Sun, Nov 07, 2004 page9

• `Albeit': Is this qualifier nifty or wifty?

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  "Disarmament Process Starts in Sadr City, Albeit Slowly" was a front-page headline in The Washington Post last month.

  About the same time, at a bankers' convention, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan marveled at "the management skills of bankers and the ability of regulators and legislators to adapt, albeit slowly, to change."

  And in Laconia, New Hampshire, The Citizen commented on the 2004 election race: "It's been an exciting, albeit sometimes frustrating, election year."

  This word that has become all the rage was classed prematurely as an archaism by Henry and Francis Fowler in their 1906 "The King's English." The sainted brothers Fowler likened albeit to such antiquated terms as thither (instead of "there"), perchance (replaced by "perhaps"), theretofore ("till then") and ere ("before").

  But albeit, born in writing in Chaucer's 1385 Legend of Good Women, refused to die. In the 1965 revision of Fowler's Modern English Usage, Ernest Gowers cited its full meaning -- "all though it be that" -- and observed that "it has since been picked up and dusted and, though not to everyone's taste, is now freely used." And in his 1996 revision of the Fowler classic, Robert Burchfield shook his head in wonderment at "one of the most persistent archaic-sounding words in the language."

  Albeit's synonym is the conjunction "although," and the meaning spreads over the stronger "even though" and the debater's "conceding the fact that." Its meaning also ranges from a stern "notwithstanding that" and "in spite of the fact that" to a grudging "granted that" and a confessional "admitting that." Albeit's first syllable is pronounced "all," like although (not like Al Capone).

  What accounts for the persistence and recent renaissance of albeit, when so much of its Chaucerian cohort ere long went thither and we know not hereof? Why don't we just go with the familiar synonym -- in this case, its interchangeable word, although -- which aforetime won the 600-year usage battle?

  Because it's short. (No sentence fragments!) I put the question to the Washington Post foreign copy chief yclept Tony Reid, who wrote the headline at the top of today's illuminating exegesis. "Albeit is shorter, for one," Reid replied. "And the tone of that word seems more definitive to me than although. Maybe because it's older it carries a little more weight. There is some part of my subconscious where my mother is running around that forced that word out of me. I know it's kind of old-timey, but when you're writing a headline, one word can make a difference."

  I'll buy the second part of his rationale; though some people use albeit to affect a literary air, others imbue it with associations that give it an old-fashioned, intentionally stiff semantic color. I will dispute his first reason about brevity, however: if you drop the al from although, you get though, which has just as few letters as albeit. Although started as an emphasizer of the shorter word six centuries ago. But that al-emphasis has faded; today, though, while slightly more informal, means the same as although.

  The only grammatical difference between them is that although is a conjunction -- connecting parts of speech -- while though can also function as an adverb. (As in: I'd steer clear of the voguish albeit, though.)

  NIFTY WIFTY

  "Reviews of her speech in July at the Democratic convention ran the gamut," wrote Katharine Seelye in The New York Times in September about Teresa Heinz Kerry, "from self-absorbed to wifty."

  That put my researcher, Elizabeth Phillips, on the trail of this unfamiliar term. A month before, the doughty columnist Ellen Goodman stoutly defended the Democratic candidate's outspoken wife in The Boston Globe, though she wrote that a remark Heinz Kerry made on the Today show "was pretty wifty."

  Earlier in the summer, The Washington Times' Scott Galupo wrote that Catherine Zeta-Jones, in the movie The Terminal, played "a slightly wifty, lovelorn international flight attendant." And the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Karen Heller noted that "people are always happy with pie and also Toll House cookies, provided you don't get too wifty with the recipe."

  In 1985, a New York Times editorial writer (always anonymous but it was Jack Rosenthal, with slanguage help from his son, John), in an editorial headed "The Dictionary of Dumb," did a riff on airhead, then a teenage term being bruited about in derogation of female politicians. He was the first on my block to say it was synonymous with ditsy and wifty.

  Though wifty seems to be used frequently in Philadelphia -- Seelye is from the nearby Main Line -- and writers on the Fluffya Inkwire (where Seelye once worked) like the word, its major sponsor has been Boston's Goodman. "How do I explain the word wifty," she wrote in 1988, "which appeared in a column describing Susan Sarandon's character in Bull Durham? ... Some assumed it was a typo and printed nifty. Now the truth can be told. Wifty: a cross between fey, spacey and charming. Soon to be available in your local dictionary."

  And there it is, in Merriam-Webster's with-it 11th Collegiate edition, tracked back to 1979, origin unknown, defined as "ditsy." In turn, that synonym is defined as "eccentrically silly, giddy, or inane: dizzy" (which is why I would spell it ditzy). That meaning is a considerable distance from Goodman's gentle definition -- her fey now means "campy, elfin, otherworldly" -- but nobody owns a word's meaning after it leaves Philadelphia and Boston. A neologism can vanish in a nonce, or could last a full generation, as wifty has, or even make itself comfortable in the dictionary just as has the similar nifty -- a slang term for "fine" that dates to the Civil War.

  WMD

  "I see many references to WMDs," writes Marc Eisen. "Doesn't WMD stand for 'weapons of mass destruction,' already plural? Maybe we need to use WsMD."

  No. We don't write Ps.O.W. as initialese for "prisoners of war" or, in baseball, Rs.B.I. for "runs batted in." The initials focus on the subject and ignore the number. Although the New York Times stylebook says "never r.b.i.'s," The Associated Press says "one RBI, 10 RBIs," and I think that easy-to-understand formula holds for the horrific: One WMD, two WMDs.

  Not everyone agrees. In the campaign, Vice President Dick Cheney's text warned of "terrorists equipped with WMD," meaning "weapons," while Senator John Kerry's statements were written to refer to the plural as "WMD's," including an apostrophe that does not indicate possession. The New York Times likes the apostrophe and insists on periods after each letter.

  My personal preference: a WMD (standing for a single weapon, or for the subject of "weapons of mass destruction"); and WMDs (for two or more of the weapons). Forget about WsMD because you can't say it.
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