US Vice President Cheney minced no words recently when he vulgarly proposed that Senator Patrick Leahy do something impossible to himself. Most US newspaper editors, however, wary of offending public sensibilities, chose not to repeat his verb and called it instead "the F-word." By so doing, they called attention to their vigilance against dirty words and also to a word weed spreading through the language like dandelions.
The -- word: This usage probably began as a coy way to avoid obscenities and delete expletives. Garry Trudeau described the main ones in a Doonesbury comic strip last month in which a Cheney voice announces that "I not only intend to use the F-word from now on, I'm also using the S-word, the C-word, the P-word and the J-word," leaving readers to wonder what curse the J-word might euphemize.
This usage -- I call it letteracy -- is hardly limited to dirty words. It has effloresced since 1988, when the usual proprietor of this space commented on three geopolitical examples: "the D-word" for detente; T for taxes; and U for unemployment. "This vogue will probably peter out in a few years," he wrote, "after we go through the alphabet and begin to get confused about what a given letter is supposed to signify."
William Safire was half-prescient. We have, indeed, gone through the alphabet, and what a given letter signifies is often confusing. Yet there is no sign that letteracy is petering out. Here's a glossary of examples.
A -- This may be the granddaddy of letteracy, the Scarlet Letter for adultery. B -- Budget. Biodiversity. C -- Cancer. Cellulite. Class. D -- Detente. Dinosaur. Deficit. E -- Elite. New York Times columnist Barbara Ehrenreich commented on conservatives' promoting the idea of "a sinister, pseudocompassionate liberal elite. ... Note how richly the E-word embellishes the screeds of Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and their co-ideologues." Also: Euphemism. Electronic.
F -- The Cheney F-word episode recalls a moment in 1976 when the New York Times Magazine published a campaign profile of Jimmy Carter by Norman Mailer. Carter had just created a stir by acknowledging that, hardly perfect, he had experienced lust in his heart. Explaining himself, Carter disclaimed making moral judgments about others, saying, "I don't care if people say -- ." In his manuscript, Mailer insisted on spelling out the F-word. After some discussion, here is how he agreed to finish the sentence: "... and he actually said the famous four-letter word that the Times has not printed in the 125 years of its publishing life."
G -- God. Genocide. H -- Horror. Husband. Hostages. Halliburton.
J -- Jews. K -- Kashmir. L -- After Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election, "the L-word" was widely and sarcastically used to signify liberal. Today the term is known as the title of Showtime's television drama about lesbians. Also: Landslide. M -- Marriage, as in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision last February enabling single-sex unions. In her dissent, Justice Martha Sosman described the controversy as "a pitched battle over who gets to use the `M' word." Also: Math. Malaise.
N -- By far the most common usage of the N-word is to avoid repeating the hateful corruption of the word "Negro" when used by non-blacks. O -- Oil. Organic. Orphanages. P -- Posture. Productivity. Process. Q -- Quagmire. Quality. Quiet. R -- Recession. Revolution. S -- Sustainability. Socialism. Socialization. T -- Terrorism. Torture. U -- Unions. Unilateralism. Uranium.
V -- Values. As the 2004 campaign ripened, this became the buzzword of both the Bush and the Kerry campaigns, so much so that in July the New York Times reported that "Mr. Kerry used the V-word no fewer than eight times in a 36-minute speech." Also: Vouchers. Volunteers. Vagina. W -- Welfare. Wedding. Wilderness.
All told, that's 54 examples of letteracy, encompassing 22 letters of the alphabet, and there are surely many more. No matter how many, by now they all boil down to a single C-word: cliche.
SEE THE DOG
With the Republicans gathering in New York to formally nominate their candidates this week, political speculation next turns to potential Cabinet appointees. Before filling the Cabinet jobs, however, the first requirement is to remember them all
For decades, a brief mnemonic described the departments, and followed their order of creation: St. Wapniacl. That is, State, Treasury, War, Post Office, Navy, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor. In the last half-century, however, the roster of Cabinet departments has been transformed with the combination of War and Navy into Defense, the transmutation of the Post Office into the Postal Service and the addition of three departments whose names start with H, two with E, plus a T and a V.
The present Cabinet consists of 15 departments, plus other officials designated from time to time by one president but not necessarily another, like the US representative to the UN, or the US trade representative. In order of creation: 1789, State, Treasury, War, Attorney General (the Department of Justice was created in 1870), Post Office. 1798, Navy. 1849, Interior. 1862, Agriculture. 1913, Commerce, Labor. 1949, Defense (merging War and Navy and adding Air Force). 1953, Health, Education and Welfare (becoming Health and Human Services when the Department of Education was created in 1979). 1965, Housing and Urban Development. 1966, Transportation. 1970, Post Office Department converted to independent Postal Service. 1977, Energy. 1979, Education. 1988, Veterans Affairs. 2003, Homeland Security.
The addition of the Department of Homeland Security makes a new mnemonic all the more necessary. Here's one first proposed on the New York Times editorial page in 1988 and later revised: See The Dog Jump In A Circle; Leave Her House To Entertain Educated Veterans' Homes.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
Yesterday, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), once the dominant political party in Taiwan and the historic bearer of Chinese republicanism, officially crowned Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as its chairwoman. A former advocate for Taiwanese independence turned Beijing-leaning firebrand, Cheng represents the KMT’s latest metamorphosis — not toward modernity, moderation or vision, but toward denial, distortion and decline. In an interview with Deutsche Welle that has now gone viral, Cheng declared with an unsettling confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not a dictator,” but rather a “democratically elected leader.” She went on to lecture the German journalist that Russia had been “democratized
RSS