The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (56 page)

At the current Moscow summit, the word
abrogate
is used by the Clinton briefers only to say what they would not do and what the Republicans might do. The GOP candidate, Governor Bush, last year used the harsh word to indicate what he might be prepared to do, but this year he has sidestepped the semantic trap, preferring
withdraw
.

Which verb will triumph? Keep your eye on a dark horse coming up on the outside:
amend
. If Clinton gets Putin to agree to change the ABM treaty, he will declare success and send the amendments to the Senate. In response, GOP leaders have already chosen a hospital term to describe their reaction to any modest amending:
dead on arrival
.

I have been thinking about
abrogate
and
withdraw.
It seems to me that you withdraw from a multilateral treaty because there are others left to observe it and you abrogate a bilateral treaty because it takes two to tango
.

You will immediately say ah yes but the ABM treaty specifically speaks of “withdraw” and “withdrawal.” I think the framers of the treaty were looking for a euphemism less harsh sounding than
abrogate.

That’s how it strikes me. I can’t prove any of it
.

Daniel Schorr

National Public Radio

Washington, D. C.

Supreme Court Stumble.
In oral argument before the Supreme Court, the Gore attorney David Boies focused on the intent of the voters. Questioning him, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that a general “intent” ran throughout the law and drove that point home with an adage: “Even a dog knows the difference in being stumbled over and being kicked.”

Just one of those homely old sayings, untraceable to its source, like JFK’s “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan”? At my urgent request, Fred Shapiro, editor of the
Yale Dictionary of Quotations,
tracked it down. Here it is, from the 1881 book
The Common Law,
by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a passage about intentional violence: “Vengeance imports a feeling of blame, and an opinion, however distorted by passion, that a wrong has been done. It can hardly go very far beyond the case of a harm intentionally inflicted: even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”

Holmes, the “Yankee from Olympus,” was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt and retired in 1932 at age ninety. His use of a homely figure of speech is evidently familiar to members of the current court.

Switcheroo.
During the war of commercial spots between George W. Bush and John McCain, Bush quoted the
Wall Street Journal,
saying McCain’s campaign was “crawling with lobbyists,” and McCain slammed back with a charge that the Bush spot “twists the truth like Clinton.” When the McCain manager offered to call a truce, Bush reportedly replied, “It’s the old game of
switch-and-bait:
say one thing and do another.”

The name of the old game, as Bush quickly realized, is the reverse:
bait-and-switch
. In this dodge, an advertiser entices a customer into the store with a low price on an attractive item, but then says, “We’re out of it,” and tries to sell a higher-priced item.

“If a product or service is advertised at a price that seems too good to be true,” advises the Better Business Bureau of Los Angeles, “this may be a ‘bait’ ad. Then, if the merchant refuses to show you the advertised item, to take orders for it or to deliver it within a reasonable time … take this as a sign you are being ‘switched.’” The point to remember in applying it metaphorically in politics is that the
bait
always comes first. Then comes the
switch
.

Bush has been criticized for his overuse of alliteration. As William Kristol noted on MSNBC’s
Hardball
program, “compassionate conservatism” was followed by “prosperity with a purpose” and then by “a reformer with results.” But to me, alliteration always attracts. My favorite was the unforgettable 1920 passage by Warren G. Harding, promising “not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not agitation but adjustment, not surgery but serenity, not the dramatic but the dispassionate, not experiment but equipoise.”

T

That Said.
“The South Carolina primary between Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain in 2000,” wrote Eleanor Randolph, the
New York Times
editorialist, discussing Representative Lindsey Graham’s current campaign for the Senate, “left Republicans in his state bitter and divided.
That said,
both President Bush and Senator McCain have already campaigned for his election to the Senate.”

In olden times, those two sentences would have been written as one, with the first clause subordinated: “
Although
the South Carolina primary … left Republicans … divided, both Bush and McCain … campaigned for his election….” Or they could have remained as two sentences, with the second beginning
however
instead of with the voguism
that said
.

Coming out of a meeting in the White House with President Bush about the war in Afghanistan, Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, told reporters: “I don’t believe there was adequate notification.
Having said that,
we will move on.” He could have begun his second sentence, which undermines the first, with the wishy-washy
on the other hand,
the stark
in spite of that,
the smooth
all the same
or the bookish
nevertheless,
but the word-conscious Democratic leader chose—with his characteristic consummate care-the other form of the self-referential voguism sweeping the country:
having said that
.

This absolutive participial construction now spreading like wildfire through our discourse was brought to my attention by the Floridians Sylvia and Morton Holstein. They noted an article I wrote wearing my other hat, in my op-ed capacity as vituperative right-wing scandalmonger, and considered my harangue inconclusive, lacking the zinger at the end that satisfies both advocate and audience. “As the journalists like to say,” they wrote, “‘
having said that
’—and then go on to the real meat of the subject. Well, Mr. Safire, having said that—now what? Can we expect a follow-up?” This is it. I was also alerted to the voguism by Samuel P. King somewhere in e-maildom: “The latest abomination is the substitute for
however
in its many forms—
having said that, that having been said,
et cetera. That said, I guess I’ll just have to get with it.”

We turn now to Professor John Lawler in the linguistics department of the University of Michigan: “
That said
is an abbreviated form of the absolutive participial phrase ‘(With) that (having been) said.’” (You were wondering where I got that “absolutive participial” from? You think I make up this stuff? If I had taken Latin, I’d be able to explain the closely related ablative absolute.) Lawler goes on to the essential meaning of
that said:
“It announces a change of subject, often despite whatever was just said.”

But let us plunge deeper into the vocabulary of vacillation. Writers of opinion articles know how to use what we call a
to-be-sure graf
. After making an argument, some of us feel the urge to show that we are not simpletons—that we know the counterarguments, have taken them into due consideration, but still maintain our positions. In goes the
to-be-sure graf,
a paragraph disarming our opponents with its “Yes, we know all that folderol on the other side” and thereby reducing the volume of irate email.

To be sure
is a rhetorical device to set up and counter the opposition after your initial point has been made. You often present the other side’s position as a straw man easy to knock down and then repeat your opening argument with great force at the end. This
to-be-sure
trick is described by grammarians as “concessive”—that is, I’ll give you this; it costs me nothing and makes me appear reasonable.

However (to use an old construction),
that said
is a device that works in the other direction. The point to be negated is made first: “My opponent is a great guy, a real patriot and a quick study.” (End of concessive construction.) “
That said,
he doesn’t know what he is talking about.” In the Daschle usage quoted above, a refinement was added to make the message “He was mistaken;
that said,
I forgive him and will take credit for my compassion.” (President Bush does this, too; listen for it at news conferences.)

Are we ready for the definition of the two faces of today’s phrase?

One sense of
that said
is “however” and balances what goes first with what goes afterward, as in the objective Randolph usage that opened today’s voguism watch. In its much more frequent sense of “nevertheless, in spite of that, even so” and the lusty “contrariwise,”
that said
clears the air and clears the throat for casting aspersions on all that has preceded it. The subliminal message is “I have done my duty by touching all the bases to show my profound understanding of both sides, and the buttering-up I have just completed gives me the right to now lay upon you what I really think.”

To be sure,
that said
has its good side.

Titular.
As he took the oath of office, George W. Bush not only assumed the powers of the presidency but also became the
titular
head of the nation. That presumes the meaning of “the
titular
head” to be “the one who holds the title.”

Ah, but the word has a connotation that makes politicians shudder: it resonates as merely “nominal; in name only.” A
titular
leader is understood to be the one who may have the formal title but is not the real or actual wielder of power. For that reason, the expression “
titular
head of the party” is reserved for the person who won the party’s nomination but not the election.

“The
titular
leader has no clear and defined authority within his party,” said the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1956. “He has no party office, no staff, no funds…. Yet he is generally deemed the leading spokesman of his party.” When Alf Landon, the 1936 GOP nominee, told the House minority leader, Joseph Martin, in 1940 that FDR had just offered him the post of secretary of war, Martin later wrote: “I advised him not to accept. He was, after all, the
titular
head of the Republican Party.”

Now it is Al Gore’s turn to bear the burden, or dubious honor. But even that title may be under challenge from the former president with whom he served. “Clinton is still the
titular
leader of the Democratic Party, having rudely shoved aside Al Gore,” opined the cable-TV pundit Mort Kondracke at year’s end. National Public Radio’s senior correspondent, Daniel Schorr, used the title in a more nuanced fashion when saying that Gore “should be the
titular
leader of the party, and is—and yet I somehow feel you’re going to see a lot more of Bill Clinton.”

Dick Morris, the political analyst who once advised Clinton, said that Senator Hillary Clinton will be “the
titular
leader of the Democrats in the Senate.” (This was the first time, and perhaps the last, that the title was given to a woman.) I think it was a misusage: if the former first lady becomes the most powerful force in the Senate, then the elected leader of the Senate Democrats, Tom Daschle, would be derogated as merely the
titular
leader, which would imply that Senator Clinton held the real power.

To No Avails.
Because George W. Bush was frequently answering questions on a variety of subjects from reporters on his campaign plane, his aides noticed that their chosen message of the day at major events was not getting through. “Because Gore wasn’t doing
avails
like that,” said Karen P. Hughes, “the networks were using shots from his events.”

Peter Marks, a
New York Times
reporter, noted, “Unlike the campaign of Vice President Al Gore, which has strictly limited the candidate’s access, Mr. Bush and his advisers have provided a steady diet of the kind of ‘
availabilities
’ that reporters crave.”

When were
press availabilities
born? How do these differ from
news conferences
? When did they get clipped to
avails
?

In June 1980, Representative John B. Anderson was running for president as an independent. “The congressman continues to receive substantial local attention,” wrote Warren Weaver in the
New York Times,
“from the daily sessions at each campaign stop that his staff labels as ‘press availabilities.’” Three months later, as Ronald Reagan’s lead over Jimmy Carter narrowed in polls, easy access to the GOP candidate was curtailed; the
Toronto Globe and Mail
noted that “all ‘
press availability
’ sessions with the former California governor have been dropped.”

Reagan understood the shade of difference in the lexicon of access. “I have had now over 120 interviews since I’ve been in office,” he said in 1983, “and numerous
press availabilities
.” An
interview
is a talk with one reporter or a small group. A
news conference
(changed from
press conference
by President Richard Nixon, who believed the event should not belong to the press but to the newsmaker) is usually called to make an announcement and to take questions on that and other subjects. A
press availability
is actively passive; that is, political figures open themselves to general questioning, putting the burden of creating news on the press. It is less focused on the candidate’s preferred message and is therefore, from a campaign’s point of view, riskier.

In 1992, Mary Schmich of the
Chicago Tribune
noted that Senator Bob Kerrey “faced the media in a routine campaign free-for-all known as a ‘
press avail
.’” Two years later, Howard Wilkinson of the
Cincinnati Enquirer
wrote: “The flacks who surround political candidates like to call it a
‘press avail
.’ … No one in the glamorous and fast-paced world of high-power politics has time to say six syllables when one or two will do.”

Without the word
press,
the word
availability
has a different meaning in today’s politics: “commercial time available for purchase by advertisers.” But in American political history, that word has profound resonance as a derogation of opportunism. In 1840, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri said scornfully of the Whig candidates William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, “
Availability
is the only ability sought by the Whigs.” And lexicographic objectivity forces me to report that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay the next year, “Conservatism … goes for
availableness
in its candidate, not for worth….”

You reported on the usage of the word
avail
as shorthand (or shortspeak) for
availability.
My dictionary defines
avail
as, to be of use or advantage. So, now we have two words, both nouns, both spelled the same, both pronounced the same. Should this be sanctioned, or sanctioned?