The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (54 page)

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 Nixonian
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.”

Bill Clinton put the constitutional phrase into a question and then answered it in 1994: “What’s the state of our Union? It is growing
stronger,
but it must be
stronger
still.” In 1996, he said “the state of the Union is
strong
” and in the next two years repeated that phrase, reverting to his initial
our Union,
but sticking to
strong
. In 2000, with the economy still booming and surpluses projected as far as the eye could see, Clinton concluded his string of SOU addresses with “the state of our Union is the
strongest
it has ever been.”

George W. Bush last month also used
stronger,
but his speechwriter Michael Gerson used it in a creative way, pointing to a seeming paradox: “Our nation is at war, our economy is in recession and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been
stronger
.” This anomaly was apparent in the victory in Afghanistan and was largely brought about by “the might of the United States military.” In Bush’s first SOU, he was able to point out how a justified pride in our power and national will overwhelmed both the economic strains and the dangers of terrorism. The favorite adjective of recent presidents to characterize the nation’s state—
strong
—was thus unarguably applicable. Do presidents and their writers think about the one-word summation of the state of the Union (always capitalized) when the time for the report required by the Constitution rolls around? Do they read the way their predecessors handled it and chew over whether to stick with previous usage (
Good? Sound? Strong?
), or play off one of those usages, or come up with something fresh? As this history should show, you bet they do.

Squeezewords.
Rush Limbaugh, the radio philosopher, was appalled. Thousands of his listeners were sending in messages protesting the increased number of commercials on his program. Because he was talking the same amount of time every day, and the show ran the same three hours, how could this be?

Then a surreptitious form of editing was revealed to him. “A new kind of digital technology,” wrote Alex Kuczynski in the
New York Times,
“was literally snipping out the silent pockets between words, shortening the pauses and generally speeding up the pace of Mr. Limbaugh’s speech.” The irate radio commentator stormed, “I think it is potential doom for the radio industry.” Since then, he tells me: “I have amended that. They will reduce the pauses judiciously, no more than a minute and a half per hour. I want to see if the nuances are affected—after all, a pause can be pregnant.”

Decades ago I did something similar to Humphrey Bogart. He had a habit, as do many of us, of punctuating his ad-lib phrases with
uh
. (This has since been replaced with “I mean” and “y’know,” which serve the same function of demonstrating a presence while not saying anything.) When Bogie had a couple of drinks, the
uh
’s came thick and fast. In the ’50s, after taping an interview with him for the Armed Forces Network, I did him a favor and laboriously snipped all those stammering self-interruptions out of the tape. When our talk was broadcast, he was surprised at how articulate he sounded.

In most cases, I would do the same today as a courtesy to interviewee and listener. I’ll even clean up a grammatical error when taking notes for a written interview, thereby preserving a source and avoiding [sic-sic-sic] wiseguyism. But secret snipping for commercial gain is another kettle of fishiness. Not only is it sneaky, but the silent squeeze also weakens discourse by removing dramatic pauses.

A related danger is not a result of nefarious squeezing by money-grubbing time-savers, but of the hurried laziness of speakers. Let’s not be stiffs about this: in pronunciation, the English language has always tended toward contraction. Old-timers cannot recall ever having heard
business, colonel
or
Wednesday
pronounced with three syllables.
Chocolate,
which geezers recall as “CHOCK-a-lit,” has become “CHAW-klit”; its central syllable melted away in our mouths. In a 1949 article in the
New Yorker
(now the Nyawka), John Davenport commented on “Slurvian,” the language of what linguists call syncope (“SING-kuh-pee”). In this laid-back lingo,
syrup
becomes
surp, Americans
are
Merkins,
and “no, Ma’am”
gnome
. His
forn,
for
foreign,
was picked up by the Central Intelligence Agency, and now “no foreign distribution” is stamped NOFORN.

In our time, such speeding up must not go unremarked. In today’s compulsive compression, other majestic and sonorous words are losing their central syllables. In
The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations,
Charles Harrington Elster argues that “syncopated pronunciations tend to improve the fluidity of speech” and cites “VEJ-tuh-bul” for
vegetable,
“FAM-lee” for
family
and “DY-pur” for
diaper
. (Only babies say “change my ‘DI-a-per.’”)

This has not taken place in a
vacuum
. (That word was once pronounced “VAK-u-um,” but our natures abhorred it, and it’s now “VAK-yoom.”)

However, Elster still cites as objectionable to cultivated speakers such squeezings as “AK-rit” for
accurate,
“YOO-zhul” for
usual,
“claps” for
collapse
and “VUR-bij” for
verbiage
. (I would add an “ASS-ter-ik.”) He takes a pop at me for countenancing an
r
-less “TEM-puh-chur,” and he’s right: from now on, I’ll take my “TEM-pra-chur.”

In this political season, two locutions have come under the sustained pressure of the squeezers. One is
President,
the three-syllabled office much coveted by campaigning candidates. I never minded Lyndon Johnson’s southern pronunciation of the last syllable in his warm “I am yo’
Presidint
”; that is a legitimate dialect variation. However, the near-universal adoption of
Prezdent
seems to me to diminish the office.

A special target for the squirrels of squeeze has been
Social Security
. This generation, promised six full syllables with no cutbacks, was willing to accept “Soshasecurity.” But what of the candidates who promise the salvation of “Sosh-security” or preserving untouched the indexed benefits of “Sosa CURE-ity”? Dwayna M. Wisdom of Union City, New Jersey, notes other variations from “SoSecurity” to “Soshacurity.”

How can anyone pledge expanded benefits to a contracted program? Cock a wary ear to the way the candidates squeeze this revered phrase in coming debates. Then cast your vote for
Prezdent
.

Stovepiping.
The new bête noire of the military, and of the most modern managers, is
stovepiping
.

“Flat organizations work better than vertical organizations,” decrees the Pentagon’s manpower analysis handbook. “It should be noted that
stovepiping
is not inherently evil, but the burden of proof should be on the
stovepiping
function to demonstrate that it is not.”

Lt. Gen. Ed Rowny (Ret.) urged in the
Wall Street Journal
that Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, be given authority to order widely dispersed bureaucracies into coordinated action. Ridge’s present problem? “Rampant
stovepiping
—different agencies under different command.”

Rowny was present at the time of the creation of the word. When he was working for James Forrestal in forming the Defense Department in 1947, he notes, “we all went up and down our particular chain of command, but when it came time for the Army to cooperate with the Navy, we’d
stovepipe
—go up to the top of the pipe and then back down, instead of cross feeding.”