Alistair Cooke of BBC fame called me with an assignment: "The State Department still has a Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. The rest of the world calls that area the Middle East. Do something about this right away."
(What is it with these old guys? Cooke, at 94, has the world's liveliest nonagenarian mind. I ran into Herman Wouk the other day; at 88, he's busy finishing his latest novel. And Dan Schorr, 86, is the most lucid regular commentator on National Public Radio. I think a creative and critical use of the language must have a lifelong affect on mental acuity.)
A young whippersnapper at the Department of State was willing to discuss this sensitive matter on background. "Middle East is a relatively modern term," said my unnameable source. "At the beginning of and during World War II, the term most often used was Near East, and we had a Near East Division. In 1949, it became the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs." The spokesperson had to admit it was "a very Euro-centered term."
It all began in 1852 with the Far East (capitalized because it was not just a direction but the proper noun for a region), defined by the O.E.D. as "the extreme eastern regions of the Old World." Standing in Europe, you looked eastward toward the far-distant Orient (now called Asia, or East Asia if you want to exclude Russia). But what of the huge area that is not so "far" east? Fred Shapiro of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations provides a citation from the July 1876 Atlantic Monthly: "The whole nearer East looks dim and rough after the splendor and sheen of Japan."
It was not until 1897 that Catholic World magazine followed "the genius of building back to its immemorial source in the middle East." A year later, the British historian William Miller wrote Travels and Politics in the Near East, shortening nearer and capitalizing near. That joined the century-long battle between Near and Middle to describe what used to be called the Ottoman Empire.
First let's define the border of Near/Middle East, now used interchangeably. One sweeping definition is "the countries of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa," but Webster's New World gets a little more specific: "area from Afghanistan to Libya, including Arabia, Cyprus and Asiatic Turkey." American Heritage says it is generally thought to be "Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Egypt and Sudan in N.E. Africa are sometimes considered part of the region."
I'd toss in Morocco and Tunisia. The New York Times stylebook adds Iran and the Persian Gulf emirates and subtracts Turkey. (We generally eschew Near, insisting on Middle, and permitting Mideast only in headlines, a grudging concession to the need for compression.) This region can be described as "predominantly Islamic" but not as "the Arab world," because Turks, Kurds, Iranians, Israelis and others are not Arabs.
The UN is slowly working its way around the problem. "Within the UN system, it is most often called the Middle East," says Farhan Haq, a spokesman. "We have the Middle East peace process and the special coordinator for the Middle East. But we also have the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, as well as the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia." Pressed for current usage, he says, "Near East is probably the most infrequent usage, used in organizations that date way back."
That leaves the hidebound, traditionalist US Department of State unilaterally zigging while the rest of the world is going zag. William Joseph Burns carries the title of assistant secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, making this modern diplomat an archaic laughingstock. What to do that shows both multilateral cooperation and linguistic leadership?
Some would suggest dropping any use of East as Eurocentric, but that would call for scrapping such phrases as the Western alliance and even the Western world, an extreme step. Under pressure from Alistair for a clear-cut recommendation, I say: go with the flow of Middle East, but leapfrog to the shorter but still understandable Mideast. If we can settle the nomenclature issue, who knows what we can settle next?
Egg walk
When a hawkish vituperator characterized a diplomatic comment by General Tommy Franks as "walking on eggs," Benjamin Errett, arts editor for Canada's National Post, objected. He insists that the correct term is walking on eggshells.
I quickly turned to googlefight.com, a Web site not associated with Google but which uses that amazing search engine to compare the frequency with which similar terms are used. Walkers on eggshells are found seven times more often than walkers on eggs. Errett is correct about current usage, which dates to the early part of the last century. A Times reporter, covering the 1920 Democratic National Convention, which selected James Cox to oppose Warren Harding, wrote: "Indiana, a State which has been walking on eggshells all day long and trying to find a safe place to let down its weight."
But the metaphoric meaning of the phrase is "to walk with great care, lightly, tippy-toe, taking precaution not to offend." In 1866, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips derided senator Henry Wilson as "of that cautious class who could walk upon eggs without breaking them." In 1621, Robert Burton wrote in his Anatomy of Melancholy of a man "going as if he trod on eggs." And around 1510, the Italian Ludovico Ariosto, in "Orlando Furioso," used the phrase "calcar ... l'uova" -- "to tread on eggs." Not shells, which are already broken, and you don't have to be careful about breaking them. (Though I admit you have to be careful lest you cut your bare feet.)
The great old metaphor has been corrupted in current use, and I am pleased with this opportunity to set it right.
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