The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time

by William Safire

  Michael J. McTague

  Bronx, New York

  “Gerareheeuh” I know as “gerradeheeuh,” I think that comes from Brooklyn. The evidence is in the name of one of the founders of Murder, Inc., usually printed as Gurrah Shapiro. In earlier days, when he proposed selling a shopkeeper “protection,” the response was “gurradeheeuh.” After a while, I think, people just paid off, but the name stuck.

  Robert W. Bertcher

  East Rockaway, New York

  As I remember hearing or reading, the original expression was “gurrareheeuh,” supposedly coined by Louis (Lepke) Buchalter (a Brooklyn-based Jewish gangster of the ’20s with a heavy accent). He allegedly used it so often that they started to call him Lepke “Gurrah” Buchalter, but probably not to his face.

  Annette Picard

  Les Monts-de-Corsier, Switzerland

  The Lower East Side mobster Louis Lepke Buchalter had a henchman, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, a mean-spirited thug with a gruff, heavy accent who ordered people to “get out of here.” It came out as “Gurrah.” My father was a laundryman. He has the unenviable distinction of having paid protection money to Shapiro in the ’20s.

  Leonard Kian

  Grand Rapids, Michigan

  May I add a footnote to your word list of Slurvian? You speak of the well-known Brooklyn accent signalized by “the oily boid.” Modern Brooklynites only exaggerate what all of New York and New Jersey inherited from the Dutch, whose eu sounds halfway between our er in early and oi. It’s now gone, but one could still hear that gentle sound in the speech of Nicholas Murray Butler and Robert Livingston Schuyler, both at Columbia in my time.

  Jacques Barzun

  San Antonio, Texas

  Smashmouth. “The word smashmouth is everywhere,” notes the Times education reporter Edward Wyatt: “the XFL, the title of a book about the presidential campaign, even in a certain columnist’s column. Everywhere, that is, except for the online OED. Worth a look?”

  The XFL is a professional football league, co-owned by the World Wrestling Federation and NBC, that makes a fetish out of ferocity, with teams sporting macho and self-mocking names like “the New Jersey Hitmen” and “the Memphis Maniax.” The book is a campaign-trail memoir by Dana Milbank titled Smashmouth: Two Years in the Gutter With Al Gore and George W. Bush. The columnist is a right-wing vituperator who usually eschews vogue words, but in this case wrote of “the sort of smashmouth campaign that the Democrats perfected.”

  The word’s meaning goes beyond “aggressive.” It is a new and especially vivid synonym of “brutal, savage, violent,” stopping just short of “heinous” and “barbaric.” However, in the XFL it has a self-mocking quality, and in politics it does not always carry such an offensive connotation. “Such nasty, smashmouth politics are said by the goody-goodies to be destroying our democracy,” goes Milbank’s thesis, “alienating the electorate and suppressing voter participation. I believe the opposite is true: that nasty is nice on the campaign trail, that it’s cool to be cruel.”

  Football metaphors are as mother’s milk to politicians: no etymologist has yet come up with the origin of level playing field, but football’s game plan was adopted by campaign strategists, and both politicians and quarterbacks relish the military metaphor of throwing the bomb.

  Although coinage of smashmouth is often attributed to Mike Ditka, the former Chicago Bears tight end and coach, that CBS sportscaster vigorously, almost aggressively, denies being the originator. The word is a compound adjective, which calls for hyphenation; in current use, however, it is most often treated as one word, as if it were an attributive noun like blood in “blood sport.” It cannot properly be written as two words if used as a modifier.

  The earliest citation on the databases (can a hacking baseball player slide into a database?) is a September 1984 usage by Jim Wacker, the Texas Christian University football coach, who told David Casstevens of the Dallas Morning News that the “physical game” played by his TCU Horned Frogs was “smash-mouth football.”

  Two months later, the columnist George Will praised Wacker for having “the finest sense of nuance in language since Flaubert, or at least since Woody Hayes,” and applied the coinage to politics: “As the clock—the merciful clock—runs out in this final quarter of what feels like a 27-quarter presidential game, Messrs. Mondale and Reagan are playing smash-mouth politics. Vigorous, they are.”

  In 1994, the term was adopted as the name of a rock group, whose members told the Wall Street Journal reporter Stefan Fatsis that they liked the way the sportscaster John Madden used it. Above the topically etymological story (everybody wantsa get inna de act), a headline writer reviewed the progress of the locution in one of the Journal’s characteristically chatty subheads: “Smash-Mouth: Sick of the Term? Sorry, There’s No Stopping It—Blame the XFL If You’d Like, But It’s Old and Seems to Fit the Popular Culture Well.”

  NBC’s Web site claims its XFL is “the type of ‘smash mouth’ [sic] football that fans crave … returning football to its tougher roots.” A league spokesman, Jeff Shapes, says: “It’s the type of football played in the National Football League in the ’60s and ’70s. Football fans breathe and drink smashmouth football.” He adds hastily, “Obviously, it doesn’t mean literally that anyone’s mouth is being smashed.”

  Snippy. “You mean to tell me, Mr. Vice President,” George W. Bush said incredulously to Al Gore on election night, “you’re retracting your conces-sion?”

  “You don’t have to be snippy about it,” Gore responded.

  This interchange on the most tumultuous night in the history of American politics was reported by aides who heard one side of the conversation, or might have been listening on telephone extensions; we do not yet know if the call was also surreptitiously recorded. Neither candidate disputed the accuracy of the above account by Kevin Sack and Frank Bruni in the New York Times. The Associated Press report, almost but not exactly the same, had Bush saying, “Let me make sure I understand—you’re calling me back to retract your concession?” and Gore replying, “You don’t have to get snippy about this.”

  In the interest of global public understanding and linguistic history, however, this department is obliged to unearth the origin and meaning of the Gore charge of snippy.

  The earliest definition, in Nathaniel Bailey’s 1727 dictionary, is “parcimonious” (now spelled parsimonious and considered a bookish term for a cheapskate) and “niggardly” (now used less frequently because some confuse it with a racial slur). In John Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms, it is defined as a “woman’s word” for “finical,” probably rooted in the sense of fine as “small,” which has now become finicky and is a derogation meaning “excessively meticulous.”

  That cannot be what Al Gore meant. Let’s go back to basics: to snip, from the German snippen, originally meant “to snatch quickly” and came to mean “to clip or cut off, often with a scissors.” (This produced a snippet, a tiny piece of a thing, later extended to a short bit of prose or, in Dryden’s use, “some small snip of gain.”) The action of clipping or cutting off small pieces led to snippety, “fragmentary, scrappy,” with a temporary detour to sniptious, and finally to snippy, metaphorically cutting off pieces, thereby seeming “curt, supercilious, fault-finding, airish,” its meaning influenced by the “irritable, tart, short-tempered” sense of snappish.

  Snippy, like snappish, begins with the sneaky “sn” sound, characteristic of sniveling, snide and snarling.

  Earlier generations might have taken snippy to mean “brassy, cheeky, saucy”; now the wide-ranging senses are expressed as “touchy, flip, smartalecky, disrespectful, on your high horse, having an attitude.”

  The American election results were “the fault of the American people,” a French broadcaster suggested. “They seem to have ignored their responsibilities to be clear on what and whom they want.” The Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland’s riposte: “Now that is snippy.”

  To snip, you wrote, comes from
the German word, “snippen,” but there is no such word; what you meant is “schnippen.” That, however, does not mean “schneiden” in the sense of “cut,” but obviously stems from the noun “Schnupfen,” which is the German word for “cold,” but is more related to “snuff” and leads us straight to the meaning of your snippy and the German “schnippisch.” In the 16th century, exactly 1550, Hans Sachs—he of the Meistersinger—used it in the sense of “to breathe in air” by way of throwing your head back in a show of hauteur. There is your “disrespectful,” “smart-alecky” or even better “on your high horse.”

  As a verb, “schnippen” is only used in the context of snapping your fingers. Whereas the snip in the sense of “cut” has a little “s” inserted after the “p”—and then it is down to one “p” only—as in “schnipseln” or “Schnipsel” (n.) (snippet).

  Christine Brinck Joffee

  Munich, Germany

  Sorry. I regret not having previously explored the etymology of apology. You’ll have to excuse me, but I refuse to say I’m very sorry.

  We have just run the gamut of English words that the Bush administration used or refused to use in extricating from China twenty-four service-members in detention (suggesting a brief hold in custody, usually on political grounds), internment (longer denial of freedom without imputation of criminality) or captivity (longest, connoting punishment, synonymous with imprisonment).

  Note the relatively new term servicemember, which alternated with the two words “crew members.” That was used because “members of the armed services” is a mouthful. Reporters could not use servicemen because that now-sexist term would not include three of the navy aircraft’s crew who are women; hence the Pentagon locution, not yet in most dictionaries, servicemembers. President Bush persisted in using “our servicemen and women.”

  After the collision of the Chinese fighter plane and the American EP-3E Aries (Latin for “ram”) reconnaissance plane, Secretary of State Colin Powell, soon followed by President Bush, expressed regret at the apparent loss of life of the Chinese pilot. The root of regret is the Old English grætan, “to weep.” As a verb, it means “mourn, lament”; as a noun, it means “sorrow” but is not a form of contrition, admitting sin or guilt; rather, regret is condolence without culpability.

  The Chinese demanded not merely bao qian (bow chen), as in “sorry I was late,” but the much graver dao qian, a phrase that begins a formal apology. The Greek apologos, “a full account,” led to the Latin apologia, “justification.” Apology began in English in 1533, meaning “a speech in defense” with the “Apologie of Syr Thomas More, Knyght.” That sense of vindication was soon replaced. In current use, to apologize means “to express regret at a mistake or wrongdoing; to accept responsibility for a misdeed.”

  No deal, said the United States; an apology is not in order. Although Premier Jiang Zemin suggested, in English, that a mild excuse me might be acceptable, other authorities in China demanded the confession implicit in apology. On National Public Radio, Daniel Schorr jocularly suggested a so-lution: apologrets. Nice try; didn’t fly.

  Resolution came in the form of linguistic ambiguity that allowed both sides to claim victory. In using the syllable qian in his translation of our letter referring to our unauthorized landing at a Chinese airfield, the American ambassador, Admiral Joseph Prueher, some scholars said, allowed the Chinese to infer an admission of wrongdoing. After our crew was released, Secretary Powell retorted, “We should not be fooled by Chinese propaganda that says they got an apology.”

  The key word was sorry, later adverbially emphasized as very sorry. (Fortunately, it never came to really, really sorry, no foolin’.) It’s the informal alternative to sorrowful, based on sorg, which first appeared in Beowulf around 725, meaning “grief, sorrow, care.” Sorry, with its -y suffix—meaning “full of” but also used to form pet names—seems more colloquial than regret. It was seized upon by the Chinese as “a form of apology,” enabling them to claim satisfaction.

  Then came the -ident controversy among American spokesmen. “It’s an accident, it’s a very regrettable accident,” said Richard Boucher, State Department spokesman, four days after the collision, “and we’re trying to resolve it … without blowing it into an international incident.”

  The next day, Sun Yuxi, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, twice used incident to describe the episode, matter, subject or occurrence. Nor did hard-liners here like the State Department’s insistence on accident; in their judgment, the aggressive, reckless endangerment of American surveillance aircraft ordered by the Chinese high command for months was intended to create an incident. President Bush straddled, claiming we “did nothing to cause the accident” and in the same statement referring to “the kind of incident we have just been through.”

  In diplolingo, an incident is no trivial happening; it is like the striking of a match, no conflagration in itself but an event that could inflame passions. Curiously, the word works as both dysphemism and euphemism: Americans were repelled in 1940 at the fictional account of lynching called The Ox-Bow Incident, but when Chinese Communist officials want to minimize what Westerners call “the massacre at Tiananmen Square,” they call that crushing of studentled protest “the incident of June 4, 1989” (in Chinese, liu si, “six four”). The lexicographer Eric Partridge wrote in 1960 that “if a businessman speaks of incidents when he means quarrels, he has been influenced by journalism.”

  Sou. If you were president of the United States, and someone asked you to describe—in one word—what kind of state the Union was in, what adjective would you select?

  White House speechwriters struggle with that almost every year. Judson Welliver, who did the writing for Calvin Coolidge under the title of “literary clerk” (and who should get the credit for Silent Cal’s reputation for eloquence), elected to use nouns. “It is exceedingly gratifying,” said the cool-keeping chief executive in 1925, “to report that the general condition is one of progress and prosperity.” No powerful, state-defining adjective.

  When it came to Harry Truman, the operative word was the modest but solid good. “I am happy to report to this 81st Congress”—the one after “that Republican, 80th do-nothing Congress”—“that the state of the Union is good.” The following year, the plain-spoken Truman said that it “continues to be good.”

  Dwight Eisenhower avoided the characterizing adjective, preferring to say that the state “continues to vindicate the wisdom of the principles on which this Republic is founded.” I thought that evaded the responsibility of the top man to give the country a grade. John Kennedy came back to the Truman tradition, but with a nice buildup: “I can report to you that the state of this old but youthful Union, in the 175th year of its life, is good.” Lyndon Johnson copped a plea at one point—“the state of the Union depends, in large measure, upon the state of the world.” As Vietnam wracked his administration, he used a thoughtful adjective in 1968: “I report to you that our country is challenged, at home and abroad.” Richard Nixon, in his next-to-last “SOU,” as we speechwriters called the annual messages (written, as Thomas Jefferson preferred) or addresses (spoken, as Woodrow Wilson preferred), used a defensive adjective, a conservative adjective and an uplifting adjectival phrase. “The basic state of our Union,” his writers wrote in February 1973, just before the Watergate scandal took hold, “is sound, and full of promise.” The use of the defensive modifier basic may have reflected a concern that the apparent, or surface, state was not so sound or full of promise.

  Gerald Ford, two years after what he had called “our long national nightmare,” recalled Harry Truman’s word and admitted dolefully but honestly, “I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good.” The following year, he called the state “in many ways a lot better—but still not good enough.” In his last such address, in 1977, Ford assessed the nation’s state as good, adding with pride, “We have a more perfect Union than when my stewardship began.”

  Jimmy Carter thrice preferred the Nixonia
n sound, an adjective often used to reassure the public about the economy, as in “sound money,” and also in the firmness of “sound judgment.” A digression about sound: the noun, from the Latin sonum, means “the sensation of what we hear.” Don’t listen to that. The sense here of the adjective sound comes from the second syllable of the Old English gesund, “health”—similar to the German Gesundheit! wished upon sneezers. In 1601, Robert Johnson wrote about the French king that “Francis the 1 left his credite sound.” More recently, as an Arthur Andersen executive testified before Congress, “This policy toward document disposal reflects sound audit practice.” In that sense, sound means “financially healthy”; curiously, in these health-conscious times, no president has yet said the state of the Union is healthy.

  In each of Jimmy Carter’s uses, he chose to change one word in the language of the Constitution, which requires the president to “give to the Congress information of the state of the Union,” and said “the state of our Union.”

  Ronald Reagan, during 1982’s recession, looked ahead: “In the near future the state of the Union and the economy will be better—much better.” The following year, he admitted that “our economy is troubled,” but said that “the state of our Union is strong.” This picked up the Carter our, which ever since has been most often preferred by presidents, but chiseled in granite the adjectives strong and stronger.

  Although Ford showed that it was possible to say not good, no president has said or is ever likely to call our state weak. The first President Bush used “sound and strong” in 1990, combining Nixon-Carter with Reagan, but the following year departed from tradition to use the word union in a sense that illuminated his “thousand points of light”: “The state of our Union is the union of each of us, one to the other—the sum of our friendships, marriages, families and communities.”