"It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another," wrote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld toward the end of a memo to a quartet of his top aides, "but it will be a long, hard slog."
The "snowflake" -- as the SecDef's deputies call his many stimulative memos that cause the bureaucracy to quake -- was promptly leaked to USA Today. Reporters wondered, Did this mean the publicly resolute Rumsfeld was secretly getting discouraged? Was his use of "slog" a clue to a diminution of his optimism, or even more delicious, the first inkling of self-doubt?
When Rumsfeld went home from the office after the "slog memo" was published, his wife, Joyce, asked: "Are you sure that's a word?"
"Oh, I'm sure it's a word," he says he replied, "but I just haven't heard it for about 20 or 30 years, and I thought I'd bring it back into active competition."
He revealed this intimate marital interchange about vocabulary at a press conference the next day to which he came armed (by his speechwriter, Marc Thiessen) with the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of the verb, "to slog: To hit or strike hard, to drive with blows, to assail violently."
A reporter, Jamie McIntyre of CNN, prefacing his question with "disinclined though I am to be disputatious," noted that the American Heritage Dictionary's preferred definition was "to walk or progress with a slow, heavy pace; plod, as in `slog across the swamp.'"
"Right, I've seen that one," Rumsfeld said. "I read the one I liked."
The disputation was slightly off the point. Both the secretary and his questioner gave the varying definitions of the verb "to slog," and both were correct, their lexicographic sources unassailable. The earlier meaning of the verb, as in the OED's 1824 British criminal court citation "Go back and slog him," was indeed, as Rumsfeld noted, "to hit or strike hard." But it was also used in the 19th century to mean "to walk heavily or doggedly," and its sense reported by the slanguist James Halliwell of "to lag behind" suggests a common Scandinavian root with the verb "slug," the adjective "sluggish" and nouns "sluggard," "slugabed" and baseball's "slugger." Thus, both "slog" and "slug" have a sense of "strike, wallop" and also share a sense of "walk heavily."
Forget all that. Thiessen, McIntyre and I have led you into a blind alley. The verb "slog" is not the noun slog, and what Rumsfeld wrote was the noun in "a long, hard slog."
The noun "slog" is defined in Merriam-Webster's 10th Collegiate as, first, "hard persistent work" and second as "a hard dogged march or tramp." I would extend the metaphor of the latter, more current, sense to "through mud or snow" and define its current sense to "an arduous journey."
Does the context of Rumsfeld's use of the noun -- "it will be a long, hard slog" -- suggest one of the verb meanings, "to hit or strike hard?" I think not. He was spoofing his press audience the day after -- merrily splashing around in the leak, which did not upset him -- and had used the noun in his memo to mean "an arduous journey; a long, difficult effort." This implies more square-jawed resolution than Gloomy Gussiness.
Does one slog (the verb) through a quagmire (always a noun)? The latter word, popularized during the war in Vietnam, is an amalgam of "quag," "a bog or marsh," and "mire," "deep, soft mud." The way to get through it is to slog. "`Quagmire' connotes being stuck and sinking," observes Paul Matulic of Washington, "while `slog' connotes moving through with difficulty."
Metrics
"Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," Rumsfeld wrote. Using the new meaning of metrics, he gave this example of the sort of data he felt were lacking: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrasas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Metrics originally meant the application of mathematical analysis to a field of study -- for example, econometrics. In its current voguish sense, it is a hifalutin word for "measurement," carrying an overtone in both Foundationese and Pentagonese of the estimation of "long-term outcomes."
Behinder
"Do we need a new organization?" asked the defense secretary in his shake-'em-up memo, demanding that his aides think outside the five-sided box. "How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrasa schools? Is our current situation such that `the harder we work, the behinder we get'?"
Behinder? Not "further behind"? Rumsfeld was quoting a new adage, to use an oxymoron, that sometimes goes "hurrier I go, behinder I get." A Google search pops up 35 uses attributed to Pennsylvania Dutch (the "Dutch" standing for Deutsch, "German") and 26 to the Amish in that state. This is dismissed as folk etymology and mere "placemat logo" by C. Richard Beam of Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Others have attributed it to the author Lewis Carroll, but neither "hurrier" nor "behinder" can be found in his jabberwockian works.
Earliest use I can find in the form Rumsfeld quoted is by a frustrated Oail Andrew "Bum" Phillips, coach of the New Orleans Saints in 1985. After a stinging defeat in the Louisiana Superdome, Phillips said: "I'm embarrassed. Who wouldn't be embarrassed? The harder we play, the behinder we get."
Lexicographic Irregulars who can find the source for this pseudo-Germanic aphorism will gain undying etymological fame by sending it to onlanguage@nytimes.com. To quote the T-shirt wisdom, rooted in German, that might be imagined in the E-ring of the Pentagon: "Ve get too soon Oldt und too late Shmardt."
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