Safire - Coming to Terms

BOOKS BY WILLIAM SAFIRE

Language

Fumblerules
Language Maven Strikes Again
You Could Look It Up
Take My Word for It
I Stand Corrected
Whats the Good Word?
On Language
Safires Political Dictionary

Politics

Safires Washington
Before the Fall
Plunging into Politics
The Relations Explosion

Fiction

Freedom
Full Disclosure

Anthologies (with Leonard Safir)

Leadership
Words of Wisdom
Good Advice

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Safire, William
Coming to terms / William Safire. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Essays originally appeared in The New York Times, 19861988.
1. English languageUsage. 2. English languageStyle.
I. Title.
PE1421.S216 1991
428.00973dc20 90-23376
eISBN: 978-0-307-80059-6
Copyright 1991 by The Cobbett Corporation
All essays originally appeared in The New York Times
Copyright 19861988 by The New York Times Company
Reprinted by permission
All Rights Reserved

v3.1_r1

For Sir Basil and Lady Feldman

L anguage users have been coming to terms for more than two centuries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the infinitive phrase to come to terms first had a meaning of to reach a settlement, to agree upon conditions, when the British biographer Roger North wrote prior to 1734: The creditors rather than to contest accounts, came to terms, and agreed to take shares. By the early twentieth century, a second sense of to reconcile oneself had also come to this term.

Lexicographers who have assisted me in coming to terms include Robert Barnhart of Barnhart Books, Robert Burchfield of the O.E.D., Frederic Cassidy and Joan Hall of the Dictionary of American Regional English, Sol Steinmetz of Random House, Victoria Neufeldt of Websters New World, Frederick Mish of Merriam-Webster, and Anne Soukhanov of the American Heritage Dictionary. Jacques Barzun has provided guidance in usage, James McCawley in linguistics, though both of these academic giants must get exasperated at my triumphant judgmentalism (they have come to terms with the difficulty of educating me). Helping me to track quotations have been Justin Kaplan of Bartletts, the quotation anthologist Len Safir, and Jeanne Smith at the Library of Congress. The lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, who died in 1990, deserves special note.

Those who assist me at the New York Times bureau in Washington, D.C., include my assistant, Ann Elise Rubin; my research associate, Jeffrey McQuain; our chief librarian, Barclay Walsh; our other librarians, Monica Borkowski and Marjorie Goldsborough; and our communications manager, Earl Smith. At Doubleday, Im grateful to Herman Gollob, Joel Fishman, Wendy Goldman, and Chaucy Bennetts.

Of course, I am especially grateful to the legion of Lexicographic Irregulars, flanked by the tireless troops of the Squad Squad and the heavy hitters of the Gotcha! Gang, for their assistanceeven when cloaked in gleeful one-upmanship.

C ertitude is the wrong attitude.

A name I answer to is U. Of all people. That is the salutation on corrections from the Gotcha! Gang, members of which believe that self-proclaimed language mavens, above all others in the writing dodge, have an obligation to be 100 percent accurate.

A few years back, I alluded to a subtle kinship of grammatical terms with like the Colonels Lady and Rosie OGradyrecalling, as Kipling fans know, sisters under the skin.

A Gotcha! Gangster, Jerrold Weinberg of Norfolk, Va., promptly set me straight: The character who is sister under the skin to the Colonels Lady is Judy OGrady, not Rosie, whom Mr. Weinberg cautiously identified as the subject and title of the 1890s song attributed to Maude Nugent. (Maude Nugent did write both the words and music of the song Sweet Rosie OGrady, copyrighted in 1896.)

Corrections of fact and grammar are received here with equanimity bordering on grim glee. This particular correction from one of my equipoisoned pen pals, however, got to me. I have been inaccurately pairing the Colonels Lady with the wrong OGrady woman all my lifehundreds of times in conversation, dozens of times in print. Many listeners or readers must have said to themselves, Hes got the poem mixed up with the song, but its not for me to tell him what sort of jerk that makes him in my eyes.

The realization of that long-perpetuated embarrassment caused a klong, a word coined by Frank Mankiewicz to describe a sudden rush of crud to the heart. The repeated damage was done: it is now too late to thread my way back through life to fix that mistake.

A copy editor in my youth saved me from another one of those always-belated klongs. Beach Conger, the New York Herald Tribune editor who read my copy in the late 1940s, changed gilding the lily to painting the lily. When I asked why, he pointed to the line in Shakespeares King John: To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.

Everybody says gilding the lilythats the expression, I argued, holding that any copy-desk requirement that the idiomatic phrase be used strictly as originated was arrant pedantry. (The dour Mr. Conger destroyed my village by countering that arrant pedantry was a clich. I almost replied that that was arrant nonsense, but I didnt want either to use another clich or lose my job.)

Forty years from painted roses to sweet Rosies, and I have never again used the phrase gilding the lily. That misquoted metaphor, now so ingrained in the language as to be a nonsolecism, was consciously avoided a hundred times in my life. But what worries me nowand what should worry you, if you dont want to be afflicted with similar klongs in lifeis this: how many other citations that are not quite right are we carrying around in our heads?

Once more into the breach, my friends. Ive said that, too, a hundred times, usually with a satisfied sigh of world-weariness. But when it came to using that quotation from Shakespeares Henry V in a piece making predictions for the coming year, I had to stop and think: how do you spell that opening into which Henry was urging his troopsbreech or breach? A breech is a rump, so called because the anatomys posterior, with its split between buttocks, appeared to the literal-minded to be broken. Accordingly, the breech of a gun is the back end, the part behind the barrel; a breech delivery is with the babys backside first, and a cub reporter occasionally gets too big for his breeches, or trousers.

Why, you wonder, did the Geneva Bible of 1560 become known to book collectors as the Breeches Bible? Because of its depiction of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:7: They sewed figge leaves together, and made themselves breeches. Although the earlier Wyclif Bible used the same word with the variant spelling brechis, it was the Geneva Bible that gained the nickname; the later King James version substituted