

  From sea to shining sea!

  Oh Oh. A satirical form of intellectual sabotage took place at the Boston Globe twenty years ago. An editorial about President Carter’s economic plan was scheduled to be headlined “All Must Share the Burden.” This is one of the dullest, most hackneyed clichés in journalism, always followed by a mournful paean to responsibility.

  Either a printer-prankster or an editorial writer who could not stand it any longer changed the headline at the last minute to “Mush From the Wimp.” This could have been a derogation of the president’s policy or of the chief editorial writer’s prose. The underground dissident was never caught, but editorialists ever since have been on the alert to this form of internal sabotage.

  (I remember this vividly because it triggered a column about the origin of wimp, defined as “a person weepy as a drip and listless as a nebbish,” derived from whimper and influenced by the name Wimpy, for a sleepy-eyed lover of hamburgers in the comic strip featuring Popeye the sailor. Wimp, a derogation dreaded more by politicians than “ax murderer,” has since been edged out by wuss, a rhyming form of unprintable etymology. But I digress.)

  Last month, in an editorial in the Washington Post supporting the Justice Department’s raid on a Miami home to seize Elian Gonzalez, the headline remained as intended: “The Elian Operation.” But the key line read: “Eight agents were in and out of the house in three minutes, carrying the boy in a blanket. ohhoh.”

  When I asked Fred Hiatt, editor of the Post’s editorial page, about this strange insertion of ohhoh into the editorial, he muttered, “We think it was a mechanical error.”

  I am prepared to accept this explanation from an embarrassed fellow opinionmonger, but am inclined to wonder: could ohhoh have been a prankster’s surreptitious editorial comment on editorial comment? If so, what does it mean?

  The exclamation or interjection oho is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “an exclamation expressing surprise, taunting, exultation.” Its first recorded use was in 1369 as a shout to arouse a sleeper (some readers of editorials need this sort of antisoporific) in a passage by Chaucer: “This messenger … cried O how, a-wake anoon.” Shakespeare changed the spelling when he picked it up in his 1601 Twelfth Night, with Malvolio telling himself, “Oh ho, do you come neere me now.”

  Chaucer, in his 1386 Canterbury Tales, also spelled the exclamation dif-ferently: “A ha the fox! and after him they ran.” This sense of the sound as “lo and behold” was taken up in the 1611 King James Bible thrice in Ezekiel, transliterated from the Hebrew heach, later translated by some as indicating “malicious joy.”

  In current use, oh-hoh has been overtaken by aha!—its sense a “triumphantly derisive discovery of a minor subterfuge.” I asked the playwright Neil Simon about this a few years ago, and he came up with several meanings, from “a response when you know something but find it unnecessary to share” to “the first half of an uncompleted sneeze. “His most apt usage: “Aha! is said sarcastically to your daughter when she says she came home at 11 last night when you know it was 12:15.”

  Now let’s take a different tack. What if the mechanical errorist at the Washington Post meant to represent typographically a sound of wry derision, as if to say, “Sure, that’s what you say”? That would be spelled uh-huh. (That meaning is also expressed in what Edward Bleier of Time Warner has termed the “double positive,” which turns the sense of the word around, as in “yeah-yeah.”) Uh-huh is also the sound of “I hear you, I understand” or the slightly more affirmative “Yeah, I guess so.” The earliest recorded uses of uh-huh were in the late 19th century by magazine fiction writers transcribing Negro dialect, more as exclamation than affirmation.

  In contradistinction to that positive, if sometimes mocking, uh-huh is the clearly negative uh-uh. The first literary citation for this negation is in Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 Maltese Falcon: “Do you know who he is?” asks Effie Perine, and Sam Spade replies, “Uh-uh, but I’d guess he was Captain Jacobi.”

  Now for a final run at the possible meaning of the mysterious ohhoh in the Post editorial.

  Dictionaries that have an entry for oh as “an expression of wonderment” fail to carry a definition of oh-oh, or the more staccato uh-oh. But almost every native speaker of American English knows oh-oh to mean “watch out” or “trouble ahead”; when our leading lexicographers read this, they will utter uh-oh and hasten to include the commonly exclaimed warning in their next revisions.

  Could the phantom of the pressroom have meant “Watch out—the preceding opinion will draw a lot of mail”? Perhaps; we’ll never know unless somebody confesses. But a new generation of proofreaders is now alerted to avert mush from the wimp.

  On the university campus where I found myself in the summer of 1946, one of the many clichés constantly bandied by veterans was uh-oh. It was always an underplayed warning that danger (at least of a sort) was immediately at hand. Thus an ex-B-17 pilot who two years earlier had looked out to see that a wing had fallen off would now utter uh-oh when a spigot attached to a beer keg produced a dry hiss instead of a rush of suds. Or an erstwhile infantryman who had recently seen enemy mortar fire walking its way in his direction, would now mouth uh-oh when a professor wrote an exam question on the board which bore no resemblance whatsoever to what had been in his lectures. By no means all veterans had faced such dangers, but all adopted uh-oh as a way of saying that they too had taken part in the great experience. Along with the Britishism, “I’ve had it” or “we’ve had it,” uh-oh was the big code word that summer and into the following fall.

  Richard M. Wight

  Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida

  Of Wimps and Mush. In an aside (watch out for those asides) in an article, I recalled a 1980 headline over an editorial in the Boston Globe that read “Mush From the Wimp,” which I presumed a prankster substituted for the cliché “All Must Share the Burden.” I am now informed by David Greenway, who retired last month as editor of the Globe’s editorial page, that it was not sabotage but a self-inflicted wound.

  “It was the late Kirk Scharfenberg, editorial writer and later editor of the page,“writes Greenway,” who wrote ‘Mush From the Wimp’ over his editorial on President Carter’s economic plan. He wrote it as a joke, never thinking that the headline would ever see print.

  “As you know, the copy editors write the headlines,” continues my colleague Greenway,“but in this case the copy editors let it through. The night editor caught it in midrun, and the headline was hastily changed to the clichéd ‘All Must Share the Burden’ as a last-minute sub for the rest of the run.”

  Many years later, when Greenway became editor of the Globe’s editorial page, the paper criticized animal rights advocates who wanted to close down dogsled racing in Alaska. The headline chosen for its historic resonance:” More Wimps for the Mush.”

  On the Hook. In a parallel universe, I write a didactic political column. Recently, I sternly directed the president to get on the hook to Prime Minister Blair to coordinate positions on United Nations inspections of Iraq.

  John Strother of Princeton, New Jersey, shot back, “Did you substitute on the hook for on the horn?” Kevin McNulty of Newark agrees: “A phone can be on the hook, but it must be off the hook
to be used. Shouldn’t that be on the horn?”

  On the hook is military usage for “on a radiotelephone hookup.” In his 1976 Grunts, C. R. Anderson wrote, “Six on the hook, Sir.” (Six is a frequent radio call sign for the unit commanding officer.) An easier-to-understand term is on the horn, as all who remember yelling “Hello Central!” into the speaker of the telephone hanging on the wall fondly recall. The other term—and one I should have used—is on the blower, which has a nicely archaic feel.

  Dial into this: all the metaphors for telephonic communication are direly in need of updating. Dials are gone (have you seen Punch M for Murder?). Because of wireless cell phones, a line now requires a retronym: landline. (If you’re calling from a cave, use the landline.) Use e-mail; stay off the dog. (That’s Cockney rhyming slang of the second order: the dog, which chews a bone, rhymes with phone. That’s a little out of date, too.)

  In my opinion, on the blower originated as a nautical/naval expression referring to a ship’s speaking tube connecting (especially) the bridge with the engine room. To signal the person at the other end that one wanted to talk to, one blew into the tube, which created a whistle-like signal at the other end, prompting the other person to pick up the tube.