No Uncertain Terms: More Writing from the Popular "On Language" Column in The New York Times Magazine - Hardcover

Safire, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743242432 ISBN 13: 9780743242431

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Synopsis

Examines and provides comments on language trends while tracing the origins of timely words and phrases that discuss such topics as technology, entertainment, and everyday life.

About this title

About the Author

William Safire is a senior columnist for The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for distinguished commentary and now serves on the Pulitzer board. A former speechwriter for President Nixon, Safire is the author of twenty-five books, including Safire's New Political Dictionary, the speech anthology Lend Me Your Ears and the novels Freedom, Sleeper Spy and Scandalmonger. He lives in Washington, D.C.

William Safire is a senior columnist for The New York Times and a former speechwriter for President Nixon.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TRACKING THE FAST TRACK

To be revealed before your very eyes is the anatomy of an "On Language" column. You will discover its impetus, its motive, its little research tricks, its blinding flashes of lexicographic insight and the way the writer, straining to show how language illuminates The Meaning of Life, settles for the meaning of a word.

1. Glom onto a vogue word just as it passes its peak.

"White House Finds 'Fast Track' Too Slippery" was the Washington Post headline over a story by Peter Baker. His lead: "Attention White House speechwriters: The term fast track is no longer in vogue." As the drive for free-trade legislation began, the phrase of choice was "Renewal of Traditional Trading Authority."

Just as many of you were getting your engines steamed up to take the fast track, your track gets renamed. Why?

"Fast-track legislation" made its burst for fame in the mid-70s as Congress gave the President a right that stretched to twenty years to negotiate trade treaties with other nations without having to face amendments back home; as a result, subsequent treaties would be ratified or turned down, all-er-nuthin'. Robert Cassidy, a lawyer who helped draft the Trade Act of 1974, recalls the adjective surfacing toward the end of the Tokyo Round in the late 70s; it did not appear in legislation until 1988.

When presidential authority to zip a treaty through expired, a Republican Congress was not so eager to hand that power back to Democrat Clinton. That's the reason White House wordmeisters derailed the use of fast track (too hasty-sounding) in favor of the solid, stodgy, nothing-new-here "Renewal of Traditional Trading Authority," as if George Washington had been born with the old fast track in his crib.

2. Involve the reader.

Here is a postcard from a slum dweller in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with an incomprehensible scrawl for a name asking: "What's with fast track? Whatever happened to 'life in the fast lane'?"

Now our linguistic train begins to leave the station, and we

3. Follow the usage trail.

The fast lane comes from auto racing. The trusty Oxford English Dictionary, supplemented and on CD-ROM, has a 1966 citation from Thomas Henry Wisdom's High Performance Driving: "One is frustrated on a motorway by the driver ahead in the fast lane (if only he understood it is the overtaking lane)."

How did the term get popularized in its metaphorically broadened form? A 1972 novel by Douglas Rutherford was titled Clear the Fast Lane, but that was still about auto racing. Then, in 1976, a rock group named the Eagles put out an album, Hotel California, that included the single "Life in the Fast Lane" by Joe Walsh, Don Henley and Glenn Frey.

"They knew all the right people/They took all the right pills/They threw outrageous parties/They paid heavenly bills/There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face/She pretended not to notice she was caught up in the race...." The chorus: "Life in the fast lane/Surely make you lose your mind...."

Since that song, the fast lane has had overtones of the drug culture and impending disaster, a speeded-up, sinister, modern version of Shakespeare's "primrose path of dalliance."

At this point, the language columnist thinks he has come to the fundament of it all, fulfilling his obligation to

4. Satisfy the slavering etymological urge in roots-deprived readers.

We have seen the OED make clear that the derivation is from highway driving. In Britain, the fast lane is the overtaking lane; in the United States, it is usually officially called the "passing lane." And as fast lane was being adopted, it spawned, or influenced, fast track.

Not so fast. The phrase fast track has a long history in horse racing, to mean "dry, conducive to speed." On the other hand, if it has been raining, the wet track is described as "slow," and the touts race about urging you to put your money on a "mudder," a horse that digs slogging. Count on some reader to find a metaphoric extension of fast track in a Jane Austen or Henry James novel.

Nor is that the only untapped root. Soon the vast legion of railroad buffs will check in with yards of lore about fast railroad tracks, where expresses roar past with whistles in the night.

I remember Richard Nixon using fast track in 1964, after he moved to New York City following his defeat for California governor. He told The New York Times a year later: "New York is a place where you can't slow down -- a fast track. Any person tends to vegetate unless he is moving on a fast track."

And so the column falls together, requiring the writer only to

5. Leave with a snapper, or sometimes a peroration.

When next you hear of Congress disputing the president's bid for fast-track authority, think of the well-mentored business executives and political loners on the rise, following the racing drivers careening around the speedways, following the jockeys booting their mounts home on a sunny day, following John Luther (Casey) Jones, the hero engineer, slamming on the brakes and giving up his life to save his passengers from death on the fast track.

Copyright © 2003 by The Cobbett Corporation

Achilles' Heels

The legal columnist Bruce Fein of The Washington Times, attacking the attacker-attackers who have been blasting his friend Ken Starr, expressed astonishment at "mass-media gullibility in peddling bogus portraits of the Whitewater independent counsel sold by myrmidons of President Clinton."

What's a myrmidon? The poet Homer, often caught nodding but now probably shaking his head at the Clintonian odyssey, would point us to the Myrmidones, an Achaean race in Thessaly, Greece, who fought under Achilles in the Trojan War. They assumed their ancestor to be the issue of the mating of Zeus with Eurymedusa, a woman wooed by the god when he took the shape of an ant. (Some wags suggest that this may have been the origin of "ants in the pants.")

An alternative mythic source is the changing of ants into men by Zeus in answer to the prayers of King Aeacus, who had lost his army to the plague. But the metaphoric intent is the same, describing a race of antlike men, and the meaning of myrmidon, which should not be capitalized in its extended meaning, is "slavish follower; subordinate who obeys the orders of his leader without mercy."

The Greek word was introduced into American politics by Alexander Hamilton in his efforts to block Aaron Burr from becoming president in 1800. Hamilton wrote to Gouverneur Morris that Burr, to accomplish his end, "must lean upon unprincipled men, and will continue to adhere to the myrmidons who have hitherto surrounded him."

One man's myrmidon, however, is another man's die-hard.

ACRONYMANIA

In South Africa, an organization that hands out free condoms to prostitutes calls itself the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (Sweat).

In Chicago, an antidrug outfit calls itself Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (Crack).

Serious business should eschew jazzy acronyms. Time for Citizens Militant on Nomenclature (C'MON).

ADVENTURER

The word adventurer has been through a half-millennium of exciting times.

Disrepute was its cradle. The Latin advenir meant "come to," as in "come to pass; arrive, happen," and a vestige lingers in gambling lingo as "betting on the come" in the hope that what will come next will enable the gambling adventurer to win. Adventure meant "coming by chance; the luck of the draw."

Applied to a person, adventurer meant "gamester," what we would now call "gambler." Accordingly, an English ordinance in 1474 decreed that the royal household would bar the "swearer, brawler, backbyter" and "adventorer." Five centuries ago the adventorer was a fit companion for the secretive backbyter, the calumniator who whispered his slanders, stabbing reputations in the back.

Gambling and war combined as soldiers of fortune bet their lives on their livelihood; a 1555 usage derided "our adventurers, that serve withoute wages," supported only by their plunder. Just seven years before that, Edward Hall in his Chronicle provided the etymology: "He gave them a Pennon of St. George and bade them, Adventure (of whiche they were called Adventurers)." Most soldiers of fortune were self-glorified brigands; to be called an adventurer was to be insulted.

Then the pejorative word had a run of good luck. John Milton, in his 1667 Paradise Lost, wrote of "the Heav'n-banished host" of fallen angels awaiting the return of their satanic leader "now expecting/Each hour their great adventurer from the search/Of foreign worlds." (Though devilish, Lucifer was "great.") Meanwhile, a commercial company was founded in Antwerp and chartered in England called the Merchant Adventurers, in the sense of "enterprise," and led in the exploration and colonization of North America. The hazard to be undertaken was no longer a time-wasting game but a dangerous journey, an exploration for riches or a moral crusade. Jonathan Swift wrote in his Tale of a Tub (1704) "to encourage all aspiring adventurers."

But then it was applied to Prince Charles Edward Stuart in the pretender's desperate insurrection of 1745; his sobriquet was "the Young Adventurer." Then adventuring became an -ism and lost even more respect. An English review in 1843 lumped together "Concubinage, Socialism and Adventurism," scorning all three as evidence of social decline. The Oxford English Dictionary defined it as "the principles and practice of an adventurer or adventuress; defiance of the ordinary canons of social decorum." An adventuress, especially, was not just a kept woman but was stigmatized as "loose."

Worse, adventurism

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743242432
• ISBN 13: 9780743242431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384