The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (51 page)

Close study of the history of the word indicates the primary meaning to be “partner” or “close friend,” with only a second sense carrying a connotation of “junior partner” or “subordinate,” from “one who walks or rides alongside.” A vice president would not call a president a
sidekick,
because they are not political equals, but could use the word about a colleague in the administration’s cabinet without seeming to pull rank.

Skutnik.
When a person’s name turns into a word, that’s called an eponym, from the Greek
epi,
“upon,” and
onyma,
“name.”

The University of California at Santa Barbara had a panel about the media (from the Greek for “really high-class buncha guys”). When CNN’s Jeff Greenfield assured the crowd, “I haven’t planted a
skutnik
here,” I stopped him: I had heard of a
sputnik,
the Russian word for the first Soviet satellite, but what was a
skutnik
?

Greenfield directed me to his book
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!
about the media failure on election night: “A
skutnik
is a human prop, used by a speaker to make a political point. The name comes from Lenny
Skutnik,
a young man who heroically saved lives after the Air Florida plane crash in Washington in 1982 and who was introduced by President Reagan during his State of the Union speech.”

The introduction of heroes became a staple in presidential addresses to joint sessions of Congress. In 1995, the columnist William F. Buckley was one of the first to use the name as an eponym: “President Clinton was awash with
Skutniks
.”

The play on
sputnik
aside, the word should be spelled
Skutnik
in deference to the original honoree. Watch for one the next time around.

Sleeper.
In the stock market, a
sleeper
is an undervalued security. Among publishers, a
sleeper
is a book that sells for years without being advertised. Movie moguls think of it as a film that surprises by grabbing audiences, and in politics a
sleeper
is a seemingly unimportant amendment that would cost billions if not spotted by alert opponents. In horse racing, when a horse has been held back in previous races to build up the odds—and then is allowed to go full speed to win its owner’s big bet—that horse is a
sleeper
.

That word of so many senses (and don’t forget the garment with no opening for toes that sleepwear manufacturers produce for toddlers) has awakened new interest with its most sinister meaning: “a spy long in place but not yet activated.”

“Hollister … was a
sleeper,
” wrote the mystery novelist Holly Roth in a 1955 book that used that word as its title, “a member of the Communist Party whose whole life was dedicated to the one big moment.” In 1976, the
Times of London
observed, “There almost certainly exists within our political establishment, what is known as a ‘
sleeper
’—a high-level political figure who is in fact a Soviet agent, infiltrated into the system many years ago.”

As the cold war ended, the word surfaced again with a slightly different meaning: in 1990, Professor Paul Wilkinson, a British terrorism expert, told the Press Association that Iraq was unrivaled in the technique, with
sleeper
squads, known as “submarines,” already in position.

Benjamin Weiser reported in the
New York Times
on Dec. 22, 2000, that a former U.S. Army sergeant, Ali A. Mohamed, testified to a federal grand jury investigating the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa that the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden used the technique: “In 1997, [Mohamed] told the FBI about networks of terrorists,” wrote Weiser, “known as
‘sleepers,
’ who lie low for years but do not need to be told what to do.” The reporter quoted an FBI document released in court holding that Mohamed knew “that there are hundreds of ‘
sleepers
’ or ‘submarines’ in place who don’t fit neatly into the terrorist profile.”

Four years after that FBI report was written, the word
sleeper
moved from spookspeak jargon into the general language. “The pattern of bin Laden’s terrorism,” wrote Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball in
Newsweek
two weeks after September 11, “is to insert operatives into a country where they are
‘sleepers,
’ burrowed deep into the local culture, leading normal lives while awaiting orders.”

Slippery Slope.
“In bioethics,” writes Robin Henig, a science writer from Takoma Park, Maryland, “a
slippery slope
implies a certain inevitability to scientific progress, an inability to put a stop to progressively more loathsome applications of knowledge once we receive knowledge in the first place. When did the term come into use, and what has it meant other than the way we use it today in bioethics?”

In politics: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in decrying the undemocratic methods of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, said that the African nation was “on the
slippery slope
of perdition.” (By using “of,” he used
perdition
to mean “eternal damnation”; had he said “to,” it would have meant “hell.”) The Nobel laureate Tutu liked that phrase: “When you use violence to silence your critics … you are on the
slippery slope
toward dictatorship.”

Civil libertarians in the United States use it, too: Otis Moss III, pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, warned that President Bush and his attorney general “stand upon a
slippery moral slope
as they attempt to respond to this horrific act [September 11] with legal procedures that shred the foundation of our Constitution.”

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Before the ever-popular phrase was extended into metaphor, it was used by poets who liked the alliteration to mean, simply enough, a muddy hill on which one could break one’s neck. Herman Melville in his 1876
Clarel:
“The steeds withstand the
slippery slope
/ While yet their outflung fore-feet grope.” And Robert Frost in 1916: “As standing in the river road / He looked back up the
slippery slope
/ (Two miles it was) to his abode.”

But the key task of the phrasedick is to find earliest uses of the current sense of “a course that leads inexorably to disaster.” The
OED
tracks it to a 1951 novel, but new retrieval technology lets us do better than that. The economist Herbert Heaton wrote in 1928 that Canadian “cards and bills alike found themselves on the steep
slippery slope
of war finance.” And thanks to the Cornell Making of America database, we have this 1857 use from
Chamber’s Journal:
“When the educated person of middle class is reduced to pennilessness … what but this gives him the desire to struggle again up the
slippery slope
of fortune?”

In both those citations, the meaning is closer to “the greasy pole,” a figure of political speech popularized by Benjamin Disraeli to describe the difficult climb and easy fall from power. The current sense of “first step in what will be a long slide” probably surfaced in the early 20th century, possibly in an article by a writer in a 1909
Quarterly Review,
published in London: “the first step down that
slippery slope
at the bottom of which lies a parliamentary government for India.” If you want to join the phrasedick fellowship, send along an earlier usage and get an effusive accolade.

Nowadays, as Ms. Henig notes, the phrase is often used in controversies about ethics. “It does not make sense to ban stem-cell research where abortion is completely legal and fertility clinics destroy untold embryos,” wrote Marcel D’Eon in the
StarPhoenix
of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, last month. “And it demonstrates what opponents of abortion have been saying for more than 30 years: we are on a
slippery slope
. Who knows where it will lead?”

Logicians are very cautious about
slippery slope
arguments because it is impossible to know beforehand, with absolute deductive certainty, that an “if-then” statement is true. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 came up with the “falling domino” principle: “You knocked over the first one, and what would happen to the last one was the certainty that it would go over very quickly.” This “domino theory” was later much derided by opponents to our defense of South Vietnam.

I notice that the word “phrasedick” is a favorite of yours. I assume you intend it to mean a person who investigates origins and associations of phrases, as in “phrase detective.” The second syllable was used in that meaning more popularly in my youth (’40s and ’50s) than it is today, when, as you surely know, it more commonly suggests a vulgar definition. I’d hate to think of you in that way
.

Madeline Hamermesh

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Slug It Tout.
Headline writers—at their best, the language’s poets of the succinct—sometimes give in to the urge to accentuate a minor sense of a temptingly short word. In response to the television news producers’ “If it bleeds, it leads,” some writers of our headlines are in danger of adopting its counterpart: If it fits, it hits.

“Bush
Touts
Welfare-to-Work Proposal During Ohio Trip” was an AP headline this month. It was soon followed in the
Washington Post
by a headline over an article from Michigan, “Bush Steps Into the Classroom to
Tout
New Education Law.”

We’re talking about the English verb
tout,
pronounced “towt,” not the French word for the adjective “all,” pronounced “too,” as in “le tout New York,” meaning “anybody who is anybody among the glitterati.” The English
tout
is hot, not just in headlinese but also in the body of articles. A
Washington Times
reporter, object of no pleas to squeeze, picked up on the vogue verb with “The president was scheduled to travel to Pennsylvania today to
tout
another component of his budget: $11 billion to fight bioterrorism.” A reporter for the
New York Times
noted that Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey supported a deduction of college tuition payments from federal income taxes with “He and his advisers
tout
this whenever possible.”

An AP deskman, asked about the meaning of
touts
atop the wire service article about welfare-to-work, quickly replied, “It means ‘speaks in favor of.’” Others would defend their use of
touts
as meaning “recommends, urges passage of, advocates, supports, presses for” or even “praises, hails.” Those are not the primary meanings of this colorful colloquialism. Words carry connotations; because of its larcenous, racy origin, this verb lugs along an aura of slyly phony enthusiasm.

Touter
began as a noun in the English village of Tunbridge Wells in 1754. “Here are a parcel of fellows,” wrote Samuel Richardson, “mean traders, whom they call
touters
and their business
touting
… riding out miles to meet coaches … to beg their custom while here.” The racetrack association came early, as
Sporting
magazine in 1812 defined a
touter
as “a person who hides up between the furzes on the heath to see the trials of horses.” The novelist Charles Dickens, in his 1844
Martin Chuzzlewit,
used it to mean “a thieves’ scout” when he wrote of “thimble-riggers, duffers,
touters,
or any of those sharpers … known to the Police.”

Clipped to the single-syllable
touts,
these sneaky souls can still be spotted coming back from the furzes on the heath at some of our huge raceways to
tout
—the verb—a horse to an unsuspecting bettor, thereby to manipulate the odds or get a piece of the winnings. (A generation ago, I bought a double-breasted pinstripe suit; A. M. Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the
Times,
said, “You’re supposed to look like a newspaperman, not a racetrack
tout,
” and I have not worn it since.)

From this sleazy background we get the current extended meaning of the verb to
tout:
“to publicize blatantly, to praise extravagantly; to importune often for a selfish or sinister purpose.” Politicians have been known to do that, of course, and opinionmongers have the right to use it freely. Though it is terse and punchy, its judgmental appearance in a headline is to be (to use the favorite verbs in headlinese) assailed and decried. What’s a good substitute for
tout
?
Discuss
has no sell in it, and
advocate
is too bookish; if you’re reaching for dignified pushiness, try
promote
.