The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Think of George Bush the elder, and you have a thousand points of light and line in the sand and kinder and gentler nation, with his voodoo economics and read my lips, no new taxes tossed back at him.

  Think of Bill Clinton, and—what? In his ascent to power, the vividly Carvillian it’s the economy, stupid was indelibly associated with Clinton; in his descent, it was the relentlessly replayed sentence accompanied by his wagging finger.

  This department seeks memorable Clintonisms from friend and foe, but will begin today with a linguistic sleeper. A phrase coined by candidate Clinton in his campaign for the Democratic nomination has been gaining strength as the years flash by.

  His chief rival at the time, Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, ran a TV spot claiming to be honest, truthful and unpolished—“no Bill Clinton, that’s for sure.” Asked in an Illinois cheesecake emporium in March 1992 about this and other charges about his character, Clinton replied: “I think that the American people can spot somebody that’s on their side…. They’re tired of the politics of personal destruction.”

  As president in 1994, Clinton lashed out at Republicans in Congress for blocking his proposals, charging them with “the politics of personal destruction and of legislative obstruction.” This caused a Georgia member of the House minority, Representative Newt Gingrich, to call his attack “not the politics of personal destruction; it’s the politics of self-destruction.” After the GOP upset that year, establishing itself as the majority in the House, Clinton slammed back with: “My job is not to stand in the way and be an obstructionist force. My job is not to practice the politics of personal destruction.”

  He continued to use the phrase as an attacking defense, culminating in a short Rose Garden speech after impeachment in 1998: “We must stop the politics of personal destruction. We must get rid of the poisonous venom of excessive partisanship, obsessive animosity and uncontrolled anger.” Nitpickers who winced at the redundancy of “poisonous venom” were impressed with Clinton’s alliteration in his peroration to “rise above the rancor.”

  The phrase outlived the Clinton presidency. Last month, the Washington Post played on it in a headline above a column by George Will about the likely resistance to George W. Bush’s proposals by a Senate controlled by Democrats: “The Politics of Personal Obstruction.” When a phrase is familiar enough to take such wordplay, that is evidence that it is becoming fixed in the lexicon.

  In coining phrases, the politics of has long been found useful. In the 1860 edition of his Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sang of “the politics of Nature”; Upton Sinclair in 1918 excoriated the “politics of hypocrisy”; Aldous Huxley titled a 1963 book The Politics of Ecology; and Yippies in 1968 lolled back to enjoy with Timothy Leary “the politics of ecstasy.”

  In the politics of politics, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. led the way, beginning in 1949 with The Politics of Freedom, followed by his Politics of Upheaval in 1957 and, five years later, The Politics of Hope. This deeply impressed Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who in 1968—not an especially upbeat time in war—torn America—was optimistic enough to hail “the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.”

  Poo-teen. He may be with us for a while, so let’s get his name right: the president of Russia is Vladimir Putin, pronounced “POO-teen.” “The stem for Putin’s name is derived from put, meaning ‘path’ or ‘road,’” notes Albert Weeks, an NYU professor emeritus now living in Sarasota, Florida.

  Marat Akchurin of the American Name Society adds: “The meaning of Putin was ‘the one who was born on the road’; that is, the mother was traveling when the birth took place. So, within the current political context in Russia, Putin could be taken to mean ‘transitional.’” Another possible etymology is the verb putat, meaning “to swaddle, bind” and, by extension, “to confuse, make ambiguous, entangle.”

  Can it be connected to Rasputin, the derisive name for the swinging Russian monk, Grigory Novykh, who dominated the court of Czar Nicholas II? One meaning of rasputye is “debauched,” but another is “crossroad”; putin without the prefix ras could mean “one-track road.” Be careful not to read too much into this.

  You write that the name of Russian President Putin means in Russian, “born on the road.” According to the standard Russian dictionary “Ojegov,” the name can be defined three different ways. The first meaning, from the Russian word “Putina” (POOtina), is “fishing season.” The second meaning, from the word “Put” (POOT), is a “way” or a road. The third potential meaning—which may be most apropos for Mr. Safire’s column—is from the verb “Putats” (Pootats), which means “to make a mess” or “to speak without logical connection.”

  Boris Zeldin and Damian Schaible

  Jersey City, New Jersey

  Pop Go the Lyrics. “Nobody knows what the words mean,” goes the Web site advertising for an album titled All for You, by the pop singer Diana Krall, “but when Diana sings them, it isn’t hard to draw your own conclusions.” The album celebrates the songs popularized a half-century ago by Nat King Cole, and the reference is to the song “Frim Fram Sauce.”

  The lyric reads: “I don’t want French fried potatoes, red ripe tomatoes / I’m never satisfied. / I want the frim fram sauce / With ussin-fay, with shafafa on the side.”

  This is a job for the Deconstruction Workers Union. Frim fram is one of the oldest terms surviving as slang, cited in John Heywood’s 1546 book of proverbs: “she maketh earnest matters of every flymflam,” about a woman easily deceived. Flimska is “mockery” in Old Norse and flim, “a lampoon”; an attempt to fool the monarch in 1538 was described in England’s State Papers as “a flim flawe to stoppe the ymagination of the Kynge.”

  Thus, as sung by Cole and then Krall a half-millennium later, “frim fram sauce” is the oleaginous goo of deceit poured over some unsuspecting dupe. (All dupes are unsuspecting, just as all goo is oleaginous; I’ll hear from the Squad Squad about those redundancies, but a mouth-filling phrase suspends the rule.)

  Next: Ussin-fay is pig Latin for fussin’ (just as ixnay conceals nix), which in turn has a slang sense of “playing about fretfully”; a whimpering infant is said to be fussin’. That locution seems out of place in a menu metaphor, but I can think of no other logical etymology of ussin-fay.

  Shafafa is a problem; it is too far a stretch from alfalfa, and no slang term or Old Norse derivation offers a clue. I called Diana Krall, the singer who resuscitated the word, and asked if she had any idea about what it meant or where it came from.

  “It’s all about sex,” she replied innocently, though in the sultry tone that has become her musical signature.

  Oh. That would explain the lyric’s “never satisfied,” as well as its sauce of deceit, and supply another entendre to the fretful whimpering of fussin’.

  We have hummed through the hermeneutics of a single lyric to show that in pop music the sophisticated innuendo of the ’30s and ’40s is being newly appreciated by a generation not then born. That explains the comeback of Cole Porter (whose “Let’s Do It” was banned by some radio stations for its suggestiveness), as well as Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein and Johnny Mercer as interpreted by today’s balladeers. The intricate rhyming and occasional character development in their songs is received with respect from enthusiasts of neo-soul and post-grunge and house music. (Definitions for those are vamping until I’m ready.)

  “There’s a return to personal storytelling,” Krall noted. She sang a little of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in the Frank Sinatra style and said: “Then we slowed it down, which made it more tragic. I like messing with tempo because it changes the story.”

  Story is central in “Contemporary R&B,” the designation given the rhythm and blues sung by artists like Alicia Keys and India. Arie. Note the way Arie styles her name: like a dot-com, she uses a period in the middle rather than a space. This playing with normal style was pioneered by the poet Edward Estlin Cummings, who liked to use lowercase initials. It carries forward the co
rporate mid-capitalization craze begun with “TelePrompTer” in 1950 (a style the New York Times resisted) and taken up by “DaimlerChrysler,” “WorldCom” and many others. It will soon be followed by other punctuation marks by people and companies following the crowd that is straining to be distinctive. (Should I change my byline to “William!Safire”?)

  Dot-Arie sings of an “Acoustic Soul.” After the 1950s civil rights revolution, soul music enjoyed great popularity. The intense, earthy outgrowth of gospel singing was an expression of black culture; the term took hold about the same time as soul food and was followed by political figures who were eager to be said to have soul. As the musical style was revived in our time in modified form, a new label was adopted: neo-soul.

  Time magazine’s Christopher John Farley defined the term in 1998 as combining “the classic soul of the 60s and 70s with a healthy appetite for 90s sonic experimentation and boundary crossing … lyrics are more oblique and yet more socially and emotionally relevant than those of gangsta rappers.” This month, reporting on the sweep of the Grammy awards by Alicia Keys, U.S. News said that Keys “sings classic soul-style melodies with a hip-hop flavor…. The music biz is praying that Keys … and other neo-soulsters will revive slumping record sales.”

  In categories like the chanted patter of hard-core rap, the fast-faded, grubby-dingy grunge, the anguished, rock-influenced introspection of post-grunge, the offbeat, Jamaican ska-punk and the British garage, violent sex is still a seller. “In terms of language about sex and violence,” says Jim Steinblatt of ASCAP, “the gangsta-lifestyle music is still big, but as rap music has become more mainstream, the lyrics are not quite as explicit.” Two generations ago, the word love was even more frequently used in lyrics than baby; in the ’90s, as baby held its own, the use of love declined. But in Keys’s “Fallin’,” now the “Song of the Year,” the word love is used no fewer than six times.

  Consider the toning-down of the above-mentioned British garage—the name taken from the Paradise Garage in New York—also known as speed garage and 2-step. (Strange name for a dance, “two-step”; even I can do it.) Born in the disco music of the ’70s and part of the genre labeled electronica, this art form combined digital reggae, or ragga, with “diva vocals”—high-pitched melodies sung at the top of the lungs to a 4-4 beat—and became known in the ’80s as house music. In the current decade, hoarse voices tell me, the garage outside the house has a quieter, “more soulful, sophisticated and organic feel.” Organic is a vogue word in modern music criticism, as it is among nutritionists (formerly dietitians) and now auto mobile advertisers. Its musical meaning varies widely but is never associated with a pipe organ or mouth organ.

  The tuned-in reader will have observed the use of diva applied to female stars. (Star went out with dietitian.) This is rooted in the Latin diva, “goddess,” and until recently has been primarily applied to female opera singers, usually temperamental prima donnas. With star and even superstar passé, and goddess limited to “sex goddess,” the old diva once again took center stage.

  Old-time rock is also enjoying a revival, especially as sung by U2. Most of the veteran group’s new fans think the name a play on “You, too?” rather than on a high-altitude American spy plane that could read the license plates on cars entering the Kremlin (and that, like rock music, is still oper-ational; words and parachute by Francis Gary Powers). Numerals are a vital part of many names of musical groups. Besides U2 and 2 Live Crew, we have Sum 41, blink-182, 3 Doors Down and 9 Inch Nails.

  A bluegrass winner is “O Death,” by Ralph Stanley, which offers a chilling evocation by a man begging to be spared a little more time. Such serious bluegrass songs, some evoking and providing comfort for the 9/11 mood, contrast mightily with such derogatory ditties we used to strum: “I’d Rather Pass Another Kidney Stone Than Another Night With You” and a feminist favorite, “Shut Up and Talk to Me.”

  Dig it or deplore it, the music industry is a fecund source of lexical terms—if you can make out the words.

  I was delighted to see attention given to the song “Frim Fram Sauce.” However, I was disappointed that you neglected to mention the author of that song, Joseph Ricardel.

  Vincent Ricardel

  New York, New York

  Shafafa is an Arabic word which means lace, what belly dancers wear, and refers to partial nudity.

  Heskel M. Haddad, MD

  New York, New York

  Blessings on thee, verbal man, for spelling out that wonderfully incomprehensible word “ussin-fay.” After years of poring through old Nat King Cole sheet music, we had given up ever seeing it in print. For a time, we thought it might be the name of some nightmarish recipe called “the Awesome Fate,” but Diana Krall’s recent rendition of the song proved that false.

  We do feel, however, that you may be trying too hard to link each silly name to an actual food item. We like to think the song depicts a woman of moderate means (who has grown up on “fish cakes and rye bread”) sitting in a fancy restaurant, trying to order exotic dishes and fumbling over the names. In that case, “frim fram” loosely translates into, “y’know, that wonderful sauce I had one time that went with the whatchamacallit fish.” And the same could be said for “shafafa” (although that could possibly be a gross mispronunciation of “chiffon”). The use of the Pig Latin “ussin-fay” for “fussin” fits right in with this interpretation.

  Diana Krall says it’s all about sex, and that’s certainly the way she sings it. But Carmen McRae, in her 1983 rendition, says it’s all about attitude and a heaping plateful.

  Floyd Gumble and Carol Adamson

  Carmel, New York

  I love that Frim Fram sauce! I think I have solved the mystery of “shafafa on the side.” I think shafafa is from Arabic, i.e., a Semitic triconsonantal root (there’s an Israeli place name “Beit Shafafa”), naturalized into some African language (the way Swahili does a lot of). The root “sh-f-f” yields meanings of either “lips”—your lips on the side—or “diaphanous garments, filmy clothes”—Give me that teasing deception, courting [“fussin roun” as in Thurber], and your lips [or sexy clothes] on the side.

  Leslie S. B. MacCoull

  Society for Coptic Archaeology

  Tempe, Arizona

  Pound Sand. When Tony Blair called George W. Bush on the day after September 11 to pledge his support, the British prime minister said he assumed the United States was considering an immediate response. According to a report in the Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, giving an anonymous Blair adviser as a source, Bush replied, “We’re thinking about that,” but he did not want to “pound sand with millions of dollars in weapons” to make himself feel good.

  Historians a decade hence will probably be able to determine if President Bush actually used that expression in a call that was surely recorded by both men. But two insider accounts of the week following the attacks on the U.S. show that it was in active use in the White House. According to Bob Woodward and Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Andrew Card, the chief of staff, asked rhetorically in a Camp David meeting on September 15, “What is the definition of success?” The reporters then paraphrased Card’s answer: “He said it would first be proving that this was not just an effort to pound sand—as the president had repeatedly made clear.” In Time magazine’s version of the same meeting, “A quick cruise-missile response was ruled out as ineffective. White House chief of staff Andy Card called this the ‘pound sand’ alternative.”

  From this we can deduce that the president in all likelihood did use the phrase that tense week, perhaps repeatedly. What did he mean by it?

  Following the clue of context, the Bush administration usage of pound sand means “waste time, act ineffectively,” influenced by the expression used pejoratively by bomber pilots about meaningless missions, “making the rubble bounce.”

  That is a variant of the phrase’s original meaning. “I find it interesting,” e-mails Wayne Butler from Marblehead, Massachusetts, “that writers in family newspapers wo
uld use such phrases as ‘turn in the barrel’ and ‘pound sand’ when the origin and/or complete phrase is so well known.” (That was after I had written that it was somebody’s “turn in the barrel,” forgetting that the phrase originated in the punch line of a dirty joke. I apologize for blanking out on that; the phrase seems to have crossed into general usage from its sexual origin, similar to today’s innocent use of wuss for “one who is unmanly” or schmuck for “jerk.”)

  In the same way, pound sand has escaped its earlier scatological association. Along with go pound salt, the imperative now has the dismissive sense of “buzz off; go jump in the lake”; it has lost its taboo connotation of “do something humiliating to oneself.”

  As used earlier by politicians, the phrase is not taboo. When Clark Clifford in the last days of the 1948 election campaign told his boss, President Harry Truman, that a Newsweek poll of fifty reporters gave him no chance of beating Tom Dewey, the man from Independence replied: “I know every one of these fifty fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.” This salty derogation of the media was recalled by the first President Bush toward the end of his calamitous campaign in 1992; when he saw a sign that read “Annoy the media, elect Bush!” he laughed and said, “I feel like Harry Truman when he talked about fifty reporters, and he said not one of them knows enough to pound sand in a rat hole.” (The elder Bush’s assessment of media wisdom was not as accurate as Truman’s.)

  Truman did not coin the phrase. In volume 4 of the great Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), the origin is tracked to someone’s refusal to give a recommendation. A Dialect Notes issue of 1912 records “He wouldn’t know enough to pound sand in a rat hole; so don’t get him.” The same source provides a variant recorded in 1923: “Don’t know enough to pound akerns in a woodpecker hole.”