Whether you're a president or a rock star, you do not use obfuscatory bureaucratese without inviting hoots of derision from exponents of straight talk.
The most memorable phrase in George W. Bush's third-best State of the Union address was his verbal tiptoeing around the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction so far. He seemed to lower the bar when he said, "Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities."
The use of the plural noun phrase "weapons of mass destruction" as the first part of a compound adjective modifying the plural noun phrase "program activities" -- with that second noun phrase itself one step removed from an actual "program" -- drew derision-related hooting activity from the many critics of a key justification for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote in The Washington Post: "Aren't Republicans supposed to hate gibberish that sounds like it emerged from the office of the third assistant to the vice policy coordinator for the deputy secretary?"
In fact, the phrase originated in the preliminary report that Bush cited in his speech. David Kay, the US weapons inspector chosen by the CIA to lead the team searching for WMD and the missiles to deliver them, told Congress on Oct. 2, 2003 -- more than three months before Bush adopted the magic phrase -- "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections."
Kay was head of the Iraq Survey Group, not exactly the third assistant anything but rather a midlevel government employee who produced a document within the bureaucracy. Because of that, his phrase went relatively unnoticed at the time he released his report.
However, when presidential speechwriters lifted the phrase verbatim and put it in the mouth of the nation's chief executive -- and without quotation marks to call greater attention to its official source -- it was pounced upon as a euphemistic diminution of an original goal of the inspection and of the invasion as well.
The oratorical lesson is plain: What a bureaucrat can get away with, a president cannot. Let a major politician take cover in the passive with something like "Mistakes were made," fuzzing accountability, and critics will rightly call him on it. This brings us to the way the new demand for plain speech is being extended even to icons that avid fans exalt more than mere presidents.
During the MTV-produced halftime entertainment at Super Bowl XXXVIII (that's 38; the NFL has brought back Roman numerals), the singer Justin Timberlake ripped his dance partner Janet Jackson's bodice so as to expose her right breast. The TV technical director in the control room hastily hit the button to cut away -- but not before millions of kids were welcomed to the NFL.
The Timberlake-Jackson bodice-ripping was watched by about a hundred million shocked, shocked fans and their impressionable preteen offspring. But after the NFL chastised Viacom's MTV and CBS, Timberlake's press agent issued a statement: "I am sorry if anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance." This highfalutin phrase drew outraged groans from euphemism-busters.
However, some good may come of what Jackson called her costume reveal, and not just the notoriety desired by publicity-famished entertainers. At long last, someone too shy to call a friend's attention to a state of inadvertently unzippered pants has a choice of modest methods of notification: "Your wardrobe is malfunctioning" or "You may want to do something about your costume reveal."
TABLE'S RUN IS OVER
Every presidential-primary year, talking heads, chin-pulling pundits and other media thumbsuckers face a challenge: how to handle what George Bush the elder called "Big Mo," or what Teddy Roosevelt's enthusiasts called "the bandwagon." Specifically, how does a commentator break away from the press pack with an original metaphor to describe a seemingly unstoppable string of state victories leading up to the national convention?
Running the table is running out of gas. This expression borrowed from billiards a half-century ago describes the action of a player clearing the pool table of all the balls without interruption, thereby winning the game and leaving other hustlers gaping. (Pool, a game of billiards using 15 object balls and a cue ball, is from the French word poule, meaning "hen," and no shark can tell me the metaphoric etymology. In Britain, where betting on football is often done by placing bets on a number of games in hopes of winning the combined pot, or pool, created by all the bets, the winner is said to "scoop the pool." The phrase has not crossed the Atlantic.)
After political sages stopped speculating about Howard Dean running the table and started guessing that John Kerry would do it, the columnist Robert Novak tried to break out of clicheville with "Kerry's aides won't admit it publicly, but they see a chance to sweep the board."
This is a basketball phrase. I put the full-court press on Tom Jolly, The New York Times' sports editor, who dribbled a while, thinking it over, before opining that "to sweep the boards is to dominate the rebounds until the score is made. The `boards' are the backboards behind the basket." (He will undoubtedly be inundated with mail from fans certain it refers to floorboards, scoreboards or college boards. Better him than me.)
But assuming Jolly is right, is the metaphor already outdated? To allow spectators seated in rows behind the baskets to see the action, the old wooden boards have been replaced by unbreakable glass or transparent plastic. "That's true," says my colleague, "which is why you now hear cleaning the glass."
Aha! With running the table now "so over," I will cock an ear for "senior aides to the candidate say privately that the senator (or governor, or general, or whoever) is likely to clean the glass on Super Tuesday." If so, the commentariat will throw the table on the Big Mo bandwagon and shout: "He shoots! He scores!"
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