"Disarmament Process Starts in Sadr City, Albeit Slowly" was a front-page headline in The Washington Post last month.
About the same time, at a bankers' convention, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan marveled at "the management skills of bankers and the ability of regulators and legislators to adapt, albeit slowly, to change."
And in Laconia, New Hampshire, The Citizen commented on the 2004 election race: "It's been an exciting, albeit sometimes frustrating, election year."
This word that has become all the rage was classed prematurely as an archaism by Henry and Francis Fowler in their 1906 "The King's English." The sainted brothers Fowler likened albeit to such antiquated terms as thither (instead of "there"), perchance (replaced by "perhaps"), theretofore ("till then") and ere ("before").
But albeit, born in writing in Chaucer's 1385 Legend of Good Women, refused to die. In the 1965 revision of Fowler's Modern English Usage, Ernest Gowers cited its full meaning -- "all though it be that" -- and observed that "it has since been picked up and dusted and, though not to everyone's taste, is now freely used." And in his 1996 revision of the Fowler classic, Robert Burchfield shook his head in wonderment at "one of the most persistent archaic-sounding words in the language."
Albeit's synonym is the conjunction "although," and the meaning spreads over the stronger "even though" and the debater's "conceding the fact that." Its meaning also ranges from a stern "notwithstanding that" and "in spite of the fact that" to a grudging "granted that" and a confessional "admitting that." Albeit's first syllable is pronounced "all," like although (not like Al Capone).
What accounts for the persistence and recent renaissance of albeit, when so much of its Chaucerian cohort ere long went thither and we know not hereof? Why don't we just go with the familiar synonym -- in this case, its interchangeable word, although -- which aforetime won the 600-year usage battle?
Because it's short. (No sentence fragments!) I put the question to the Washington Post foreign copy chief yclept Tony Reid, who wrote the headline at the top of today's illuminating exegesis. "Albeit is shorter, for one," Reid replied. "And the tone of that word seems more definitive to me than although. Maybe because it's older it carries a little more weight. There is some part of my subconscious where my mother is running around that forced that word out of me. I know it's kind of old-timey, but when you're writing a headline, one word can make a difference."
I'll buy the second part of his rationale; though some people use albeit to affect a literary air, others imbue it with associations that give it an old-fashioned, intentionally stiff semantic color. I will dispute his first reason about brevity, however: if you drop the al from although, you get though, which has just as few letters as albeit. Although started as an emphasizer of the shorter word six centuries ago. But that al-emphasis has faded; today, though, while slightly more informal, means the same as although.
The only grammatical difference between them is that although is a conjunction -- connecting parts of speech -- while though can also function as an adverb. (As in: I'd steer clear of the voguish albeit, though.)
NIFTY WIFTY
"Reviews of her speech in July at the Democratic convention ran the gamut," wrote Katharine Seelye in The New York Times in September about Teresa Heinz Kerry, "from self-absorbed to wifty."
That put my researcher, Elizabeth Phillips, on the trail of this unfamiliar term. A month before, the doughty columnist Ellen Goodman stoutly defended the Democratic candidate's outspoken wife in The Boston Globe, though she wrote that a remark Heinz Kerry made on the Today show "was pretty wifty."
Earlier in the summer, The Washington Times' Scott Galupo wrote that Catherine Zeta-Jones, in the movie The Terminal, played "a slightly wifty, lovelorn international flight attendant." And the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Karen Heller noted that "people are always happy with pie and also Toll House cookies, provided you don't get too wifty with the recipe."
In 1985, a New York Times editorial writer (always anonymous but it was Jack Rosenthal, with slanguage help from his son, John), in an editorial headed "The Dictionary of Dumb," did a riff on airhead, then a teenage term being bruited about in derogation of female politicians. He was the first on my block to say it was synonymous with ditsy and wifty.
Though wifty seems to be used frequently in Philadelphia -- Seelye is from the nearby Main Line -- and writers on the Fluffya Inkwire (where Seelye once worked) like the word, its major sponsor has been Boston's Goodman. "How do I explain the word wifty," she wrote in 1988, "which appeared in a column describing Susan Sarandon's character in Bull Durham? ... Some assumed it was a typo and printed nifty. Now the truth can be told. Wifty: a cross between fey, spacey and charming. Soon to be available in your local dictionary."
And there it is, in Merriam-Webster's with-it 11th Collegiate edition, tracked back to 1979, origin unknown, defined as "ditsy." In turn, that synonym is defined as "eccentrically silly, giddy, or inane: dizzy" (which is why I would spell it ditzy). That meaning is a considerable distance from Goodman's gentle definition -- her fey now means "campy, elfin, otherworldly" -- but nobody owns a word's meaning after it leaves Philadelphia and Boston. A neologism can vanish in a nonce, or could last a full generation, as wifty has, or even make itself comfortable in the dictionary just as has the similar nifty -- a slang term for "fine" that dates to the Civil War.
WMD
"I see many references to WMDs," writes Marc Eisen. "Doesn't WMD stand for 'weapons of mass destruction,' already plural? Maybe we need to use WsMD."
No. We don't write Ps.O.W. as initialese for "prisoners of war" or, in baseball, Rs.B.I. for "runs batted in." The initials focus on the subject and ignore the number. Although the New York Times stylebook says "never r.b.i.'s," The Associated Press says "one RBI, 10 RBIs," and I think that easy-to-understand formula holds for the horrific: One WMD, two WMDs.
Not everyone agrees. In the campaign, Vice President Dick Cheney's text warned of "terrorists equipped with WMD," meaning "weapons," while Senator John Kerry's statements were written to refer to the plural as "WMD's," including an apostrophe that does not indicate possession. The New York Times likes the apostrophe and insists on periods after each letter.
My personal preference: a WMD (standing for a single weapon, or for the subject of "weapons of mass destruction"); and WMDs (for two or more of the weapons). Forget about WsMD because you can't say it.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US