At last month's annual conference of the Computer Security Institute, the keynote speaker was one of those privacy nuts who exhorts businesses to tighten up their software and databases lest they threaten customers with ever-more-dangerous identity theft.
In passing, the keynoter noted that a hot word at the conference was "whitelist," and would somebody please explain it to him.
I was that anti-penetration, word-hungry keynoter.
Sure enough, as the ballroom darkened to spotlight the next speaker, a brilliant female executive hurriedly slipped a note into my hand along with her business card, whispered "Whitelist!" and disappeared into the crowd.
I was reminded of the opening to my favorite short story, The Green Door, by O. Henry, which I cited last year in a review of current spookspeak.
"Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner. ... You turn to look into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman. ...
She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, `parallelogram!' and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder. That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it?"
How could any adventuresome word maven refuse the challenge to get a firsthand definition by an early user of an arcane word of the future?
Here is the mysterious message:
Blacklist (noun) a list of known senders of unwanted messages.
Blacklist (verb) to block messages automatically by comparing sender to members of a blacklist.
Whitelist (n) a list of senders of wanted messages that is used by automated spam-filtering systems to override any rule that would result in those messages being blocked.
These rules may include membership in a blacklist, string-matching on "bad" words, or probability-based rules such as "any message addressed to more than fifty receivers must be spam." Also a verb, "to whitelist."
The attached business card identifies this incipient lexicographer as Jennifer Bayuk, chief information security officer of Bear, Stearns & Co.
PC World magazine reported that "this new idea of creating a whitelist of authorized applications is going to be more widely adopted by security vendors because the traditional antivirus technique of blocking known malware is simply becoming too unwieldy." (Malware is software that does evil things like spamming, viruses and worms. Worm first appeared in the context of evilware in a 1975 sci-fi novel by John Dunner.)
The Yankee Group's Andre Jaquith says that "whitelists are probably the way to go," but there is a management downside: administrators have to get involved every time software is updated.
"If Microsoft sends out a hotfix, you're probably going to have to reregister those applications," he says.
Opposites
Have you noticed how many new words are an amalgam of opposites?
In 1958, John Tukey got the idea that the opposite of hardware should be software.
The lexicographer Charles Levine calls them "analogical formations" (on the analogy of analogy), often with a switch on one-half of the word: the Free Software Foundation grants reuse and reproduction rights to anyone who is willing to pass along a program with rights to use, modify and redistribute its "open sourced" code.
Defenders of artists' copyrights usually disapprove of its name -- Copyleft -- which appears on T-shirts in Seattle, but the founder, Richard Stallman, informs me that "in 1984 or 1985 I received a letter with amusing slogans stamped in red including `Copyleft -- all rights reversed.'"
In the mid-1980s, the pejorative term "whitewash" sired a more specific form of mind manipulation with "greenwash," defined by Fiona Harvey last month in the Financial Times as "a way of presenting oneself as environmentally friendly while continuing to deploy destructive tactics in the background."
The same pattern of analogical degeneration can be found in the switch from brainstorming to blamestorming, from multitasking to multislacking, from upsizing to downsizing to management's rightsizing to workers' dumbsizing.
The overwhelming evidence is underwhelming.
Follow that lady's linguistic lead to language's little green door: Parallelogram!
Murder Board
Veteran pundits who appeared in July on Meet the Press told Tim Russert that the two key phrases central to the coming battle for Supreme Court philosophical supremacy were the Latin stare decisis, loosely translated as "respect precedent," and murder board.
In 1944, the Times Magazine defined murder board as a "selection board that passes on Wac officer candidates."
It became part of the political-judicial war in 1987, when a Legal Times correspondent, Aaron Freiwald, wrote, "A senior White House official acknowledges that the `murder boards,' as the moot-court sessions are known to administration officials, did not prove effective with [Robert] Bork."
The tough questioning by a group eager to prepare the nominee apparently proved helpful to Judge John Roberts.
One member of that murder board was the White House counsel, Harriet Miers; when it came her turn to be nominee after the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, it was reported that she did not perform well.
Stellar performance before the Senate, in a television courtroom age, is dispositive, to use Senator Joe Biden's favorite word.
Now Judge Sam Alito is willingly taking his murder boards, which are like the bat weighted with steel shot that a baseball hitter swings before trading it for a lighter one as he steps up to the plate.
The phrase has a literal base in German criminology: in 1916, the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel in Massachusetts reported, "Germany's Police: How the `Murder Board' Works to Solve a Mystery."
The Justice Ministry in Berlin confirms that the term used was Mordkommission.
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