My colleague in columny Maureen Dowd charged recently that Vice President Dick Cheney and his aides "shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam's aluminum tubes, weapons labs, drones and al-Qaida links into former secretary of state Colin Powell's UN speech."
Two weeks before, in a review of local delicatessens, Erik Himmelsbach wrote in the Los Angeles City Beat that the corned beef in Brent's deli was high quality but that the dignified restaurant was "missing the mishegoss associated with the deli experience."
Mishegoss -- Himmelsbach's spelling better reflects the pronunciation of the Yiddish term (mish-eh-GOSS) than Dowd's -- is rooted in the Hebrew adjective meshuga, "mad, insane." But as Leo Rosten noted in his classic The Joys of Yiddish mishegoss is more often used in a light, amused, madcap vein: "a wacky, irrational, absurd belief ... a piece of tomfoolery" or, in another sense, a foolish fixation: "She has a new mishegoss -- that the neighbors are trying to ruin her."
This is an example of a vocabugap (vo-CAB-you-gap), a word I was forced to coin today to describe the situations in our lives for which we have no English word -- and have to turn to a foreign language for lexical expansion. In past columns, we have explored a couple of favorite nouns from the German language: Schadenfreude, "the guilty feeling of pleasure at the misfortune of others" and Fingerspitzengefuehl, "the sandpapered-fingertip sensitivity of a safecracker."
Every few months a query comes in about in-laws: "What do I call my father-in-law's brother?" The English lexicon does have that unfilled semantic space. Yiddish comes to the rescue by naming all one's relatives by marriage as machetunim, (mokh-eh-TOO-nim), plural of the Hebrew mechutan, (mokh-HOO-ten), which could signify your spouse's mother's second cousin. The most inclusive word is mishpocheh (mish-PAW-kheh), literally "family," which lumps together just about everybody invited to the wedding. It is similar to the Russian rodnye (rohd-NEE-eh). The linguist Christopher Moore came out with a book last year, In Other Words, that offers a range of needed words from different languages. What do you call your peace offering -- of flowers, candy, baseball tickets, whatever -- to an angry spouse when you come staggering home hours late? Try the German Drachenfutter, "dragon fodder." The palliative bribe may not work, but the word fills the vocabugap.
What noun sums up the inescapable bore who buttonholes you to make a pitch or unload on you an interminable tale of woe? The Italian solution: attaccabottoni (at-TAC-ca-BOT-own-ee). In a more bittersweet mood, the Russian offers razbliuto (ros-blee-OO-toe), "a feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about." (Why can't we be friends?) Optimists about Middle Eastern events will keep their eyes on the Arabic taarradhin (TAH-rah-deen). Though it's hard to find a specific term for "compromise" in that language, taarradhin suggests the resolution of a conflict that involves no humiliation: our closest definition is "a win-win outcome." Many foreign languages are difficult for the Japanese to learn because their language is written vertically. They have come up with the phrase yoko ("horizontal") meshi ("boiled rice"), meaning "a meal eaten sideways." Yoko meshi evokes the stress that comes from trying to make oneself understood in a foreign language.
English prides itself on being the magpie language, freely picking up foreign words to incorporate into its flexible vocabulary. There are still plenty of delicious tidbits to help us cope with all our mishegoss.
CREEPING PHRASEOLOGY
Vintners know that a second squeezing of a fine vineyard's grapes can still produce a respectable if somewhat tannic wine. In the creation of catchy political phrases, speechwriters and pundits often employ a similar variation on familiar themes.
Take bracket creep, a politico-economic term that had some bite in the 1970s. When inflation drove up a person's income, the taxpayer found himself in a higher tax bracket, which raised his taxes while his purchasing power dropped. Recalling the stealthy connotation of the word creep in the phrase creeping socialism, opponents of this unfair tax increase effectively denounced it as bracket creep.
A decade ago, that successful construction was given a second squeeze by changing its first word. During Operation Joint Endeavor in Bosnia in 1995, commanders who wanted to avert expansion of their operations wrote the supreme allied commander in Europe that "mission creep is to be resisted."
This month, Jim Hoagland, the foreign-affairs pundit for the Washington Post whose Weltanschauung reflects a keen Fingerspitzengefuehl, gave the creepy grapes a third squeeze by changing the phrase's second word: "After years of fearing mission creep in foreign adventures," he wrote, "Washington is allowing `mission shrink' to jeopardize Iraq's chances to build a sustainable, functioning democracy."
This quotable criticism will surely find favor at national-security think tanks.
In the same column, however, Hoagland used a famous phrase that fairly cries out for a second squeezing: "Empowering the Iraqis politically and militarily is obviously the only workable exit strategy." That locution, elevated to permanent cliche status in last year's presidential campaign, was coined in its present military sense by the columnist Joseph Kraft, who wrote presciently in the Washington Post of Feb. 2, 1984, about avoiding American humiliation in Lebanon: "It is time to think about an exit strategy that can be applied unilaterally to limit the gains that will accrue to radical nationalists and the Soviet Union."
A second squeezing of this product of Kraft's prose vineyard is overdue. Envision a scene in a future Situation Room. White House aides are faced with the urgent need to quash an imminent threat, and the national security adviser asks: "Anybody got an idea for an entrance strategy?"
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