Ten months ago, Senator John Kerry's primary campaign was in the doldrums. (This is a part of equatorial waters known for light squalls followed by calms. Originally an offshoot of dullard and influenced by tantrum, doldrums, in the plural, means "a condition of low spirits; the dumps" -- a good description of the Kerry campaign in Howard Dean's heyday.)
Asked at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "What's your strategy for getting back on track and winning the nomination?" Kerry replied, "I'm known as a good closer." He repeated the phrase at dispirited rallies that December: "I'm known as a good closer, and I intend to be a good closer in this campaign." After Kerry took the lead in February, one of his remaining rivals, Senator John Edwards, announced hopefully "I am a good closer." This month, after polls showed Kerry drawing even with President Bush, Newsweek turned the word into a sobriquet in a headline: "How `The Closer' Made It a Dead Heat."
"Seems to me that the word is being incorrectly applied," writes Tony Gaas from earthlinkland. "A good closer in business is someone who can `close the deal' and get the prospective buyer to sign. I don't remember any denizen of the track referring to the racehorse Silky Sullivan as a good closer -- maybe a good finisher."
Earliest political use I can find is from the primary campaign of 1988. On March 6, as Super Tuesday approached, David Nyhan wrote in The Boston Globe about then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis: "The Duke was never known as a strong closer in Massachusetts elections. ... But it looks like Duke and Jesse [Jackson] run one-two Tuesday night." The phrase lay dormant until the campaign of 2000. Vice president Al Gore was running behind in August, and the Democratic consultant James Carville -- "the ragin' Cajun" -- sought to encourage the depressed troops. "Vice presidents are good closers," he said, perhaps thinking of Hubert Humphrey's 15-point surge that almost caught Richard Nixon at the close of the 1968 campaign. "Gore is a good closer."
The phrase has long been applied to the manager of a used-car lot who is called in by the salesman to put the heat on a prospective buyer. It has also been belted around in baseball. "The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary" cites closer first as "a starting pitcher who often pitches complete games," and second as "a relief pitcher who tries to get the final out or outs in a game," citing a 1998 usage: "No one is a closer until they've got 40 or 50 saves behind them."
WISHY-WASHY
Cheryl Otis' question was the one chosen by the debate moderator Charles Gibson to lead off the second presidential debate. She said she had asked her friends why they were not voting for Kerry, and "they said that you were too wishy-washy. Do you have a reply for that?"
In his answer, he used the reduplication twice. He said he had a plan to put people back to work ("That's not wishy-washy") and promised a tax cut, again using the derogation "That's not wishy-washy." He returned to the pejorative reduplication a third time later in the debate: "The president's been very busy running around the country using what I just described to you as a reason to say I'm wishy-washy, that I'm a flip-flopper."
Wishy-washyness, often spelled wishi-washiness, is not synonymous with flip-floppiness. I dealt with flip-flop, both noun and verb, in this column a few months ago, defining the side-switching not so much as a permanent change of mind but with its verb synonym "waffle" (from the Scottish waff, "gust of wind"; nothing to do with the Dutch wafel, "cake baked on a grid"). Kerry in debate charged the president with "walking a waffle line" on stem-cell research.
The independent candidate Ralph Nader derided the two-party choice as between "President Flop and Senator Flip-Flop." The standard English synonym for the flip-flop verb is "vacillate." A speechwriter in 1970, familiar with Vice President Spiro Agnew's attraction to alliteration, offered "vicars of vacillation," a mouth-filling epithet with little punch.
To draw the distinction: A wishy-washy person does not take a strong enough position to flip-flop from. To be wishy-washy is to be "feeble; weak"; the Latin root of its standard synonym, "insipid," is sapere, "to taste," and a wishy-washy person lacks all flavor and zest.
But here's the etymological question about this 4-century-old reduplication: Does it come from to wish, suggesting a plaintive, forlorn hope, or from to wash, suggesting a watery, washed-out nature?
Clue: It started out as swish-swash. "There is a kind of swish swash made also in Essex," wrote William Harrison in 1577, "... wyth Hony and water, which the countrey wiues putting some pepper & a little other spyce among, call meade." This was not a good, strong, alcoholic drink of mead (modern spelling), mind you, but an inferior, diluted version as thrilling as near-beer.
In 1791, this miserable swish-swash (beautiful onomatopoeia; you can hear the liquid moving around the mouth) was reported in The Massachusetts Spy: "He ... looked at the broth -- and [damned] it for wishy washy stuff." The metaphor was extended to a form of prose: The Nation in 1893 objected to "a silly, wishy-washy, inconclusive ... style of writing." (That proudly leftist publication has maintained its style of inveighing with vigor.)
No wonder Kerry decided to confront the word head-on, repeating it twice in debate to deny the pusillanimous condition, which he knew would be debilitating to his candidacy if ignored. The first President Bush faced a similar challenge from the word wimp and was reported to have seethed at a 1987 Newsweek cover emblazoned with the headline "Fighting the Wimp Factor." That word (from the verb "to whimper," and influenced by the gentle, hamburger-obsessed cartoon character Wimpy, Popeye the Sailor's friend) imputes weakness colored by cowardice, and wimpish is thus a more infuriating derogation than the namby-pamby wishy-washy.
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