The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (3 page)

Synonyms—more precisely, similar metaphors—for
bated breath
include
butterflies in the stomach;
the British
get the wind up;
the 17th-century
on tenterhooks
(the frame on which a tent’s cloth is stretched);
have one’s heart in one’s mouth,
from Homer’s
Iliad;
and
on pins and needles,
an 1810 coinage about the tingling sensation from sitting on them. In Yiddish, this feeling is expressed as
shpilkes
. The extreme is
screaming meemies,
which
Picturesque Expressions
by Laurence Urdang notes originated as a World War II nickname for German rocket shells and is now often confused with the phrase
streaming media
.

In
bated breath,
we have a clear-cut case of widespread misspelling. It’s no controversy; forget
baiting
unless you’re fishing or taunting. And yet I anticipate mail on this item. A dozen or so readers, afflicted with raging e-mailitis, will ask: “How come President Mwanawasa’s first name is Levy? That doesn’t sound Zambian.” To get ahead of the querying curve, I called the Zambian Embassy. They haven’t called back. You can imagine in what state I’m waiting.

Bravo for saying about
bait/bate
that the frequent, ignorant confusion is a mistake and not to be condoned.

But I think that your list of equivalents to “bated breath” is too inclusive. It takes no account of motive. “Bated breath” results from deliberate purpose—wanting to remain hidden, hoping for a much-desired answer. Something makes us hold our breath; whereas “butterflies in the stomach” or “heart in one’s mouth” comes unbidden, and so does “getting the wind up” (as the passive sense of getting implies). As for “tenterhooks” and “pins and needles” they also are consequences of external events or others’ actions. Finally, “screaming meemies” require a great deal of breath and are the contrary of the bated supply.

Jacques Barzun
San Antonio, Texas

Between Prexies.
Here’s a word that pops up every four or eight years:
interregnum
. The Latin means “between reigns.” The
interregnum,
or
interregencie,
originally meant the interval when a throne or position of leadership was vacant, as between the death or removal of one sovereign and the accession of the next. This invited trouble, as in the Cromwell era. William Blackstone, in his 1765
Commentaries,
held that in England “the king is made a corporation to prevent in general the possibility of an
interregnum
or vacancy of the throne.”

The word now means “an intermission in the order of succession” and, more generally, “a breach of continuity.” Specifically, in the United States, it means “the period between the election of a new president and his inauguration.” But it is not limited to political power: the breakfast-table autocrat Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Between the last dandelion and violet … and the first spring blossom … there is a frozen
interregnum
in the vegetable world.”

The word, lest we forget, is spelled with two
r
’s. It produced a spin-off during the transition from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, which wags called the
interreaganum
.

Bialy.
Thanks to Mel Brooks, creator of
The Producers
—one of the few smash-hit musicals without one popular song—the word
bialy
is rising on America’s horizon.

His central character is Max Bialystock. That name gives a vaguely Eastern European flavor to the role of the unscrupulous impresario out to bilk investors by producing a surefire flop.

That’s because there is a place named Bialystock. It is a city of about a quarter million residents located in northeast Poland; its most famous sons were the Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov and the microbiologist Albert Sabin. Its most famous product is known locally as the
Bialystoker kuchen
and to the hungry world as the
bialy
.

A
bialy
is to a bagel what Bialystock is to Vladivostok—that is, a world apart. A
bialy
is a round, saucer-size
pletzl,
“flat bread” (rhymes with
pretzel
), that has its center mushed in to form a depression made delectable with bits of onion.

The food critic Mimi Sheraton explored this mouthwatering subject last year in a book titled
The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World
. Although
bialy
means “white” in Slavic languages, the cakelike bread does not get its name from its dusting of white flour; rather, the Polish mountainside, or
stok,
is on what we would call the White River, which gives its name to the city. That city, in turn, gives its name to the fragrant roll and to the fictional Broadway producer.

Sheraton describes the tenderly crusty roll as “characterized by an indented center well that is ringed by a softer, higher rim, all generously flecked with toasted onions and, at its most authentic, with a showering of poppy seeds.” It has, she adds with a certain reverence, “an affinity for sweet butter and fluffy cream cheese.”

This department does not shrink from controversy: one should neither slice nor toast a
bialy
. Smear whatever you like over the onions in the well; bakeries these days use up their poppy seeds on bagels, which can be toasted, but the seeds mess up the toaster. If you like your breakfast bread hot, bake the center-depressed
pletzl
for five minutes or so until its edges look threatening. (I don’t know at what heat; this is a language column.) The newly popularized word is pronounced “bee-AH-lee.”

Big Applesource.
Controversy rages over who coined
the Big Apple
as a moniker for New York.

The earliest citation is in Edward Martin’s 1909 book,
The Wayfarer in New York
. Martin, a founder of the Harvard
Lampoon
and first editor of the humor magazine
Life,
was writing about the attitude of the Midwest toward the metropolis: “Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city…. It inclines to think that
the big apple
gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.”

The
Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang
notes an absence of capitalization or quotation marks in this citation and thinks it “probable that the 1909 quotation represents a metaphorical or perhaps proverbial usage, rather than a concrete example of the later slang term.” I dunno about that; capitalization is not necessary in coinage, and quotation marks only would suggest an earlier use.

The etymologist Barry Popik, with fresh support from the phrase detectives Fred Shapiro and Gerald Cohen, has long been campaigning to give coinage honors to John J. Fitzgerald, a turf writer. He wrote in the
New York Morning Telegraph
on Feb. 18, 1924: “There’s only one
Big Apple
. That’s New York.” After Fitzgerald popularized the term, crediting it to African-American stable hands in New Orleans in 1920, the columnist Walter Winchell picked it up in 1927. A decade later it became the name of a Harlem nightclub and a dance.

Popik makes a strong case, but I’d credit Martin with coinage and Fitzgerald with independent recoinage and early popularization. But you pays yer money and you takes yer cherce (from an 1846 cartoon in the British magazine
Punch
).

Blip.
“We don’t react to day-to-day
blips,
“ said James Gorman, a Merrill Lynch sales chief. On
Wall Street Week,
Louis Rukeyser dismissed “some renewed jitters in the wake of a
blip
in retail sales.”

As a linguistic plunger, I invested heavily in
blip
s two decades ago. “
Blip
has good upside potential,” it was noted in this space in 1982, when a White House spokesman shrugged off bad financial news with “We had one bad
blip
today.” Since then, the usage of this onomatopoeic word has soared as jargonauts in a variety of fields embrace it, and I remain bullish on
blip
s because the word satisfies a need for “sudden, minor shock; meaningless interruption.”

The earliest senses were “a quick blow, accompanied by a popping sound” and “a twitch.” The
Dictionary of American Regional English
exhumed its origins: “Brer Rabbit draw back wid his fis’, he did,” wrote Joel Chandler Harris in his 1880 Uncle Remus stories, “en
blip
he tuck ’er side er de head.” In 1894, Mark Twain in
Tom Sawyer Abroad
wrote, “We took him a
blip
in the back and knocked him off.”

Dashiell Hammett kept that sinister sense in his 1929
Maltese Falcon,
introducing a verb form: “You could have
blipped
them both.” In our electronic age,
blip
overtook
pip
to mean “a point of light on a radar screen to locate a searched-for object.” On television and later computer screens, the noun denoted any sudden surge of sound or light, often caused by an electrical interruption. When this was done deliberately to expunge an expletive, it was called a
bleep
.

Because the spot of light or pop of sound was tiny, the word soon connoted smallness or insignificance as the metaphor was extended.

In the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush used a vulgarity near an open mike, the
Dallas Morning News
noted the difference between a minor slip and a major blunder: “Analysts differ over whether it is a soon-to-be-forgotten
blip
or a
blooper
with staying power.” Electronic media that wanted to shield their listeners
bleeped
the
blip
.

Do not sell this short word short, as it can be used to describe sudden, transitory moves in any direction. Diplomats have long found it a useful word to minimize troubling changes: commenting on reversals in peace negotiations in 1972, Henry Kissinger said there “may be
blips
up and down.” But dismissal as a
blip
can invite response from editorialists who deride attempts to play down major events. As Watergate scandals came to a head in 1974, the
New York Times
wrote about President Nixon, “Can he really be so uncomprehending that he considers it, to use his word, a mere
‘blip ’
?”

Though some language mavens cautiously rate
blip
as a market outperformer, I’ll still call it a buy.

As for “bleep,” you failed to mention it lasts longer than a “blip,” which is only momentary (or, in the language of today, possibly “momentous”). Also, the
Slang Dictionary
’s “origin” is probably mere coincidence: “blip” is virtually onomatopoeic, and that is its most likely origin.

Laurence Urdang
Old Lyme, Connecticut

I was a bit disappointed to see you perpetuate the misuse of the word “expletive.”

While the word came into widespread use upon the publication of the Nixon tapes, which made “expletive deleted” a common term, it has been widely misused.

There is nothing about an expletive, per se, that would require it to be deleted or “bleeped.” An expletive is merely an exclamation, which may be obscene, but “ain’t necessarily so!”

fudge!” or “Gosh!”-those would be expletives, but would not be obscene and would not require deletion. If, however, I were to say, “Al Gore is a lying sack of [deleted],” the word in brackets would be an obscenity, but would not be an expletive!

Misuse of a word, no matter how widespread, should not change its meaning. If you allow this to happen you are promoting the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” school of semantics. Look at what that attitude has already done to words like “infer,” “hopefully” and “fulsome.” It’s up to purists like you and me to resist it.

Stuart Tarlowe
Rosedale, Kansas

Body Man.
The political lexicon is suddenly being enriched. For years,
the man
has been the president, perhaps associated with
main man,
from Black English. Now
the man
has a man of his own with an official job title.

“Here’s a new entry,” says Eric Schmitt, the
New York Times
reporter who covers Vice President Dick Cheney (sometimes referred to as “the P.M.,” or prime minister, or less reverently by President Bush as Big Time, recalling Cheney’s famous response to a joshing derogation of another of our journalistic colleagues). “It’s
body man
.”