Sun, Apr 11, 2004 page9

• `Wing nut:' do we need a new name to call extremists?

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Sometimes a new or offbeat word or phrase is used in common parlance for years before it sees print. Occasionally our computers' search engines, prowling the world of words for everything written or transcribed, can pick up an isolated usage.

  So it is with "wing nut." I've heard this phrase spoken by political reporters for a couple of years but never saw it in print. Then in came an e-mail message from Mary Moliski, who describes herself as a "grandmother and word enthusiast" and sees this column in The Houston Chronicle: "Have you researched the word(s) `wing nut?' I came across it in a complicated article in Slate. I don't get the connection. Sure -- you take `nut,' a -- well, a screwball; and `wing' -- yeah, someone who wings it is usually not packed too tightly. Anyway, I thought maybe you could do some research."

  I snap to attention when a reader (a) comes up with a specific citation, (b) makes an informed speculation about the meaning or derivation and (c) tosses in an offhand, colorful metaphor like "not packed too tightly," for someone who does not get both oars in the water.

  First, to Moliski's citation: Four months ago, Slate headlined an article by Dahlia Lithwick The Wing Nut's Revenge: A Conspiracy Theorist Has His Day in Court. The subject was the oral argument in the Supreme Court about whether a person's right to privacy survives his death and attaches to his family.

  One Allan Favish is derided as "an obsessive California conspiracy theorist who's been trying to get his hands on death-scene photographs of former Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster for almost a decade" to show that the government was negligent in its five investigations.

  When Justice Antonin Scalia said to the Foster family's attorney, "What he and other conspiracy theorists would say is that the fact that there were five investigations only shows the extent of the conspiracy," the reporter characterized this as, "Scalia, never afraid to call a wing nut a wing nut." Slate's headline writer alertly chose Lithwick's lively phrase for the headline. Scalia joined the unanimous ruling protecting the family's privacy.

  A fan club devoted to the TV series The West Wing calls itself the WingNuts.

  The only other usage of the two-word derogation that comes to hand is from The Austin Chronicle. The reporter Michael King describes state Representative Wayne Christian as being Representative Arlene Wohlgemuth's "fellow wing nut." I think this is meant to suggest that the two political figures are strongly conservative.

  Every mechanic and do-it-yourselfer reading this will say, "Wait -- what are they doing to our beloved wing nuts?" They know a "nut" to mean "a piece of metal with a threaded hole through it, enabling a screw to be inserted for fastening." Although most frequently shaped as a square or a hexagon, the nut sometimes has "wings" to provide a grip for easy twisting by thumb and forefinger.

  Botanists will also be dismayed at the assumption by conspiratorial types of their beloved "Caucasian Wing-nut," a tree indigenous to Iran and Turkey whose fruity catkins have an ornamental effect.

  In current political parlance, however, the word is now beginning its bid to replace the tiring "extremist." The wing of a political party or movement (derived from the flank of a military line, in turn taken from the paired appendages of a bird) most often represents its ideology undiluted by compromises designed to appeal to the center.

  In his 1909 Meaning of Truth, the pragmatist William James predicted that a canonical formula "would certainly develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters." George Orwell in 1937 described the thinking person as being "by intellect usually left-wing but by temperament often right-wing." Conservatives, of course, scoff at this as intellectual pretension.

  With the "wing" established, enter the "nut." The true believers of each side consider those similarly inclined on the other to be nuts and kooks, a satisfying arrangement of derangement. (Theodore Roosevelt in 1913 castigated both "the silly reactionaries" to his right and "the lunatic fringe among the reformers" on his left.)

  However, in what many pundits believe to be a polarized polity, what do centrists -- castigated from both sides as "me-too-ers" or wimpish "moderates" -- have in their arsenal to fire back?

  Their defensive word is "mainstream," its metaphoric flow presaged by Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women: "In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it."

  The attack word catching on with political nonwingers and by mainstreaming media is "wing nut." It is applied with supposed fine impartiality to both left-wing kooks and right-wing nuts. Listen for it as the US presidential campaign progresses. (Two words, no hyphen.)

  WALKING BACK THE CAT

  Another reader -- Mary Greenberg of Topeka, Kansas -- caught an arcane intelligence term on the air and sent it to onlanguage@nytimes.com for explication. ("Explanation" clarifies or justifies; "explication" analyzes in delectable detail.)

  On PBS' NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, the former UN weapons inspector David Kay said that politically important to the US was "walking the cat back and explaining Iraq."

  This is intelligence-insider spook-speak. To "walk back the cat" is "to apply what is now known to the actions and events of a previous time."

  For example, after a country has surprised the world by launching a long-range missile, the cat walkers closely examine all the intelligence gathered on that subject in that country for years before.

  Who rightly predicted that it would happen, and what source -- perhaps in disinformation mode -- assured our spies that it would not?

  I first heard the expression from William Casey, a veteran World War II spymaster and the director of central intelligence in the Reagan years.

  Without revealing my source (and Casey was a great source before he switched over to Bob Woodward), I noted in 1987 that a "group of second-guessers re-examines estimates in the light of subsequent events; its review -- which can reveal anything from mistaken motivation to moles -- is called `walking back the cat.'"

  Nice to see the phrase come in out of the cold. It recalls the ironic line "Tell that cat to stop stomping up and down on the carpet!"
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