The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time by William Safire Page B
Authors: William Safire
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etymologists think that may have been guesswork. The Century Dictionary, published in 1889, reported this meaning: “A dry twig, same as chat, “ a variant of chit, which is both a seed and a bit of writing, and noted that chat potatoes were “small potatoes.” A related sense found in provincial English dialect was “dry, bushy fragments found among food,” construed as plural.
Thus we see how chad, chit and chaff are related in the sense of “small residue.” The frequency of usage of chad will plummet, but the word will be forever associated with the thirst for votes in the campaign of 2000.
Back in the days when teletype machines used yellow punched paper tape (I’m not sure what time period; ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, probably; any Western Electric survivor in Skokie, Illinois, could tell you), the little round circles of paper that were punched out and discarded were called “chat,” and the metal part that collected the chat and dropped it into a collection box was called a “chat chute.”
Jack E. Garrett
Jamesburg, New Jersey
Class Warfare. After the Democratic presidential nominee posed the choice in the election as being between “the people” and “ the powerful,” he was chastised by GOP leaders as advocating class warfare .
“Al Gore launched out talking about populism,” charged Karl Rove, Governor Bush’s chief campaign strategist, “about class warfare .” The next day, on the stump, the GOP standard-bearer himself denounced his opponent as “a candidate who wants to wage class warfare to get ahead.” Unfortunately, much of the sting in the charge was lost because Bush was seen and heard on television pronouncing the phrase as “class war fore,” inviting derision.
Who coined the phrase? The Oxford English Dictionary spotted a heading of class warfare in George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Tract 41, written in 1892; it was not picked up until 1927, when Aldous Huxley, in an essay in Proper Studies, wrote about “those who would interpret all social phenomena in terms of class warfare .”
However, a useful new database—the Making of America, a joint project of Cornell and the University of Michigan—permits detailed examination of 19th-century American texts. Assiduous research by Kathleen Miller, my research assistant, reveals a use of the phrase in London’s Aug. 17, 1867, Spectator . The editorialist urged “some grand effort to settle the Irish question” and put forward a conservative idea about land reform, noting that there was “no confiscation in this plan, no plea for raising that cry, no summons to class warfare .”
From that day to this, the charge of instigating class warfare has been used as an antidote to populist ideas.
Clean Your Clock. At Super Bowl XXXVI, if history is a guide, one team will decisively defeat the other.
Fans (and advertisers) can hope for a nail-biter, defined as “a close contest that causes rooter tension,” as used in January 2002 by Elvis Grbac, the Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback: “Our games are just nail-biters, and they come down to whoever has the ball at the last second to win it.” This hyphenated word appears to have produced both nail-nibbling, “the action of nervously chewing on one’s fingernails,” and ankle-biter, “an annoying critic.”
Synonymous with nail-biter is the older cliffhanger, a 1937 coinage about unresolved plots. This was rooted in films presented in a series of episodes that always left the hero in a precarious situation, like hanging from the edge of a cliff with the villain stomping on his fingertips, thereby forcing moviegoers to return for the next installment.
A close game with high scores is also called a barnburner, a 1960s sports usage based on an old political epithet. In 1840, the radical antislavery wing of New York State’s Democratic Party, led by Martin Van Buren, was dubbed the barnburners by conservatives after “the Dutch farmer who burned down his barn to destroy the
Thus we see how chad, chit and chaff are related in the sense of “small residue.” The frequency of usage of chad will plummet, but the word will be forever associated with the thirst for votes in the campaign of 2000.
Back in the days when teletype machines used yellow punched paper tape (I’m not sure what time period; ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, probably; any Western Electric survivor in Skokie, Illinois, could tell you), the little round circles of paper that were punched out and discarded were called “chat,” and the metal part that collected the chat and dropped it into a collection box was called a “chat chute.”
Jack E. Garrett
Jamesburg, New Jersey
Class Warfare. After the Democratic presidential nominee posed the choice in the election as being between “the people” and “ the powerful,” he was chastised by GOP leaders as advocating class warfare .
“Al Gore launched out talking about populism,” charged Karl Rove, Governor Bush’s chief campaign strategist, “about class warfare .” The next day, on the stump, the GOP standard-bearer himself denounced his opponent as “a candidate who wants to wage class warfare to get ahead.” Unfortunately, much of the sting in the charge was lost because Bush was seen and heard on television pronouncing the phrase as “class war fore,” inviting derision.
Who coined the phrase? The Oxford English Dictionary spotted a heading of class warfare in George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Tract 41, written in 1892; it was not picked up until 1927, when Aldous Huxley, in an essay in Proper Studies, wrote about “those who would interpret all social phenomena in terms of class warfare .”
However, a useful new database—the Making of America, a joint project of Cornell and the University of Michigan—permits detailed examination of 19th-century American texts. Assiduous research by Kathleen Miller, my research assistant, reveals a use of the phrase in London’s Aug. 17, 1867, Spectator . The editorialist urged “some grand effort to settle the Irish question” and put forward a conservative idea about land reform, noting that there was “no confiscation in this plan, no plea for raising that cry, no summons to class warfare .”
From that day to this, the charge of instigating class warfare has been used as an antidote to populist ideas.
Clean Your Clock. At Super Bowl XXXVI, if history is a guide, one team will decisively defeat the other.
Fans (and advertisers) can hope for a nail-biter, defined as “a close contest that causes rooter tension,” as used in January 2002 by Elvis Grbac, the Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback: “Our games are just nail-biters, and they come down to whoever has the ball at the last second to win it.” This hyphenated word appears to have produced both nail-nibbling, “the action of nervously chewing on one’s fingernails,” and ankle-biter, “an annoying critic.”
Synonymous with nail-biter is the older cliffhanger, a 1937 coinage about unresolved plots. This was rooted in films presented in a series of episodes that always left the hero in a precarious situation, like hanging from the edge of a cliff with the villain stomping on his fingertips, thereby forcing moviegoers to return for the next installment.
A close game with high scores is also called a barnburner, a 1960s sports usage based on an old political epithet. In 1840, the radical antislavery wing of New York State’s Democratic Party, led by Martin Van Buren, was dubbed the barnburners by conservatives after “the Dutch farmer who burned down his barn to destroy the
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