In Texas this month for the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, I picked up a copy of the local alternative weekly, The Austin Chronicle. It turned out to be the year-in-review issue. Chosen as Quote of the Year was a sentence uttered by Matt Mackowiak, identified as a “GOP strategist,” on November 10: “Donald Trump is the dog that caught the car.”

Not only was it a great quote, but it was already on my mind: Even before I got to Austin, I felt as if I were hearing versions of it everywhere — mostly related to the Affordable Care Act, aka the ACA, aka Obamacare.

A Google News search confirmed my sense. On November 30, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer was quoted in The Washington Post, referring to Republican members of Congress: “I think they will be like the dog that caught the bus. They’re stuck, and that’s why they don’t have a solution.” In a December 31 Associated Press article, a health-care advocate picked up the metaphor but altered the vehicle: ”Republicans don’t fully appreciate the implications of even a partial repeal of the ACA. People use the analogy of the dog that caught the car.”

By the second week of January, Republicans were being compared to “the proverbial dog that caught the car” (National Review, January 11), and the analogy was spreading: “In many ways, the Trump administration is like the dog that caught the car. They’ve been blasting VA for two years. Now they’ve got to run it” (veterans activist Paul Rieckhoff, on NPR, January 11).

So were all these people just riffing on Matt Mackowiak’s invention? Well, no. A blog called Modern Healthcare used the analogy the day before he did. And, in fact, the metaphor has a long history. It first appears in the Newspapers.com database, rather clunkily, via a January 1964 article in the Idaho State Journal. An unnamed “Minneapolis milling firm executive” is said to have

blasted the federal government for what he called agricultural restrictions which resemble a dog chasing a car.

“If he ever caught the car, he wouldn’t know how to drive it…. The same thing applies to agricultural allotments, subsidies and other controls.”

In the book Augustine’s Laws, Norman R. Augustine, referring to an aerospace company, observed, “In fact, Daedalus’ s top management looked a bit like the dog that caught the car.” (Google Books credits this to a 1997 edition, though apparently Augustine published the book as early as 1984.) The first use of the phrase in the ProQuest database of newspapers is from the Austin American-Statesman, in December 1990: “All the victorious politicos are euphoric now. But so many super-serious problems face the state that in six months our newly elected officials will feel like ‘the dog that caught the car.’” In 1998, The New York Times had, ”’I feel like the dog who caught the car,’ joked Mr. [Tom] Tancredo, a Republican state legislator from Colorado, about his election to a House of Representatives that is engulfed in all sorts of intrigue and chaos.”

By 2003, the phrase was sufficiently common for Congressional Quarterly to call it “one of the most oft-used metaphors to describe a big upset winner in politics.” In his 2013 book, The Case of the Missing Cutlery, Kevin Allen swapped in a novel vehicle: “I left feeling as if I was the dog that caught the firetruck.” In his annual letter to shareholders in 2015, Warren Buffett referred to the moment when he took over a failing textile company, Berkshire Hathaway: “I became the dog who caught the car.”

American politics has a peculiar fondness for dog references, as Maureen Dowd noted in the Times in 2002. In maxims alone, she catalogued: “That dog won’t hunt. We don’t have a dog in this fight. Attack-dog politics. Run with the big dogs. We’re like the dog that caught the bus. I’ll fight ’til the last dog dies. If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” And among Democrats are two canine groups: the blue dogs and the yellow dogs.

A dog catching a car is, of course, a metaphor. But what if you take the scenario literally? There are two possibilities. One: The car has slowed to a stop. No harm, no foul. Two: The dog catches up to the vehicle in the middle of traffic. In this version, the results are gory. One hopes that we won’t see a real-life version of Version 2 starting tomorrow. But one is not optimistic.

Rocky the Cock-a-Tzu

When the satirist John Oliver returned to his HBO show from hiatus on February 12, he said the happenings of the world had left him kind of depressed. The Chicago Tribune reported:

It’s gotten so bad, Oliver said, that when his phone buzzed with a news alert recently, he looked down and was relieved: “Oh, thank God, it’s just that Mary Tyler Moore is dead,” he recalled thinking.

He spoke of being jealous of Eddie, the dog from Frasier, because of his state of blissful ignorance: “He’s a dog, he’s fictional, and he’s almost certainly dead.”

I know the feeling. In this troubling time, I’ve been getting solace from my own dog, Rocky — who, in a shocker, was just revealed by a DNA test to be half cocker spaniel, half Shih Tzu. (When we got him 10 years ago, the people at the pound said he was primarily Dandie Dinmont terrier.) And I’ve gotten into the habit of following on Instagram some of the thousands of dogs whose comings and goings are documented there in minute detail — including Olive Oil the Cavalier, Chloe the Mini Frenchie, Samson the Goldendoodle, Asher the Maltese, Doug the Pug, Scooby the Corgi, Chewie the Chi, and Underpants the Dog.

Do you notice a trend in these canines’ handles? They’re all a single name (two in Olive Oil’s case), followed by the, followed by either the name of their breed or the word dog. This is nothing new in the human world, of course. Think of Pliny the Elder, Alexander the Great,  John the Baptist, William the Conqueror, Robert the Strong, and Richard the Lion-Hearted. There’s even an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for the the in the construction:

However, those examples are all pretty old, and the convention appears to have been moribund for a century or five. It reappeared in the mid- and late-20th century with such examples as Stan the Man (Musial), Mack the Knife, Joe the Bartender, Mott the Hoople (does anyone know what a hoople is?), and Krusty the Clown. Certainly, the comedian Cedric the Entertainer, who began his career in the late 1980s, is important in the current revival. But I would say the seminal figure is the rapper Tyler, the Creator, whose first mixtape came out in 2009. (The punctuation in Tyler’s handle raises somewhat vexing questions about restrictive versus nonrestrictive elements. But since his comma is anomalous, I will not address those questions here.)  Standing on Tyler’s shoulders is Chance [no comma] the Rapper, who recently won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

As for the provenance of the Instagram-dog-name-trope, Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, who debuted on Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 1997, may have had something to do with it, but further research is called for. An early foray into that research prompts me to say that the American Kennel Club’s method of referring to dogs is kind of odd. It eschews the word named — as well as the British called – and uses the naming convention seen in this list of some group winners at the recent Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show:

Terrier: GCHS Ch. Taliesin Twice As Nice, a Norwich Terrier known as “Tanner,” owned by Lisa and John Sons and Joan Eckert.

Toy: GCHB Ch. Pequest Pickwick, a Pekingese known as “Chuckie,” owned by David Fitzpatrick.

Non-Sporting: GCHB Ch. Danfour Avalon As If, a Miniature Poodle known as “Aftin,” owned by Daniel Chavez, James Moses and Janet Moses.

Herding: GCh. Ch. Lockenhaus’ Rumor Has It V Kenlyn, a German Shepherd Dog known as “Rumor,” owned by Deborah Stern, Pamela Buckles, Patti Dukeman, Pam McElheney and Kent Boyles.

“Known as” has a definite outlaw vibe, while “owned” casts the dog as chattel — going against the recent trend that has replaced “master” with “human companion.” Meanwhile, the quotation marks around the names are a bit stilted. And can I just say, what’s up with “German Shepherd Dog”?

Speaking of Rumor, he provides evidence that, wherever, whenever, and however it started, the “[Name] the [Kind of Dog]” trend has, over the past year, reached and gone beyond the tipping point. Here is the New York Times headline for last year’s Westminster show:

And here’s this year’s headline:

Ken “The Rat” Linseman

Why don’t ballplayers have good nicknames anymore? Sure, in baseball there is Alex (A-Rod) Rodriguez, in football Calvin (Megatron) Johnson, and in basketball LeBron (King) James, but that’s only three examples and the first two recently retired. On Facebook a while back, I named some of my favorites sports nicknames, and asked friends for theirs. With spring training in full swing and a daily bowl of wrong coming out of D.C., it seems a good time to present the top responses I got, along with my own picks, grouped by category. At the end, I name the best sports nickname of all time — scientifically chosen, of course. No links provided but you can Google any or all of them for the story behind the handle.

Modes of transportation. Jerome (the Bus) Bettis. Robert (Tractor) Traylor. Walter (Big Train) Johnson. Dick (Night Train) Lane.  Lou (the Iron Horse) Gehrig. Maurice (the Rocket) Richard. Joe (the Yankee Clipper) DiMaggio.

Large household appliance. William (the Refrigerator) Perry.

Just large. Ed (Too Tall) Jones.

Unintentional irony. The most home runs Frank (Home Run) Baker hit in a season was 12, in 1913. He had 96 for his career. In those days that was considered a lot.

Unintentional accuracy. At 6 feet 1, Nate Archibald was small for an NBA player. But he was nicknamed “Tiny” after his father, who was ironically called “Big Tiny” because he was so big.

Best backstory. Anthony Webb was nicknamed “Spud” because, as a baby, his head resembled the Sputnik satellite.

Most complicated backstory. The relief pitcher Ron Davis was known as “the Vulture” because he had a tendency to enter games when his team had a lead, give up the lead, and stay in the game until his team regained the lead — so that he, Davis, would get credit for the win.

Hyperbole. Larry (Larry Legend) Bird. Earvin (Magic) Johnson. Earl (Black Jesus) Monroe.

Politically incorrect. Hank (the Hebrew Hammer) Greenberg. Mike (Superjew) Epstein. Mordechai (Three-Finger) Brown. Walt (No Neck) Williams. William (Dummy) Hoy. (He was deaf.) Lee (Mex) Trevino. Tony (Poosh ‘Em Up) Lazzeri. (The nickname was a rendition of the way a fan of Italian descent supposedly urged Lazzeri to hit a home run. In the New York Yankees clubhouse,  Lazzeri was known as “Big Dago” and his teammates Frank Crosetti and Joe DiMaggio as “Little Dago” and “Dago,” respectively.) Darryl (Chocolate Thunder) Dawkins. Charles (the Round Mound of Rebound) Barkley. Carlton (Pudge) Fisk. John (Chief) Meyers and Charles (Chief) Bender.

Meta. Don (Stan the Man Unusual) Stanhouse (a reference to Stan [the Man] Musial). Marvin (News) Barnes. (A previous player, Jim Barnes, was nicknamed “Bad News Barnes.” As a Providence College All-American, Marvin Barnes pleaded guilty to assaulting a teammate with a tire iron. Perhaps people called him “News” because the “Bad” was understood.) Dwight Gooden was dubbed “Dr. K” (later shortened to “Doc”) in honor of Julius (Doctor J) Erving. (“K” is how a strikeout is indicated in baseball scoring.) George Herman Ruth had multiple nicknames, including “Babe,” “the Bambino,” and “the Sultan of Swat.” In reference to the last, Mose Solomon, a Jewish player in the 1920s, was dubbed “the Rabbi of Swat” (also politically incorrect, of course).

Nicknames that throw shade. Hugh (Losing Pitcher) Mulcahy. Ernie (No D) DiGregorio. (DiGregorio, a basketball player initially nicknamed “Ernie D.,” was a great scorer but not so good at defense, commonly referred to as “D.”) Dirk (Irk) Nowitzki — another player who allegedly has no D. Dick (Dr. Strangeglove) Stuart. Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams. Bill (Dollar Bill) Bradley. (Teammate Howard [Butch] Komives gave Bradley that nickname as a rookie, implying that his huge — for the time — contract was undeserved.)

Best use of a nickname. In the later 1980s, Boston Red Sox Pitcher Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd, sometimes referred to as “the Can,” apparently was paid a visit by the police because he had some overdue videos, including Nudes in Limbo and Sex-Cetera. The statistics expert Chuck Waseleski dubbed the affair “the Can’s Film Festival.” No small part of the brilliance of the pun was its incorporation of the way many Americans pronounce “Cannes.”

Which reminds me. Randy (the Big Unit) Johnson.

Forced. Pervis (Never Nervous) Ellison.

Faux. On the Oakland A’s pitching staff in the 1960s were John (Blue Moon) Odom and Vida Blue — whose whole name sounded like a nickname but wasn’t. When the A’s acquired a new pitcher, the owner, Charles Finley, decided his name — Jim Hunter — was boring and henceforth would be called “Catfish” Hunter.

Food. Covelli (Coco) Crisp. Willie (Puddin’ Head) Jones. Harold (Pie) Traynor. Octavio (Cookie) Rojas and Harry (Cookie) Lavagetto.

Animal references. Ken (the Rat) Linseman. Marshawn (Beast Mode) Lynch. Mark (the Bird) Fidrych. Nate (the Snake) Bowman and Kenny (Snake) Stabler. Dennis “The Worm” Rodman.

Metaphor. Vinnie (the Microwave) Johnson — so called because he didn’t need any time to heat up. Karl (the Mailman) Malone — because he always delivered.

Existential. Walter (the Truth) Berry. Allan (the Answer) Iverson. World B. Free. (“World” was Lloyd B. Free’s nickname, but he adopted it as his legal first name, hence the lack of quotation marks. Along the same lines, Ron Artest has changed his name to Metta World Peace.)

Local color. Johnny (Pepper) (the Wild Horse of the Osage) Martin. Wilmer (Vinegar Bend) Mizell.

Poetic. Michael (Air) Jordan. Ted (Teddy Ballgame) Williams. (Shoeless) Joe Jackson. Walter (Sweetness) Payton. Fred (Downtown Freddie) Brown. Elroy (Crazylegs) Hirsch. James (Cool Papa) Bell.

And the best sports nickname of all time. In the 1950s, the Temple University Owls had a star forward named Bill Mlkvy. His brilliant handle? “The Owl Without a Vowel.”

Continuing on the subject of sports, March Madness, aka the Big Dance, aka the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, is nearly upon us, bringing to mind the subject of basketball catch phrases, buzzwords, and clichés. Each year, a new selection of these emerges. Most subside after a few seasons, while a few — such as go-to guy or buzzer-beater or knock down (a basket) from downtown — stick around for the long haul.

Some of these terms have an evident utility. A few years ago, announcers and pundits began to replace references to height with length. That makes sense since the distance from toe to head plus wing span is going to be the key number in the ability of a big to block shots — excuse me, reject. (It helps of course, if he can elevate.) A current vogue is to refer to players’ positions by numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, corresponding to the traditional point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center. It saves time, although one has to wonder, what’s the hurry?

Actually, a lot of vogue basketball terms do the opposite and fold in redundancy and extra syllables. Traditionally, the rectangle under the basket was rather elegantly known as the paint, on account of it being painted a different color from the rest of the court. A few years ago, announcers inexplicably started calling it the painted area, and they persist. Similarly, instead of he can score or he can rebound, we now hear, he can score the basketball and … rebound the basketball. What bloody else is he going to do it with?? A friend complains that dribble-drive is redundant, since you can’t do the second without the first. My own new pet peeve is something I’ve only started noticing in the past month or so — the unnecessary word “made” in a sentence like, “For the game, he has seven made field goals and two made three-pointers.”

Of course, March Madness bracketology can’t commence until Selection Sunday determines which on-the-bubble schools will have their ticket punched because their body of work contains a signature win. On the bubble is an odd phrase to indicate a team that might be selected, might not be, but it’s unavoidable this time of year, in pundits’ exegeses, in CBS Sports’ feature “Bubble Watch” and in barroom, dorm-room, and sports-radio conversations all over the country.

The expression has been associated with college basketball for what seems like forever, but the Phrase Finder website found that it originated in auto racing, in particular regarding the Indianapolis 500, where the qualifying event is sometimes called “Bubble Day.” The site offers a quotation from The Lima News, May 1970:

“On the ‘bubble’ is rookie Steve Krisiloff whose 162.448 m.p.h. was the slowest qualifying speed last weekend. With only six spots open, Krisiloff’s machine would be ousted if seven cars qualified at a faster speed this weekend.”

And why bubble? “The most popular theory,” says Phrase Finder, “ … suggests that if a driver were about to qualify and then someone did a better time and pushed him down the rankings into the nonqualifiers then dreams of qualification would be dashed and his bubble would be burst.”

The first basketball use I’ve been able to find is in a 1985 article from the Chicago Tribune:

Remember that it doesn’t matter if you went to Purdue in the by God Big 10 and the guy who sits next to you on the train went to Iona. His team is going. Your team is on the bubble. Iona is 25-4 and in the final of the Metro Atlantic Conference tournament.

Another kind of bubble often discussed these days is the political one. I always associate the metaphor with What It Takes (1992), where the author Richard Ben Cramer referred to the large organization that allowed George H.W. Bush to “leave his office, board an airplane, travel halfway across the nation, land in another city, travel overland 30 miles to a ball park and never see one person who was not a friend or someone whose sole purpose it was to serve or protect him. This is living in the bubble.”

But the late New York Times language columnist William Safire  pointed to a passage in a book published two years earlier, What I Saw at the Revolution. The author, the speechwriter Peggy Noonan, reproduced a conversation with her boss, Ronald Reagan, where she referred to the case that inspired the 1976 made-for-television movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.

“Do you ever feel like the boy in the bubble?” Ms. Noonan asked.

“Who was that?” Mr. Reagan replied.

“The boy who had no immune system,” said his speech writer, “so he had to live in a plastic bubble where he could see everyone and they could see him, but there was something between him and the people, the plastic. He couldn’t touch them.”

“Well, no,” Mr. Reagan said.

Over the years, political bubbles have been democratized to the point where we all have one. Also known as the echo chamber, it’s the electronic or real-life environment where everybody thinks the way we do and shares the same talking points and news stories (real or fake).  A  New York Times article last week cited various critiques of what some are calling the “filter bubble.”

“The ‘Filter Bubble’ Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming,” New York magazine announced the day after the election. “Your Filter Bubble Is Destroying Democracy,” Wired declared a week out. One month in, an MIT Media Lab analysis confirmed that Trump supporters “exist in their own information bubble,” as Vice reported — and that journalists didn’t let Trump supporters into their bubbles, either.

Obviously, living in a bubble isn’t great for one’s perspective, or for democracy. The Times article lists various widgets and tools that provide forcible exposure to other points of view, including Escape Your Bubble, a plug-in that populates your Facebook feed with political positions and links you would normally flee from. Seems like a good idea, but be forewarned: It might burst your bubble.

For a time in my 20s, I worked as “assistant to the publisher” at Schocken Books, now part of Random House. Like anyone with that sort of glorified-secretary position, I took on a lot of tasks that weren’t part of the job description. At one point, my boss realized that a charming “book of days” desk calendar, with clever quotes and illustrations — for which he had purchased publishing rights and print-ready films from a British publisher — lacked the permissions to reproduce most of the clever quotes. My project became finding quotations that existed in the public domain, fit the illustration or the time of year, and, most important, fit neatly into the space that had been occupied by the quote for which we couldn’t afford the permission fee. I reached for ditties like the one my mother used to recite:

Nobody loves me, everybody hates me
I’m goin’ out and eat worms.
Big long skinny ones, little short slimy ones,
and fat ones that stick in your throat.

(Various versions of this charming song exist; I can’t swear that’s the wording I used, but I was confident that no one owned the rights to it.)

Another quotation I wanted, for reasons that now escape me, came, I was certain, from W.C. Fields and had something to do with hating children and dogs. I asked around the office. Everyone had heard of it, but no one was sure of the wording. That afternoon, walking home, I ducked out of a sudden rainstorm into a bookstore. In the back was a collection of Hollywood books: gossip and history. As I thumbed through them, the store owner asked if I needed help finding something, and I told her about the quote. “I think it’s ‘A man who hates dogs can’t be a bad guy,’” she said.

“No,” said a handsome young man who was browsing postcards. “It’s about children, about hating children. And dogs.”

The young man, it turned out, also worked in book publishing, at Little Brown. The next day, I took my lunch break at the New York Public Library and managed — I thought — to track down the W.C. Fields quote. The version I found, “Any man who hates children can’t be all bad,” said nothing about dogs. I jotted it down on a postcard and sent it to the young man at Little Brown, just for fun. Two years later, we were married.

Had I known about Quote Investigator — or, more properly, had the internet existed to give Quote Investigator a home — that romance might never have started. Not that Garson O’Toole, who operates the website, has looked into the Fields quote, at least not yet. But he relates so much else about who said what that I wouldn’t have bothered with the bookstore or the library.

For instance, there’s the clever line, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” People have attributed it to sources as varied as Coco Chanel and Albert Einstein. But Quote Investigator proves convincingly that it came into circulation by way of an English broadcaster, C.E.M. Joad, in 1926.

Then there’s Mark Twain, to whom all kinds of witticisms are attributed, including, “Life is one damn thing after another,” an anonymous expression that stuck to Twain only because H.L. Mencken said so.

Vladimir Nabokov really did write, “Literature is of no practical value whatsoever.” But most quotations seem not to have been uttered — or, at least, not coined — by the person whose name we generally attach to them, including several famous Yogi Berra sayings, like “When people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them” (spoken first, apparently, by the impresario Sol Hurok).

Far be it from me to ask where Garson O’Toole, who, according to the site, “has a doctorate from Yale University, and exploring quotations is one of his avocations,” gets the energy to track down all these bons mots. But I’m sure that if I’d known I could use the quote “Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children,” apparently correctly attributed to the humorist Sam Levenson, I might have stopped chasing W.C. Fields’s hatred of the little tykes. Had the internet existed, I might have learned that dogs were indeed relevant to the quote, which was said about Fields by a scriptwriter, Leo Rosten. But then, as Yogi Berra apparently did say, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. And I did.

Trump pressing Comey’s flesh the day after his inauguration. Photo: Andrew Harrer via Getty Images

Last week’s congressional testimony by James Comey was fascinating to anyone interested in politics, human relations, or, to the point, language. A monograph could probably be written about President Trump’s use of the word hope in his remark (in Comey’s recollection), “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” and in fact another Lingua Franca blogger may explore that in a few days’ time. I’ll limit myself to observing that Trump’s phrasing had a distinct Mafioso ring to it, as did something else he told Comey: “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing, you know.” Comey testified that he had no idea what Trump meant by “that thing,” but to me it couldn’t help bringing to mind La Cosa Nostra — Italian for “our thing.”

There was more Goodfellas feel: the way Trump on one occasion cleared the room so he could be alone with Comey, and the video — endlessly shown on the cable news networks — of the president grabbing Comey for an embrace and whispering in his ear. At least Trump didn’t move in for a kiss.

On Twitter, Marc Caputo summarized the hearings in mobspeak:

Moving on, Comey, in both his prepared statement and testimony, showed himself to be a quirky, sometimes innovative user of the language. His much-commented-on “Lordy, I hope there are tapes” prompted NPR to send out a communique to all staffers on the spelling of the first word. I wondered where Comey picked up the seeming Southernism — presumably not the streets of Yonkers, where he grew up. Maybe Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. reruns.

Another bit of testimony sent me straight to the reference shelf:

There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active-measures campaign driven from the top of that government. There is no fuzz on that.

But none of my dictionaries, even slang dictionaries, had an entry for fuzz in this context. Google Books directed me to 1990 Senate hearings in which a former NASA administrator, James Beggs, testified, “NASA is fully as responsible as Perkin-Elmer for the mistake that was made. There is no fuzz on that, as we say in the trade. We are fully responsible. We had the oversight responsibility.” So: an expression meaning something that’s absolutely clear, possibly originating in either military or industrial use. (Beggs graduated from the Naval Academy and served seven years, but came to NASA after a long career in commerce.) By June 9, four people had posted similar definitions on Urban Dictionary.

Another high point came when Sen. Angus King, independent of Maine, questioned Comey, resulting in the kind of quote-dropping oneupsmanship you’d expect to overhear at a Mensa meeting.

KING: But when a president of the United States in the Oval Office says something like “I hope” or “I suggest” or — or “would you,” do you take that as a directive?

COMEY: Yes. Yes, it rings in my ear as kind of, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

KING: I was just going to quote that. In 1170, December 29, Henry II said, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and then, the next day, he was killed — Thomas Becket.

Actually, the most common form of the quote is, “Who will deliver me from this turbulent priest?” But Comey and King were close enough for government work.

But what interests me most about the Comey testimony isn’t anything he said, but something he didn’t. In his statement, he described Trump’s saying to him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Comey’s reaction: “I didn’t move, speak or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence.”

The situation spoke to a common, maybe profound, human problem: What do you say when the person you’re talking to says something you feel is inappropriate, strongly disagree with, or even think is morally wrong? The answer is never easy. Many Twitter commenters, and ultimately a New York Times op-ed by Nicole Serratore, noted the similarity of Comey’s experience to, in Serratore’s words, that “of a woman being harassed by her powerful, predatory boss. There was precisely that sinister air of coercion, of an employee helpless to avoid unsavory contact with an employer who is trying to grab what he wants.” In being silent, Serratore noted, Comey “wanted to avoid granting any favor while avoiding the risk of direct confrontation — a problem so deeply resonant for women.”

To me, the scenario brought up a situation journalists often deal with: how to respond when an interview subject says something sketchy or even hateful. You feel a little soiled keeping your thoughts to yourself, but honesty has its own repercussions, as Oliver Stone recently remarked about his evidently less than rigorous questioning of Vladimir Putin in a series of interviews that begins airing tonight on Showtime: “I challenged him the best I could. I felt like, if it goes any further, he could have ended any one of those meetings — he could have said no after the first visit, no reason given.”

The issue animated the fraud suit filed by the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald against Joe McGinniss, the writer he’d chosen to document his case. As detailed in Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer, even after McGinniss had concluded that MacDonald was guilty as sin, he egged him on in interviews and acted like he agreed that MacDonald was being railroaded. (After a mistrial was declared, the two sides settled out of court.)

The traditional strategy in such situations is to say something noncommittal, like “There you go,” or just make a grunt or  interjection like “ah” or “umm-hmm.” And at one point, when Trump asked for a public declaration that he wasn’t under investigation, Comey responded with the supremely noncommittal, “I’ll see what we can do.” A bartender I used to work with told me his go-to response to nutters and moan-and-groaners was, “Live and learn.” And a friend likes to say, to every remark for which no clear response is suitable, “I salute you!”

When presented with Trump’s demand for “loyalty,” the 6-foot 8-inch Comey chose to say nothing at all. At the hearings, Sen. Diane Feinstein pressed him on this, and his response was to me the most human, and moving, utterance of the day.

FEINSTEIN: Now, here’s the question: You’re big. You’re strong. I know the Oval Office, and I know what happens to people when they walk in. There is a certain amount of intimidation. But why didn’t you stop and say, “Mr. President, this is wrong. I cannot discuss this with you”?

COMEY: It’s a great question. Maybe if I were stronger, I would have. I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in. … I — I hope I’ll never have another opportunity. Maybe if I did it again, I would do it better.

Correction (6/12/2017, 1 p.m.): Because of an editing error, the original version of this post contained an error regarding the history of “no fuzz on that.” It was not Vice Admiral Richard Truly whose quote we linked to via Google Books, but that of the former NASA administrator James M. Beggs, and the hearing in which he spoke was in 1990, not ’91. Moreover, Beggs’s military background consisted of only seven years, making the phrase’s military origin less certain. Many thanks to Ben Zimmer for pointing out our mistake. The post has been updated to reflect the corrections.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The adjective weaponized — meaning “adapted for use as a weapon, equipped with weapons,” or more broadly, “militarized” — dates only to 1956, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, when the following was published in the journal International Security: “The fourth was an air burst of a boosted fission weapon using a U-235 core which obtained an energy yield of approximately 251 kt. It was probably a weaponized version of the 1953 boosted configuration reduced to a more easily deliverable size.”

The word poked along through the 1980s, then got a boost in the 1990s and early 2000s — in large part because of references to “weaponized” nuclear materials, and anthrax and other chemical and biological agents — as shown in this Google Ngram Viewer graph.

Relative frequency of “weaponized” in the Google Books database.

Somewhere in there, the word took on a figurative meaning: one that, oddly, is not yet recognized in the OED, Dictionary.com, or Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. The first use of metaphorical weaponized in The New York Times came in 1999, when a woman named Lynn Hawes was quoted describing a former officemate who ”weaponized her telephone for daily battle for much of the working day. … Acoustics were unusually excellent and I didn’t — couldn’t — miss a sigh or syllable.”

The Google Ngram tool tracks word frequency only through 2008. To get a sense of the popularity of the word since then, I turned to the ProQuest Newsstand database. Here’s the usage bar graph for weaponized, 1996 (seven uses) through 2017 (856 uses so far):

Uses of “weaponized” in the ProQuest Newsstand database, 1996- 22 June 2017

Even in 2013, when weaponized made a giant leap forward, there were a good number of literal uses, many of them referring to drones. But since then the literal percentage has steadily dropped, while total use of the word has gone steadily upward, with 2017 on pace to roughly double the previous record high of 2016. At this particular moment, weaponized seems ubiquitous. From the beginning of June 2017 through the 22nd of the month, ProQuest yields 118 hits for the word, almost all of of them figurative. The most recent came in a Washington Post blog about the film Nobody Speak, which, the blogger remarked, is “an argument that there is one animating force behind all of our current battles over press freedom — and against allowing reflexes of disgust or outrage to be weaponized by the wealthy individuals who want to control how they are covered.”

Going in reverse order, the other things said to be weaponized over the course of a week were:

• “Epithets such as the Asian band’s name [The Slants], [Daniel Snyder's] football club’s moniker [the Washington Redskins], and certainly the most infamous verbal insult of all — that used for black people.” Washington Post, June 21
• “Cheap glitter” (“weaponized with dried hair spray”). Review of TV series about women’s wrestling, Washington Post, June 21.
• Pictures of a character’s children posted to Facebook. Review of the novel The Changeling in New York Times, June 21.
• The band name The Slants, again. (“reclaiming a weaponized term”), New York Times, June 20.
• The internet. Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal-Gazette, June 20.
• Information. Sen. Mark Warner, interviewed on MSNBC, June 20.
• Bill Cosby’s work. (“In his trial, he weaponized it.”) New York Times, June 19.
• Uncertainty. Asharq Alawsat, June 17.
• “The freedom of the Net.” Kenneth Wollack, president of National Democratic Institute, quoted by Targeted News Service, June 16.
• The golfer Cameron Champ. Gannett News Service, June 16.
• A computer-hacking tool. Washington Post, June 15.
• The Fox News slogan “Fair & Balanced.” (It was “weaponized by critics such as Jon Stewart.”) Newsday, June 15.
• A band’s “biker-bar blues rock.” Hartford Courant, June 15.

Note that precisely half of the 14 hits comes from The New York Times or The Washington Post. I take that as indicating that the usage is peaking among the hipper members of the chattering class. What will happen to it in the years ahead?

To answer the question, consider a passage from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946):

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: “Ring the changes on,” “take up the cudgel for,” “toe the line,” “ride roughshod over,” “stand shoulder to shoulder with,” “play into the hands of,” “no axe to grind,” “grist to the mill,” “fishing in troubled waters,” “on the order of the day,” “Achilles’ heel,” “swan song,” “hotbed.”

The striking thing about that list is at least half of the “worn-out” metaphors — clichés, in other words — are still very much around, having progressed to the (benign, to Orwell) category of “dead.” Take Achilles’ heel. Samuel Taylor Coleridge apparently came up with the metaphor in 1810, when he referred to “Ireland, that vulnerable heel of the British Achilles!” Remarkably, the first person to use the now-familiar form, according to the OED, was Coleridge’s son David Hartley Coleridge, who wrote in 1840, “Ultra-royalism is the Achilles-heel of the Church of England.”

Look at the Google Ngram Viewer graph for the use of Achilles’ heel:

It just keeps growing and growing. Modern-day metaphors, by contrast, get invented, picked up, overused, and then discarded in a few years. What moderately mindful writer today could write of something (other than a drug-taking athlete) being “on steroids,” or of X being “the mother of all” Ys?

I predict, therefore, that the next few years will be a hotbed of weaponized uses, but that we’ll then see its swan song. Before long, pretty much the only things described as weaponized will be weapons.

Chronicle illustration by Ellen Winkler

If you read my posts, you may be familiar by now with the grand six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, completed in print in 2013, but continuing to live beyond that date in quarterly updates on the internet.

Now DARE  has come to life in another way. It’s not just in writing that the dictionary tells us about the different ways we talk in this vast country. DARE  is speaking up!

Now we can hear the recorded voices of some 1,800 people in 1,002 communities in all 50 states who were interviewed between 1965 and 1970 by field workers driving “word wagons” with bulky recording equipment. The researchers used a lengthy paper questionnaire to note what people said, but they also asked if the interviewees would allow taped recordings, and the great majority did.

You don’t have to go to DARE  headquarters at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to hear these recordings, and you don’t have to pay for them either. Just follow the link to the university’s Digital Collection Center, and see for yourself.

If they made these recordings half a century ago, why has it taken so long to make them available? In a word, privacy. The interviewees were promised anonymity. In the last four years, having completed production of the print volumes, DARE enlisted student interns and volunteers to bleep out names in the recordings and thus finally make them freely available.

Now, however, they are all accessible, right at your fingertips. if you want to hear how someone sounded back in the 1960s in Aaronsburg, Pa.; Adams, Ky.; Beardstown, Ill., or a thousand other places, the index to this collection will quickly find an example for you. And among other things, the index will tell you what they talked about. In the case of Adams, Ky., for example, they discussed family history, logging, work animals, wild greens, home remedies, sorghum molasses, and curing pork.

So why wait? Give it a try yourself, right now. Whether you’re a linguist looking to chart dialect distinctions, an actor looking to put on an authentic local dialect, or just a traveler wanting to hear the sounds of home — it’s all here, much more than I have room to mention.

And if you wish, tell us: What did you find?

Tyler Silvest, via Flicker

On Monday, a  Colorado jury found that a Denver disc jockey had in fact committed assault and battery against Taylor Swift during a pre-concert photo session in 2013. Some dirtbags like the DJ apparently feel that celebrities can be groped — a form of sexual assault — with impunity, and the main takeaway of the trial was the good news that the dirtbag in this case could not.

The second takeaway is that mainstream journalism apparently does not possess an adequate term for the part of Swift’s anatomy that the DJ groped. That part is the buttocks.

I noticed this last week, when reading the first New York Times article on the trial. It reported Swift’s allegation that the dirtbag — whom I’ll call DB henceforth — had “grabbed her bottom.” Bottom strikes me as an odd word, a tad informal and British, to appear in the Newspaper of Record. Searching in Google Books and elsewhere, you find, oddly, that it’s commonly used in the contexts of both nursery schools (it was favored in the ones my kids went to) and erotica.

A subsequent Times article reported the charge that the DB had “touched Ms. Swift’s rear.” Rear (a variant of rear end) is also rather too colloquial, although it has a long history. Green’s Dictionary of Slang offers a first citation of 1768, in The Gentleman’s Bottle-Companion: “Have a care, says he, of the rear, says she.” Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934) has the line, “The worst we can get is a kick in the rear.”

I would venture that this body part has more synonyms and euphemisms than any other, and maybe than any other word. But amazingly, there’s no term that comes off as straightforward and uninflected — to my ears, anyway. Even buttocks has a technical feel to it, and posterior sounds like hypercorrection. The other variations all have some degree of jokeyness, vulgarity, and/or slang, including:

Ass (in British English, arse); backside (used by the Associated Press, Washington Post, and New York Daily News in their Swift coverage); booty; bum (British); buns; butt; caboose; can; derrière; duff; fanny; heinie; keister; rump; seat; tail; and the Yiddish tuchas, tushey, or tush.

The sensitivity and sometimes embarrassment over naming this body part goes way back. In 1960, John Updike submitted to the then-prudish The New Yorker a short story called “A&P,” which contained the line: “She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can.” His editor, William Maxwell, suggested changing can to butt, to which Updike replied:

You must be kidding about “butt.” It’s really just as crude as “can.” I think the real answer is “tail” — but every time I sit down to go over the proof of A&P, I choke up with the silly sacrifice of “can.”

A compromise was reached in which the young lady was described as having a “sweet broad backside.” Updike restored can when he published “A&P” in a short-story collection.

Updike’s comment about butt is interesting. I feel that over the past half-century-plus, the word has gotten less crude. I use it in mixed company, and in the classroom on the rare occasions that the topic comes up. But it’s still too informal for The New York Times.

In my view, there’s a mot juste here. The mot doesn’t meet the Times’s standard for its own reporters’ writing. However, to its credit, the paper will use it in quotations when pertinent. And in her testimony, Taylor Swift — to her credit — used it to clearly, graphically, and unambiguously describe the assault committed on her. The DB, she said, “grabbed my bare ass.”

There’s a reason the woman writes songs that sell millions of copies.

The digital humanities are known for major-infrastructure projects, such as data-crunching the contents of capacious corpora and charting the movement of vast numbers of people and ideas over space and time. An example picked from many is Martin Grandjean’s pleasingly meta visualization of digital-humanities Twitter users, below.

Grandjean parses: “This graph consists of 1,434 nodes connected by 137,061 directed edges, each symbolizing a user ‘following’ another on Twitter.” The data, he says, show that “this little community is very dense, such a small world in which no one is very far from the neighboring cluster.”

The discipline is resolutely expanding its boundaries. As two digital humanists wrote in 2016, “Along with the digital archives, quantitative analyses, and tool-building projects that once characterized the field, DH now encompasses a wide range of methods and practices: visualizations of large image sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, ‘born digital’ dissertations, hashtag activism and the analysis thereof, alternate reality games, mobile makerspaces, and more.”

But you don’t have to be fancy to do DH. For example, I effected some with merely a Kindle Fire loaded with a copy of Bill Bryson’s recent book The Road to Little Dribbing. I generally like reading on the Kindle because (1) it balances nicely on my stomach while I’m reading in bed; (2) I can turn it on in the middle of the night without disturbing my wife; and (3) if I forget who a character is in a novel, I can quickly call up every appearance he or she has made. (What I don’t like it for is browsing and looking up footnotes, both of which it is hopeless at.) It also allows you to crunch some modest data.

Reading the Bryson — a tour of Britain that serves as a 20-years-on sequel to his Notes on a Small Island — it struck me that there was a particular word he uses a lot. The word is lovely. That or any other word can be searched in a Kindle (or other e-) book. Bryson uses lovely 59 times, and loveliest an additional six. The first appearance is on Page 4, where he remarks that the French town of Deauville is “well-off and lovely.” The last is on the book’s last page: “There isn’t a landscape in the world more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in than the countryside of Great Britain.” (The copy editor missed the comma after in.)

I noticed more characteristic Brysonian epithets as I read on, all occupying, along with lovely, a place on the positive-adjective continuum. Deciding to get my digital humanities on, I searched for the words, counted them, and used the free Infogram application to chart them. 

Bill Bryson’s go-to words in “The Road to Little Dribbing.” Numbers in Y axis indicate how many times each word was used.

Having done this, I realized what must be one of the key challenges of digital humanities: You’ve harnessed data and made a neat graphic. Then you have to say what it all means, which isn’t as easy or fun.

But here goes. A wise man once said (in French), “Style is the man himself.” The words that Bill Bryson uses a lot reveal the sort of person he is — or at least the persona that comes through in his writing and that draws his many readers to his books. Bryson at times affects a curmudgeonly harrumphing, complaining about rude clerks and incompetent bureaucrats and at one point setting down an Andy-Rooneyesque list of the things that annoy him, including:

• Color names, like taupe and teal, that don’t mean anything.

• Saying that you are going to “reach out” to someone when what you mean is that you are going to call or get in touch with them.

But that’s a smokescreen. He is more or less the anti-Paul Theroux — also an American writer who has lived much of his life in England, but who has probably never used the word lovely unironically. Bryson is a connoisseur of approbation, keen to make subtle distinctions among his laudatory epithets–at one point writing of gardens “which are pleasant if nowhere near as splendid as Buxton’s Pavilion Gardens.” In his book, never is he happier than when he has had a look at a lovely view, then traipsed around an interesting museum, followed by a wonderful piece of cake and a jolly good cup of tea. You could look it up.

The word totally has grown so overused that I was struck, last week, by the power of its near cousin, totality, describing the two or three minutes, along the arc of the much-heralded solar eclipse, when the sun was blanked out except for its flaming (and dangerous to look at) corona. At first I thought the media had invented the term. But no, it has been in the astronomy lexicon for 185 years to indicate “the moment or duration of total obscuration of the sun or moon during an eclipse.”

When the eclipse happened, I was stuck in traffic along the Cross-County Parkway just outside New York City. As my car crawled forward, I saw a few people along a bridge over the highway who seemed to be watching the sky, but the sun was behind me and I couldn’t get out of the car. When the sluggish river of traffic finally reached the horrible accident that had precipitated the slow-down, I wondered briefly if the driver of the totaled car (total as a verb meaning “to damage beyond repair,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, having first been used about a car in 1954) had been trying to eclipse-watch while driving. Then the bottleneck opened up, and I was on my way.

Many pundits remarked on the healing power of last week’s eclipse, pointing out that “the movement of the heavenly bodies remains independent of Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, or any other elected official” and calling the event “a solar love-in.” Harmony was not always congruent with totality. Just about every culture, it seems, has a story about angry gods causing eclipses. A couple of ancient Chinese astrologers may have been executed for failing to predict an eclipse. When England’s King Henry I died just after the eclipse in 1133, the solar event was taken as an evil omen. In various places today, people believe that eclipses can cause miscarriage or food poisoning.

So there’s something to be said for, you know, science. It’s easy to imagine how terrifying that black-out would be if you didn’t know anything about the laws of motion causing it. As Annie Dillard points out in her classic essay, “Total Eclipse,” “You may read that the moon has something to do with eclipses. I have never seen the moon yet. You do not see the moon. So near the sun, it is as completely invisible as the stars are by day.” Dillard goes on:

The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down. … The white ring and the saturated darkness made the Earth and the sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths; we cared for nothing. We remembered our living days wrong. With great effort we had remembered some sort of circular light in the sky — but only the outline. Oh, and then the orchard trees withered, the ground froze, the glaciers slid down the valleys and overlapped the towns. If there had ever been people on Earth, nobody knew it.

I have a strong memory of an eclipse when I was at summer camp in the Ozarks, and we were only allowed to look at the sun through one of those pinhole contraptions. Looking up that event, I find it occurred on July 20, 1963, and totality was far north, in Canada. In Missouri, perhaps 70 percent of the sun was obscured. As Dillard writes, “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him,” so I guess that, in terms of eclipses, I remain a virgin. I do know that it constituted one of my first intimations of mortality, as the slow diminution of the sun made me feel my own smallness, my own briefness.

It certainly would not have occurred to me then, as it has not occurred to most people throughout history, to go seeking the eclipse, like the so-called umbraphiles who chase the event around the globe. Much has changed since Carly Simon sang, “Then you flew your Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia/To see the total eclipse of the sun,” as damning evidence in “You’re So Vain.” These days, we thirst for totality rather than hiding from it. I’d like to believe that such collective longing has nothing to do with politics.

Columbus monument in Barcelona, with helicopter bearing symbol of Catalonia (Photo by Carles Ribas, El País)

The violence surrounding the Catalan independence referendum on October 1 has put Spanish democracy under a microscope. Some scholars believe Monday’s holiday, which the United States calls Columbus Day and some localities celebrate as Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead, has an implicit link to the Catalan independence struggle, one that casts some doubt on the national origins of Christopher Columbus.

While conventionally regarded as Genovese, his language had resonances of Catalan.

Columbus signed documents (and was referred to in state records) as “Colom” — a Catalan last name meaning “dove.” There is no record of him writing in the Genoese dialect or Italian, even in letters sent to Genoa. Save one letter in Catalan, his epistles are in Latin or Spanish, some have marginal notes in Hebrew. The conquest chronicler Bartolomé de las Casas noted that Colom “doesn’t grasp the entirety of the words in Castilian” — and much of his Spanish was colored by false cognates, idiomatic interference, and crosslingual appropriations from Catalan:

Lluís de Yzaguirre, a professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona, studied Colom’s Spanish with a forensic linguistics algorithm that applies lexical mistakes to decipher the native language of the writer. He found Colom’s hypercorrections of “b” and “v,” as well as “o” and “u” in Spanish were typical of a Catalan speaker.

Colom’s library had books in Catalan, and he named the island of Montserrat for a monastery near Barcelona.

He was also surrounded by Catalonians. Lluís de Santàngel, who financed him, was from Valencia (part of the Països Catalans) and spoke Catalan, and Pedro de Terreros, Colom’s personal steward — the only crewmember with him on all four voyages — was from north of Barcelona; the first baptism in the Americas was carried out by Ramon Pané, a man “of the Catalan nation,” according to Las Casas, most likely chosen by Colom, as was the first apostolic vicar of the West Indies (Bernat de Boïl) and the expedition’s military chief (Bertran i de Margarit).

The Catholic Monarchs received Colom in Barcelona after the first voyage, and some scholars maintain that the first journey left not from Palos, in Andalucía, but from Pals in Catalonia.

Colom’s son Diego left a silver lamp in his will to Our Lady of Montserrat “on account of the great devotion that I have always had.” As Diego never lived in Catalonia, and his mother was Portuguese, a piety for Montserrat was probably inherited from his father. According to the archives of his son Fernando, the only letter Colom bequeathed to him was written in Catalan; that document and a copy (translated to German from Catalan in Strasbourg in 1497) were lost; many believe they were destroyed in part to subdue Catalonian nationalism.

Part of the mystery may have come from Colom himself. The Hebrew marginalia and references to the Jewish High Holy Days in his writings indicate that, like Lluís de Santàngel, it is possible Colom or his ancestors were converts to Christianity.

At the end of La Rambla, Barcelona’s most famous street, is a 200-foot high statue of Colom. At the base are Lluís de Santàngel, the financier; Jaume Ferrer de Blanes, a cartographer; Bernat de Boïl, that first apostolic minister in the Americas; and Pere Bertran i de Margarit, the military commander. The motto of the monument is, “Honorable Colom, Catalonia honors her favorite children.”

Colom is pointing out to sea, with his back to Castile.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2017), Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and Paris in American Literatures. His recent work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Voces del Caribe, and The Minnesota Review.

It’s been years, now, since I stood up when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. Mine has not been a protest akin to the controversial kneeling that’s got right-wing pundits’ knickers in a twist. Colin Kaepernick and the hundreds who have followed his examples are using the occasion specifically to call attention to the ways in which police brutality against black men is evidence that our country is falling far short of its goals. Fair enough, in my view. My own actions have attracted a few glares from symphony-goers at the opening concert of the season, but no one’s ever put me in the media spotlight or asked my reason for not standing. Here it is.

I don’t like the words.

We’ll start with the third verse. In case you’ve fallen behind in the discussion, here are the lyrics:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As several writers have now observed, during the War of 1812, the British adopted the policy of offering freedom to enslaved men who escaped and fought on the British side as the Corps of Colonial Marines. They also used mercenaries. Two main lines have formed to defend lines five and six of this verse. The first claims that “slave” “is a direct reference to the British practice of impressment (kidnapping American seamen and forcing them into service on British man-of-war ships).”  This argument makes no sense. Impressed men were forced against their will to fight on the enemy side; surely Francis Scott Key is not lumping them in with mercenaries and condemning them to “the gloom of the grave.” The second line, propounded by Mark Clague of the Star-Spangled Music Foundation, argues that “for Key … the British mercenaries were scoundrels and the Colonial Marines were traitors who threatened to spark a national insurrection.” This makes more sense to me. At the same time, insofar as the Colonial Marines had attained their freedom in siding with the Brits, they were no longer slaves — except in the mind of the poet, to whom their free status was illegitimate and they were therefore still slaves who deserved the worst punishment for having bargained for freedom. (And that “insurrection” would sure be a slave insurrection.)

But the third verse is no longer commonly sung. Once we patched things up with Britain, we effectively expunged it. Do we condemn the rest of the song simply because its author also penned that verse? Well, to some degree, I do. But then I’ve always had trouble teaching D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, two of the greatest writers in the English language, because of the vileness of some things they wrote. I wouldn’t want them expunged from the curriculum, but I would not stand up for one of their poems, either.

Let’s move back to the verse we all know:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Apparently it was an enormous flag at Fort McHenry, one that remained standing, in the end, because the bodies of dead soldiers were holding it up. But the war in which they died was a problematic one, as most historians today acknowledge. The personification of the flag as “gallant” stirs the heart, but rather than being a noble war, the conflict’s lasting effect was the beginning of the modern American navy. Most people singing (or mouthing) the words today have no idea what battle is being fought in what war. What they do hear about is the rocket and the bombs — and while these were cannons and artillery in Key’s day, our associations now are much different and not ones I care to celebrate.

Finally, in the last verse — which is often sung — we have these lines:

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto —”In God is our trust”

That motto, apparently coined by Key, found itself enshrined in 1865, when Congress allowed it to be inscribed on coinage. As a nonreligious person, I’m not fond of it. But more bothersome to me is the notion of “having” to conquer. To fight for a just cause is one thing. To conquer for a just cause seems a contradiction in terms. Many have argued that the War of 1812 itself was not so much about defending American freedoms as about conquering part of British North America (now known as Canada) to expand our territory.

I understand that I am reading these words and lines of Key’s famous poem anachronistically. He was a slaveholder and hardly alone in accepting that institution in America. He was writing in the midst of a great battle in a war that threatened his homeland. Conquering and imperialism itself were both politically and morally acceptable. Anyone who wants to stand for the song and even try to sing along with it is fine in my book. But I don’t care to, and if you think that’s un-American of me, then your concept of America stands on another shore from mine.

I like to think I’m not fussy about honorifics. I don’t tell my undergraduate students how to address me. The current convention seems to be Professor X, though friends who teach at research universities report that they are often addressed as Dr. X, and frequently undergraduates used to boarding schools will default to Ms. or Mr. X. One colleague, whose last name is difficult to pronounce, goes by Dr. Dan, which students seem to love. Once students have graduated, I usually encourage them to switch to a first-name basis. I am a little affronted, though, when an incoming first-year student (or her parent) presumes to start with Lucy.

Though I know others who have set “rules” as to how they are addressed, I suspect mine is a common approach.

Outside the academy, unless I’m told otherwise, I refer to my physicians as Dr. I kind of like it when they respond with an honorific — after all, I am not their student — but it doesn’t bother me if they don’t. I am placing myself in their care; even if they are younger than I, they are the experts in those situations and I am the neophyte. I don’t use an honorific with my auto mechanic, though he always uses one when addressing me. He’s my car’s physician, not mine. I’m on a first-name basis with the person who cleans my house, though; perhaps it’s a more personal relationship.

Finally, when I first entered the working world, the question of when to use and when to refrain from honorifics fascinated me. My summer job during college was at a pastry shop in France, where the head proprietor was Madame Pellisson, but her son, who really ran the place, went by Monsieur Pierre, essentially the equivalent of Dr. Dan. In full-time jobs that ensued, I was mostly pleased, and surprised, to find that my bosses expected me to address them by their first names. There was one exception, when I was employed as a report writer for a branch of the State Department. My boss was Mr. Little. All the project managers were men, for whom everyone there used the honorific. All their secretaries — and we two report writers, who worked for the organization as a whole — were women; and the men referred to all of us by our first names. The hierarchy was unmistakable.

Which brings me to the president. Even before he was inaugurated, I noticed the frequency with which he referred to those with whom he wished to assume a certain familiarity by their first names. This applied — and still applies — whether he bestows contempt or affection on them. Some of this may be a recent shift in custom. In the Obama-McCain debates of 2008, both candidates largely referred to each other as Senator; in the Obama-Romney debates, it was President Obama and Governor Romney. In the Clinton-Trump debates, which were far more acrimonious, both candidates made a point of referring to the other by first name — a sort of barbed familiarity.

Since President Trump was inaugurated, the trend has grown more noticeable. Past presidents, as far as I can tell, may be on a first-name basis with professionals in other branches of government. But in public, I always heard them refer to senators, congressional representatives, and judges as Senator X, Representative X, Justice X. A typical clip has President George W. Bush referring to Nancy Pelosi as Congresswoman. Even within the executive branch, past presidents have generally referred publicly to Cabinet appointees and other professionals with an honorific.

Not our current president. When he reports on a meeting with the minority leaders in the House and Senate, it’s not Representative Pelosi and Senator Schumer. It’s Nancy and Chuck. The majority leader of the Senate is Mitch. Yet as far as I’ve heard, no one in the administration or the legislative branch of government calls Trump anything other than President Trump or the president. This imbalance in honorific usage seems new to me. President Obama usually referred to McConnell either by his full name or as Leader McConnell or Senator McConnell. Ditto John Boehner or Speaker Boehner. The same has not yet held true for the president’s references to Supreme Court justices; even while disparaging John Roberts, Trump took care to refer to him as Justice Roberts.

Many in the media have noted that Trump acts as though legislators work for him, rather than belonging to a separate and equal branch of the government. Referring to legislators by their first names, as they continue to use the honorific with the chief executive, subtly reinforces this impression.

There’s some flexibility here, surely. Barack Obama and Joe Biden referred to each other interchangeably as Barack and Joe and as President Obama and Vice President Biden. But the reciprocity reinforced the impression that they worked together more or less as partners. For all the absence of daylight between Vice President Pence and President Trump, the president repeatedly refers to his veep as Mike, but I cannot find a single instance where Mike returns the favor and calls the president Donald. Or is it Don? Interesting. No one knows. Because no one seems to call him by his first name. Mrs. Trump? Help us out here.

These quotes all appeared in the last week:

• “Nothing to see here: Man casually puts on deodorant; officers find meth in deodorant.” –Headline in Northwest Florida Daily News.
• “A U.S. Steel spokeswoman said the discharge wasn’t serious enough to report to the feds and did not pose a threat to public health. In other words, move along. Nothing to see here.” –Chicago Tribune, on a chromium spill in Lake Michigan.
• “This time around, Mayak [nuclear plant] authorities have similarly denied being responsible for the leak, and Rosatom, the state-run body that oversees Russia’s nuclear industry, also says there’s nothing to see here.” –Science Alert, on a mysterious radiation cloud over Russia.
• “If Donald Trump had given a $500,000 speech paid for by a Kremlin bank, and his private foundation had accepted $145 million from Vladimir Putin-linked oligarchs and their Western business partners, do you think that his critics would be insisting there was nothing to see here?” –Marc Thiessen in a Washington Post column arguing that the Clintons should be investigated.

They are just a few examples of what I would nominate as the catchphrase of the moment. The Urban Dictionary user Icemaniceman1111 offered this useful definition:

Short for “nothing to see here, move along folks”. A ironic or sarcastic phrase uttered by a person who feels that he/she has detected a hidden, usually unpleasant or sinister, deeper meaning of a story or event that the reporter or authority on that event wishes to conceal possibly to avoid upsetting the general public. From the police phrase, “nothing to see here move along,” which is often said to a crowd of people that have collected at the scene of an accident or crime and who the officer wishes to disperse without communicating the cause of the crime or accident.

How old am I? This old: I never heard the term ghosting before I read “Cat Person,” the New Yorker story that went viral in early December.

(Let us pause a moment here, to appreciate the latter part of that sentence. A piece of literary fiction published in the lone temple of literary fiction has gone viral, with people noting that perhaps fiction alone can begin to comprehend the morass we find ourselves in when it comes to dysfunctional sexual relationships. As we literary-fiction writers like to say, You’re welcome.)

Ghosting, for those of you who have been even more out of it than I, does not refer in this context to writing someone else’s book, or to reappearing in ectoplasmic form after death. It refers to the habit of people in the dating world, especially those who find their potential mates on dating apps, to begin a relationship and then disappear from their hopeful partner’s virtual world. Ghosters don’t answer texts, emails, or voicemails. (You know, voicemails, those funny oral messages we used to leave on answering machines for no one to listen to.) Ghosts are breaking up with you, only it doesn’t really count as a breakup, because it implies that the relationship was never real enough to warrant an ending. This disappearance used to be known as “the slow fade,” but there’s nothing slow about it, really — the responses stop coming, as if the ghost has erased himself.

Much has been written (all of it in venues that I apparently paid zero attention to before this month) about the effects of ghosting. Some on the trauma of staring, over and over, at a blank screen, torturing yourself on the question of what you did wrong. Some, by contrast, on the relative clarity of the message sent by ghosting. No one in the dating world seems to think it’s a particularly nice thing to do; everyone seems to admit having ghosted on at least one occasion.

What I don’t find, in these discussions of ghosting, has to do with the connotations of the word. Broadly speaking, I find three ways in which the term is disturbingly apt.

First, ghosts are dead people. A thousand years ago, I was traveling with a boy through Europe. I ran out of money and returned to Paris to stay with a cousin who lived there, while the boy journeyed on through Prague. The idea was for me to babysit my cousin’s kids for a week, and when I was paid, the boy and I would meet up in Amsterdam. I never heard from him. For months, until he showed up back at the university I was attending, I thought he might be dead. I also thought he might not like me anymore. My feelings swung wildly between these two poles. I had been ghosted, in an old-fashioned way, and vertigo hit whenever I tipped from outrage at his rudeness to horror at my own failure to sound the alarm of his disappearance. Even now, in an age where Tinder matches may not know each other’s address, family, workplace, mutual friends, or other identifiers that would enable them to seek each other out, the possibility lingers that this person with whom you have been intimate could have met with catastrophe. To be ghosted, in this sense, means there are moments when you consider that the lack of response is due to the impossibility of communicating from the beyond.

Second, there are no ghosts. People who believe in ghosts are like people who believe in unicorns; they inhabit a fantasy world, albeit one to which we are all, from time to time, susceptible. (I used to sleep in the former viewing room of a former funeral home, and sometimes reminded the spirits of the place that I was a friendly presence whom they had no reason to harm.) When you are ghosted, whether in a platonic friendship or a sexual relationship, it’s easy to feel as though what you thought happened never really happened: that the warm, easy intimacy was a chimera of your own wishful thinking. In this sense, ghosting serves to gaslight the ghostee into thinking there was no relationship to end, that not just the absent person but the connection itself was a ghost.

Finally, of course, what ghosts do is to haunt. Why they haunt whom they haunt has been the subject of many a theory, but the basic question of haunting is the same question you apply to a breakup: Is it about her, or is it about me? “Hauntings happen for a reason, and if the haunting is being caused by a disembodied soul, that ‘ghost’ has some personal motivation behind its actions,” writes one self-styled medium. “Every ghost is different [but] it is very difficult to get a ghost to move on.” Relationship ghosts, in this sense, don’t go away so much as they linger, disembodied and unsatisfied, and perhaps having little to do with any real person’s action or nonaction. Another expert in the paranormal suggests various methods for ridding oneself of ghosts, including salting and smudging and reciting certain phrases, but in the end her advice rings true — perhaps not for the ectoplasmic beings, but for the ghosts of Tinder:

So whichever method you use to rid your home of ghosts, you must believe that it will work. Know in your heart that you are powerful and more powerful than these negative energies, and that when you say they need to leave they will indeed leave. Nothing and no one has any power over you and your environment except you.

Namaste.

Namaste, indeed.

Emperor Claudius II slaying Valentine, from a copy of Speculum Historiale, Vincent of Beauvais, c. 1335, Bibliothèque nationale de France

February 14, 2018, brings about the rare concatenation of two extreme perspectives on human life. One is love, on Valentine’s Day; the other is death, on Ash Wednesday. Both are the same day this year. And both are courtesy of the early Roman Catholic church, though the former has become secular, while the latter remains religious. It’s not hard to imagine why: There wouldn’t be much of a market for Ash Wednesday cards.

Valentine’s Day began in commemoration of St. Valentine. It seems that in the third century A.D., Emperor Claudius II of Rome issued a ban on marriages and engagements, to encourage young men to join the army instead. But Valentine went ahead and continued marrying couples in secret. When the emperor discovered this, Valentine was condemned to death and beheaded. The year was 278. Or was it 270? “This Day in History” gives both years, without comment on the contradiction.

That’s just the beginning of the difficulties with the legends that developed regarding this martyr for love. Or these martyrs? According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, there are three different candidates for the true Valentine: one was a Roman priest of that name, another was bishop of Interamna (modern Terni, some 60 miles northeast of Rome), and a third was somewhere in Africa (no specifics known).

Because of his martyrdom, the Catholic Church recognized Valentine as a saint. And then, because of his obscurity, the church backed off. In 1969, St. Valentine’s Day was removed from the General Roman Calendar of saints’ days, though local jurisdictions are still authorized to call him St. Valentine, if they wish.

That leaves us with Ash Wednesday to consider. It is the day Lent begins, with a church service and the priest’s thumbprint of ashes on the parishoner’s forehead, with this admonition: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

This idea comes from the Bible, of course. Here it is in the King James Version, still the English-language favorite:

Genesis 2.7: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.

Genesis 3.19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Ecclesiastes 3.19-20: … for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

So what is a lover and a human being to do in the face of these extreme reminders on this day? Perhaps they should encourage us to make the most of the rose petals of love, ere they crumble into dust.

George Whitman with his daughter, Sylvia (named for Sylvia Beach)

Long ago, in a world preceding the European Union, the euro, and the tsunami of American students who go to Paris every semester for classes ranging from “Paris, Cinema City” to “French Political Life,” I was a pastry salesgirl in Versailles. I spent most of my days off in Paris, and when I needed a hit of American culture. I skipped over to Shakespeare and Company, the little bookstore facing Notre-Dame from the Left Bank.

Back then Shakespeare was run by George Whitman, a one-time vagabond and consummate littérateur who had come to Paris after the Second World War to study at the Sorbonne. By the time I knew him, he’d come to look like a rather puckish Trotsky, with unkempt gray hair and goatee. “Knew him” is perhaps hyperbole. He noticed me, as he must have noticed others, browsing for hours in the bookshop. One day, without ceremony, he plucked my sleeve and asked, “Would you mind taking over the caisse? I’ve got to get some coffee.”

And so I sat myself down, facing outward toward the Seine and Notre-Dame, at the small desk that served as a checkout counter, with its moneybox in the drawer. There were no credit cards; we accepted travelers’ checks. Patrons would come up to me with a book, and I would examine the covers — front, back, outside, inside — for the French price. When I found it, I charged it and made change. When I found no price, I guessed at one. If someone wanted a receipt, I pulled out one of the bookshop’s frayed cards, wrote the price and “received” on the back, and signed my name. I felt like a complete fraud, but I also felt myself, briefly, caught up in a piece of history.

I thought, back then, that George had inherited Shakespeare and Company from the legendary Sylvia Beach, who  founded it during the great period of literary flowering in 1920s Paris. Not true, as I later learned. George had his own enormous collection of books in Paris, most of which he lent out to anyone who asked, and when he opened his shop in a former Algerian grocery, it was originally called Le Mistral, after the violent wind of the Mediterranean. Only after Shakespeare and Company. had been shuttered for more than two decades was George persuaded to adopt the name.

I bought my first copy of Ulysses at George’s shop and read much of it there. Among the heavy stacks, I wrestled with Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes. I discovered James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, such a far cry from the Baldwin of my imagination that I could not reconcile the two. Week after week I came back, hoping each time that George would ask me to mind the caisse and sometimes getting my wish.

I lived, then, in a one-room flat two doors down from the pastry shop on a street that ended in the Bassin de Neptune. I couldn’t accommodate the few friends who visited from the States, so I took them down to Shakespeare and Company, where they surrendered their passports to be registered as “hotel guests” by the préfecture. They pledged to read a book every night. Then they slept on one of the couches in the reading room above the bookshop, serviced by the Turkish toilet in the corner closet.

One night, having stayed too long in these quarters with a rather boring college buddy whom I was placing there, I had started back toward the Gare Montparnasse when I realized that the last train to Versailles had left. I stood for a moment on the rue Saint-Jacques in the warm, quiet August night. I could have gone back to the bookshop, but George had gone home for the night; all that remained were scruffy college students smoking weed and trying to say smart things about Sartre. The next train left at 5:45 a.m., plenty of time for me to catch a shower and show up in my black skirt and white blouse at the pastry shop. I slipped through the gates of the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, curled up on the thin grass under a tree, and felt the air of Paris settle over me like a blanket.

George died six years ago, at the age of 98, astonishing for a man whom I remember with a cigarette more or less permanently dangling from his lips. Last month, when the box containing all my teaching materials was held up by customs, I went to Shakespeare and Company in the incessant rain visiting Paris this year. To get in, I had to stand in line with the drenched, giggling tourists. The book I needed (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein) was right there, in the well-organized “Jazz Age” section. The counter — facing in toward the shop now, rather than looking out at the cathedral — was staffed by a pair of cheerful young British people who swiped my credit card efficiently.

But yes, they said, people still sleep upstairs. And the shop was, still, selling lots and lots of books. I think George would be content.