Sun, Oct 26, 2003 page9

• `Frog-march:' not quite the British version of the `bum's rush'

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  "It's of keen interest to me," said the former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a war critic furious with the revelation of his wife's name as a CIA agent, "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

  Unable to produce any evidence that Rove, the top White House political adviser, was the one who "outed" his wife, Wilson modified his charge to say that Rove "condoned" the leak. But Don Imus, the radio interviewer, unfamiliar with the British colloquialism, put the question to Wilson of more direct interest to word-watchers: "What does `frog-marched' mean?"

  "Maybe you should ask Mr. Safire," Wilson said.

  "Was he the one -- ?"

  "No," Wilson assured him, absolving me of being a nefarious leakee, "but isn't he the arbiter of language?"

  This doesn't need an arbiter of usage as much as an etymologist of slang. (An arbiter would address Wilson's "whether or not," in which the "or not" is pleonastic -- excess verbiage -- but has long been common usage.) Wilson's own understanding of the phrase he popularized was "two guys, one on either side, marching somebody out."

  Close, but no cigar. The Briton John C. Hotten, in his classic 1873 Slang Dictionary, defined "frog's march" as "the manner in which four or more policemen carry a drunken or turbulent man to the station-house. The victim is held face downwards, one constable being at each shoulder, while the others hold on above the knees. Often another officer beats time on the recalcitrant hero's posteriors."

  After Wilson's well-publicized usage, the usual suspects in the derivation dodge were rounded up by David Montgomery in The Washington Post. A prisoner so carried "was thought to look like a frog," speculated Jesse Sheidlower of the OED. At Webster's New World, Mike Agnes offered his personal mental image: "A guard on each side grabbing one arm and lifting both feet off the ground, and the legs are scrambling for purchase on the ground, and hence kinked like a frog's."

  The author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, who used the colorful verb in one of her books for children, gave her understanding of the compound to a questioner on the Today show: "That's when two people stand [on] either side of a third person and they force them to walk along. It's like you're under arrest."

  Is the meaning associated with the slur "frog", directed at a French person? That deliberate offense, possibly influenced by the use of frog's legs as a delicacy in French cuisine as well as the "fr" sound, can be found in a 1772 British doggerel: "They will fly at the French with the stomach of hogs/And, like storks, in a trice clear the sea of the frogs." In a 1922 letter, Ernest Hemingway asked, "Do you speak frawg?"

  My judgment is that frog-march is not limited to the manhandling of French people. The meaning now has been generalized to "hustle out, under restraint" prisoners of any nationality. In his 1998 Picturesque Expressions, Larry Urdang notes "French walk" as the American equivalent of the British "frog's march". He defines it as synonymous with the "bum's rush", exquisitely described as "the forcible removal or expulsion of a person, usually from a public place, especially by lifting him by the shirt collar and the seat of his pants to a walking position and propelling him toward the door."

  A subtle difference exists, however, relating to the conclusion of the action. Today's "frog march" (as a noun, two unhyphenated words) implies incarceration after the spread-eagled carriage or its modern grabbing of the arms. A "bum's rush" -- the Americanism's first citation is 1910 -- suggests the rushee is left lying at the doorway of the saloon after being ousted, roughed up but free.

  The slang synonym is the old "heave-ho", perhaps originating in sailors' lingo and coined in its metaphoric sense -- to discard a spouse or lover -- by the columnist Damon Runyon in the 1930s. Strictly speaking -- and that's what we do in this space -- the old "heave-ho" is the act of rejection, while the "bum's rush" is the act of ejection.

  Who wants my wont?

  "Both of the senators," said Dr. Howard Dean of Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman, "with all due respect, are exaggerating, as is sometimes our wont in politics."

  "This morning," wrote Jonathan Chait in (on?) The New Republic Online, "I was reading The National Review Online, as is my wont."

  Oxymoronic as it sounds, this archaism is in vogue. The pronunciation "wunt" is awkward, somewhere between "I won't dance" and "I want out."

  It means "custom; habit; usual practice." Frank Sinatra could have sung "I'll do it my wont." It comes from the Old English verb "wonen," "to dwell, to be accustomed to the surroundings," and appeared in the legal phrase "ought and wont," "due and customary."

  Listen for this arch archaism in coming political debates, as candidates strain to become front-runners. As the king said of Gloucester in the second part of Shakespeare's Henry VI, "'Tis not his wont to be the hindmost man."
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