Although the question was posed for hundreds of years, its emergence in the popular culture in this meaningless sense was surely, as Hertzberg believes, a phenomenon that began only a generation ago. Its use in a film set in the 1930s is thus an anachronism, a word rooted in Greek for “error in chronology.”
For those moviegoers who spot such ear-stingers, and whose recourse until now was only to mutter, with Hamlet, “The time is out of joint”: “O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.”
Say What? II. In imperial Japan before World War II, members of the “thought police”—Shiso Keisatsu—fanned out to suppress dangerous thinking in the populace. The thought police were disbanded by General MacArthur when he imposed freedom of speech on occupied Japan. The name of the group was later chillingly immortalized by George Orwell in his 1949 novel 1984.
Enter now the time police. This dread group of moviegoing vigilantes is dedicated to suppressing anachronism now so freely engaged in by screenwriters.
Anachronism is the placement of a word of the present in the mouth of a person of the past. The newly organized time police have asked me to help them put a stop to it because the practice is subverting our society’s orderly sense of sequence.
“In Schindler’s List,” writes Eric Myers of New York, “in the space of ten seconds, the character played by Ralph Fiennes refers to a scam twice, then says, ‘Who’s scamming who?’ This, in Germany during World War II?”
I would have focused on “who’s scamming whom” and missed the anachronism, but he’s right: scam is carnival lingo for “trick, deception, swindle” and probably did not cross into general slang until the early ’60s.
Timecop Myers, after thus dispensing of Steven Spielberg, turns his attention to Woody Allen: “In Bullets Over Broadway, he has a distraught John Cusack moaning, ‘I’m very conflicted!’ I don’t think anybody used that kind of psychobabble in 1928.”
True; according to Merriam-Webster, conflicted came into use by psychotherapists in 1967 to describe a condition of clashing emotional impulses. By 1980, it was applied to senses ranging from “indecisive” to “at sixes and sevens” to “paralyzed by an internal tug of war.”
In the Oscar-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire, recounting the triumph of British track stars of the 1924 Olympics, one of the heroes rails at the prejudice that prevails in the corridors of power.
“It’s a ringing phrase that sets off a thrilling scene,” notes Richard Beebe of Middlebury, Connecticut, “but corridors of power didn’t come into common usage until forty years after the movie’s setting, when it was coined by C. P. Snow as the title for his 1964 novel of British politics.” (Actually, it was coined in the BBC’s magazine, the Listener, in 1962, but popularized by Snow’s title two years later.)
Writers of television miniseries are included in this glorious game of Gotcha! Charles Kluepfel, a Timecop patrolling the sets of Bloomfield, New Jersey, notes an anachronism in CBS’s Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, a drama loosely based on Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with one of his slaves: “Jefferson starts showing some children various specimens of bones, and the teleplay writer has him say, ‘This is a skull fragment of the humongous mastodon.’ But the word humongous was coined during my lifetime, and Random House Unabridged gives the times of first usage as 1965-70.”
Back to the movies. In the 1993 version of Tombstone, about the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, the dying Doc Holliday croaks to Wyatt Earp that he should grab the girl and not look back, and Earp replies sadly, “Thanks for always being there, Doc.”
Barbara Arnstein of Whitestone, New York, suggests that the gunfight venue’s name might be the “I’m OK, You’re OK Corral.” The locution to be there for you, meaning “capable, reliable, to be depended upon,” reached the general lingo in the 1920s, and its most recent sense of “to be nurturing, comforting” began with a religious overtone in 1981. Both senses came along years after Holliday joined Sheriff Earp to gun down the Clanton Brothers gang, who were, in a more sinister sense, there for him.
Say What? III. Beware the urge to be ultracorrect.
Most power-writers know that the phrase corridors of power is identified with C. P. Snow, author of the 1964 novel of that name. In a recent article, I noted this, but after looking into the OED, added, “Actually, it was coined in the BBC’s magazine, the Listener, in 1962, but popularized by Snow’s title two years later.”
Comes now Mary DeForest of Denver to set me straight. In a 1956 novel, Homecoming, Snow wrote, “The official world, the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotism—she disliked them all.”
In his preface to Corridors of Power, Snow explained: “By some fluke, the title of this novel seems to have passed into circulation during the time the book itself was being written. I have watched the phenomenon with mild consternation.
“The phrase was first used, so far as I know, in ‘Homecoming.’ … Mr. Rayner Heppenstall noticed it, and adopted it as a title for an article about my work. If he had not done this, I doubt if I should have remembered the phrase myself; but when I saw it in Mr. Heppenstall’s hands, so to speak, it seemed the appropriate name for this present novel.”
Snow knew it had become a cliché, but all must share the burden. As he put it, “I console myself with the reflection that, if a man hasn’t the right to his own cliché, who has?”
Scandalexicon. Every scandal has its own vocabulary. Today’s column is not about scandal; it reports and judges only the vocabulary. In the current anger and agony roiling the Catholic Church, here are some of the words that should be used and pronounced with care:
Pedophile is central and is usually mispronounced. If you were like me until this was written, you would have pronounced the vowel sound in the first syllable as eh as in “pedal” or “pedometer.” Why are we mistaken? Because the Greek word pæd, pronounced to rhyme with the fourth syllable of “encyclopaedia,” means child, the abuse of whom the word is about. The Latin word ped, rhyming with “head,” means “foot.” But what’s at issue here is not a foot fetish. Thus, the first syllable of pedophile should—and for decades after its 1951 coinage, did—take a long e, as in “pediatrician,” not a short eh, as in “pedicure.”
So it is correctly pronounced “PEE-duh-file,” right? Only if you’re a purist. San Diego’s Charles H. Elster, a leading pronunciator, informs me that “the rules haven’t changed, but usage has”; doctors in the 1960s began switching to the schwa, and now general dictionaries are split: Merriam-Webster sticks with the ee, while Webster’s New World and American Heritage Dictionary list both, with the more recent eh preferred. Elster is going with the flow to “PEH-duh-file”; I’ll hang tough with “PEE-duh-file,” because it’s etymologically sound and I like to correct people.
The Greek word pedophilia literally means “child love.” It is a sexual abnormality in which the preferred object of the potential predator is a child, though the pedophile or less frequently used pedophiliac is not required to act on that perversion. (Psychiatrists call it an abnormality, moralists a perversion.)
Is the pedophile’s object (or as moralists would say, victim) a male child or a female? Although the original meaning of pæd or paid, “child,” covers both, notes a Princeton professor, Joshua Katz, “in English there’s been an extension: the critical thing is the youth, not the sex of the youth. A pederast is the Greek-based word for an adult male who desires boys only.” (This synonym for sodomist has long been pronounced “PEH-duh-rast”; there’s an irritating inconsistency here, which is why it is hard for me to rail at “PEH-duh-file” as a mistake.)
If the lust of both pedophile and the outdated pederast is directed at children, what about an adult’s desire for teenagers? Until 1988, this was a void in our vocabulary; it was filled by Tariq Rahman, professor of linguistics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, with ephebophilia. He noticed its 1980 citation in a paper in French about the ancient Greek treatment of postpubescent b
oys written by Félix Buffière: “les ephèbophiles, comme certains les nomment”—as certain people have named them. An ephebos was an Athenian youth of eighteen or so in training for citizenship; the new word is pronounced “ef-FEE-bo-file.” No dictionary I’ve seen has it, but the 1999 Merck Manual defines ephebophilia as “attraction to youths” who are “postpubescent.”
That’s almost the way the Reverend Donald Cozzens pronounced its application to priestly predators last month on Meet the Press. Speaking of the abuse of minors not limited to prepuberty or to boys, he clipped the “ef.” The moderator Tim Russert seized on the new locution, clipping it as well, and so pheebofile was born—because Tim is linguistically infallible. Another formation of this noun is pheebophilia, which I define as “the desire by an adult for an adolescent” with no sex of luster or lustee specified and spelled with two e’s (as did the NBC transcript) so that sloppy pronouncers cannot do to it what they have done to pedophile.
You refer to alternate pronunciations of the first vowel sound in the noun pedophile. You label one lone e, and the other eh. You name the second pronunciation schwa. The sound is actually a mid front lax vowel, []. Schwa is the reduced vowel sound in the second syllable, which you represent as “uh,” and which phonologists represent as e.
Ellen Measday
Livingston, New Jersey
Thank you for pointing out the difference between a pedophile and an ephebophile. Distinguishing between the two is important, morally, legally and psychologically.
Ronald Colvin
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
This is my first foray as a member of the Gotcha! Gang. You referred to the vowel in the first syllable of the “PEH-duh-file” pronunciation as being a schwa, but the schwa is a sound that occurs only in unaccented syllables, like the first syllable of “about.” The dictionary says the schwa symbol is sometimes used for the related stressed vowel that occurs in “cup,” but it would never be used for the short “e” of “bed” or “pedophile.”
Sandra Wilde
Portland, Oregon
Secret Plan. In a rousing speech to an AFL-CIO convention in New Jersey, Vice President Gore used the attack word secret seven times. It is now his favorite adjective, having temporarily replaced risky (as in the phrase, pronounced as one word, riskytaxscheme).
He was blazing away at Governor Bush’s proposal, not yet detailed, to allow individuals to divert a portion of their Social Security taxes into the stock market. Gore charged that Bush believed “it would be best not to let you, the voters of this country, in on the secret plan before the election…. He is suppressing the details of how his plan would work and refusing to divulge what his secret plan really is.” At a subsequent news conference, he evidently felt that secret was not pejorative enough and added, redundantly, a “private secret plan.”
That sinister phrase—secret plan—has resonance to veteran rhetoricians and students of presidential campaigns. In the 1968 primaries, candidate Richard Nixon was searching for a way to promise he would extricate the United States from its increasingly unpopular involvement in Vietnam. The key verb to be used was end, though it would be nice to get the verb win in some proximity to it.
One speechwriter came up with the formulation that “new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.” Nixon made it part of his stump speech, and the juxtaposition of end and win—though it did not claim to intend to win the war, but only the peace—drove his major opponent for the GOP nomination, Governor George Romney of Michigan, up the wall.
When a UPI reporter pressed Nixon for specifics, the candidate demurred; the reporter wrote that it seemed Nixon was determined to keep his plan secret, though he did not quote Nixon as having said either secret or plan. But this gave Romney a chance to slam back at his opponent’s promise. In what became the centerpiece of his stump speech in the snows of New Hampshire, Romney demanded to know, “Where is your secret plan?” That question skillfully presupposed an assertion of not just a general promise but also a detailed plan, and soon it became widely accepted that Nixon had said, “I have a secret plan to end the war.”
Years later, when a New York Times columnist attributed that direct quote to Nixon, a White House speechwriter challenged him to find the quote in anything taken down by pencil or recorder at the time. The pundit searched high and low and had to admit the supposed remark was unsourceable. (Look, the Nixon speechwriter was me and the columnist was later my colleague, Tony Lewis; I didn’t have to research this.)
During Ronald Reagan’s run for re-election in 1984, Democrats took a leaf from the Romney playbook and charged him with having a secret plan to raise taxes after the election. This forced Reagan to say defensively he would raise taxes only “as a last resort” and reminded politicians that the old secret-plan charge had legs.
Even Gore, a few weeks before he leveled the tried-and-true phrase at Bush, showed he was aware of its old-chestnuttiness. In a hilarious, deadpan, self-mocking speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington, he was widely reported to have said he had a secret plan to win the White House: he would claim credit for all the good stuff that had happened in the past eight years and dissociate himself from the bad stuff.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush has been using an attack word of his own to characterize the Gore approach to Social Security: “For eight years,” he wrote in a fund-raising letter, “Clinton/Gore has had history’s greatest opportunity to reform Social Security. They chose to demagogue the problem, not repair it.”
I kept this letter, sent to me by its recipient, Leila Hadley Luce of New York, to note the use of the beslashed singular subject Clinton/Gore, followed properly by the singular verb has, but then followed incorrectly by they. Clinton/Gore is a team and takes an it.
But Mrs. Luce’s covering note questioned the use of the “new verb,” to demagogue. Originally a noun, this was formed from the Greek demos, “people,” and agogos, “leading”; it meant “leader of the mob” and now has the derogatory meaning of “a politician who appeals to people’s emo-tions.” The noun can be used attributively to do the work of an adjective: Robert Southey in 1812 denounced “the venom and the virulence of the demagogue journalists.”
Governor Bush cannot be faulted for using demagogue as a verb. It was coined in that form by James Harrington in his 1656 utopian theory, Commonwealth of Oceana. He picked up the noun coined five years earlier by Thomas Hobbes and wrote of a time “when that same ranting fellow Al-cibiades fell a demagoging for the Sicilian war.” In 1890, the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette wrote of President Benjamin Harrison, “The president never thought of demagoging the matter.”
Note the lack of a u in those usages of what most of us would until recently spell as demagoguing. But we live in a non-U world; just as catalogue and dialogue have been dropping their ue endings, so too will demagogue soon enough be spelled demagog, with its gerund demagoging.
It’s a hard word for the mob to handle; demagogic is pronounced with the final g soft, rhyming with logic, but demagoguery has the final g hard, rhyming with toggery. (Get away from that e-mail key; there is such a word. It means “clothing.”)
Will Gore now assail Bush for harboring a secret plan to attack him for demagoguery? Will Bush lash back in a debate by demanding he spell it? Both sides are now armed.
See-Through Vogue Words. Back when he was merely the Clinton administration’s treasury secretary, Harvard’s new president, Larry Summers, was asked by a vituperative columnist (me) how he planned to protect the privacy of bank depositors. “We’re more concerned with transparency,” he countered.
“You can’t turn around these days,” writes the Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams, “without encountering the Bush administration’s favorite buzzword: transparency.”
She’s right; my dossier on this term is fattening. “Part of the problem in dealing with North Korea,” President Bush told South Korea’s president, Kim Dae-jung, is that “there’s not very much transparency.”
Not to be outvogue worded, Kim later hoped that “the North Korean missile issue will be resolved with transparency.”
In Senate confirmation hearings for deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage fervently expressed his support for the five unassailable towers of political virtue: “democratization, transparency, open governance, women’s issues, empowerment.”
But perhaps pellucity’s pollution has peaked. “We have noticed a definite increase in the term visibility,” notes Sheri Prasso, editor of the section of BusinessWeek titled UpFront (one word, capital modishly in the middle, playing on the meanings of up-front as “honest, forthright” as well as “found in the opening pages of the magazine”). “The lack of visibility is cited by CEOs and other corporate types when they talk about earnings projections for the last half of the year.”
“Visibility is really poor for the back-end of the year,” said Timothy Koogle, the departing CEO of Yahoo, last month. (The year’s back-end is still referred to by the geriatric set as “fall” and “winter.” The noun back-end is a back-formation from back-ended, created by the need for an opposite to front-ended, a variant of front-loaded.)
In the struggle against the tenacity of opacity, will visibility overtake transparency? I don’t see it.
Sensual. Maneuvering my shopping cart through the brassiere section of a Wal-Mart in Charles Town, West Virginia (on the way, I swear, to men’s ultrarelaxed jeans), I was struck by the brand name of a Hanes underwear product: Sensuale.
By adding an e to the word sensual, the manufacturer not only gives a frenchified twist to the term but also enables the “lightly lined underwire” to be trademarked. Nothing incorrect about that. But a close examination of the package reveals this selling pitch: “Sensuous styling that’s sure to allure.”
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 35
