Sun, Jul 11, 2004 page9

• Wordnerds spawn books like thesauruses spawn synonyms

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  What are this summer's best new books for wordnerds? I found that locution on the back-cover promotional copy for The Elephants of Style, by Bill Walsh, a Washington Post copy chief.

  He digs puns; his last book was Lapsing Into a Comma. This title is a play on The Elements of Style, of course, and he carries the wordplay into the subtitle, "A trunkload of tips on the big issues and gray areas of contemporary American English."

  What Walsh calls his "curmudgeon's stylebook" contains such useful items as differentiating names of peoples: "Although the people of Pakistan are Pakistanis, the people of Afghanistan are Afghans. The word afghani refers solely to the country's main unit of currency. To call an Afghan an afghani is like calling an American a dollar."

  His "gray areas" are stimulating. On the singular of data, he rejects the traditional datum, holding that "it's time to pull the plug and acknowledge that data is a collective noun, like information." I agree. But Walsh also accepts as "useful linguistic evolution" the word gender to mean "sex." I say it's feminese, shying from the blunt word sex, and resolutely limit gender to treating nouns in foreign languages as masculine or feminine. He'll win on this.

  We really part company on news media. He holds that it is usually used by people as a collective singular: "Change `The media are restless tonight' to `The media is restless tonight,' because obviously the reference is to the communicators, not the modes of communication." It's good to hear an intelligent argument for media is, but I think it lumps together each medium (radio, TV, blogs) when it is important to recognize the multiplicity of communications voices. I'd stick with media are (unless I forget, which is often, and the copy editor saves me).

  To each book comes its season, and now is the time for Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush by Allan Metcalf, the respected philologist and longtime stalwart of the American Dialect Society. We members of the Judson Welliver Society of former White House speechwriters (Welliver was the first, for Harding and Coolidge) lap this stuff up.

  In a chapter on "Presidents as Neologists" -- words or phrases coined by or, more often, popularized by presidents -- Metcalf includes John Adams' adoption of the Algonquian word caucus; Thomas Jefferson's electioneering, countervailing and public relations; Theodore Roosevelt's lunatic fringe and probably nail jelly to the wall. Former president Franklin Roosevelt, while in college, provided the first instance of cheerleader, and Abraham Lincoln is credited with Michigander. (The author might have added Abe's "That is cool" in his Cooper Union speech, meaning "ironically desirable." Though environed by difficulty, he was clearly ahead of his time.) President 43 coined misunderestimate and will be remembered for his embetterment of mankind. (The word-processing demon in my computer keeps trying to change that to embitterment. A preferred form of reportorial inclusion in a military unit would be embedderment.)

  Metcalf's work on presidential style, including passages useful to students of bloviation as well as inspiration, includes the inescapable mispronunciation of nuclear as "nucular," committed by Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush, and as "noo-kee-uh" by Jimmy Carter.

  This which brings us to: Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Confrontational Times, by Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford University linguistics professor. He cannot figure out why Bush keeps treating nuclear "as if it had the same suffix as words like molecular and particular. It's the same process that turns lackadaisical into laxadaisical and chaise longue into chaise lounge."

  Nunberg's book, mainly a compilation of his commentaries on US National Public Radio, refreshingly deals with what is called in rhetoric polysyndeton, a word based on the Greek for "using many connectives," like "here and there and everywhere." He observes that the use of conjunctions rather than commas for drum-like dramatic effect is done more often by conservative writers. For every liberal Molly Ivins writing, "We will have another surge of progressivism and reform and hell-raising and fun and justice," there are four or five conservatives like Peggy Noonan writing, "You want to really feel it and experience it and smell it and touch it and thank God for it."

  A new thesaurus that is helpful, up-to-date and much-needed is the American Heritage College Thesaurus (AHCT). Take the noun hello; its synonyms are "hail, greeting, salutation, salute, welcome." A noneffusive Damon Runyon character offered "a medium hello." The AHCT, which I pronounce as the first syllable in "achtung!" also provides hello's alternatives as an informal interjection: "aloha, hey, hey ho, hey there, hi, hi there, howdy, howdy do." Then as slang: "yo, 'sup." Finally, as idiom: "how do you do, what's up." No, AHCT does not include "what's buzzin', cousin," which is out of date. Send the latest salutations to onlanguage@nytimes.com.

  Splitting hairs is instructive and fun. AHCT is proud of its "core synonym" feature for abrupt, in the sense of "rudely informal." It notes that while brusque "emphasizes rude abruptness," gruff "implies roughness or surliness but does not necessarily suggest rudeness," and blunt "stresses utter frankness and usually a disconcerting directness."

  Thesauruses open new semantic worlds to wordnerds. Let us stop worrying about the meaning of life and start enjoying the life of meaning.
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