ON LANGUAGE
'So to speak' and other verbal stutter-steps taken
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
DEFERENTIALISMS, if you will, are rampant.
"There seems to be a virus going around on television," e-mails Olivia Hugill, "that causes people to make a sort of verbal parenthesis and insert the term if you will. This may have started with V.P. Cheney, who is fond of the phrase, and now it's spreading unchecked. Could you do a riff on the subject so that we might ridicule it into permanent retirement?"
A riff is an oral or written improvisation, often comic, with the phrase or approach repeated so as to become a kind of signature; a second sense is "a variation on a theme." The word (possibly a clip of riffle) is most likely an alteration of refrain, because it is derived from a 1930s coinage describing a recurring musical phrase played by an inspired jazz soloist.
I don't do riffs; I do weighty stuff for a hyperliterate, persnickety readership. The subject Hugill raises was touched on in this space 15 years ago, as Americans picked up the British habit of emphasizing understatement. Today it deserves more profound treatment than a mere riff; it has to do with the kudzu-like creep of deferentialisms, on which I have been assembling a dossier in the years since.
The vice president, as Hugill notes, is a frequent deferentialist. Asked a couple of months ago about threatened congressional restrictions on the National Security Agency's surveillance program, he told Jim Lehrer, on the NewsHour on PBS, that "the possible amendment, if you will, to additional legislation" would be damaging. (One year ago, Cheney used the same deferentialism on the subject of Iraq: "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.")
If you will is a shortening of "if you will permit me to say" or "if you will pardon my saying so," which is not quite what the clipped phrase means. The speaker or writer needs no such permission; on the contrary, the shortening means "I'm going to say this, and you may not like it, but that's just too bad, so here goes." The point is not to show deference, as the words say, but to make a pass at submissive respect while making a forceful point.
To Lehrer in the same interview this year, the embattled but unbowed veep used a variation about congressional critics who had been previously informed of the warrantless wiretapping: "We've had some members head for the hills, so to speak." Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, also employed the short form of in a manner of speaking: "The state of Louisiana's phased evacuation plan, which was revamped ... a year earlier, worked quite well," she told her Homeland Security committee. "Then, so to speak, the wheels came off."
In both cases, the speaker was using a familiar metaphor the last throes before dying, the wheels coming off before crashing and then seemed to apologize for the vivid word-picture or for the cliché. In Hawaii, Rosalyn Baker, a state senator supporting an anti-bedbug expenditure to protect the tourism industry, used the appended apology on a much less frightening metaphor, urging colleagues to "nip it in the bud, so to speak, before it becomes a real issue out here."
These verbal stutter-steps both call attention to the metaphor-cliché and simultaneously back away from it. They are the rhetorical equivalents of tugging at the forelock (difficult to imagine in Cheney's case) in a kind of uppity modesty, as it were.
And now to as it were, the clip of "as if it were so," with the subjunctive-mood were signaling "contrary to fact," or at least "not to be taken literally." David Hare, the British playwright of Stuff Happens, a fictional treatment of the buildup to the Iraq war, told a Times interviewer that "the terrible thing is that the two as it were benign characters in the play Tony Blair and Colin Powell ... both these men get mashed." In this citation, the deferentialism as it were acts as an adverb modifying benign, making that adjective slightly malignant, or at least less than "as if it were benign."
Rhetoricians have Greek names for phrases like as it were, so to speak and if you will, calling them metanoia or correctio. Professor Frederick Dolan of the University of California at Berkeley says that they are often "ways of ironically drawing attention to the fact that understatement is being used and so to the cleverness of the understatement (and understater)." I say that such deferentialisms are smarmily pretentious, not to put too fine a point on it.
Horror show
When Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter working for The Christian Science Monitor, was freed by her kidnappers in Iraq after three months in captivity, The Boston Globe reported that her first, cautious comments "evoked the horror of her experience."
The Latin horridus means "shaggy, bristling, menacing," and its many offspring send shudders through synonymists. The least scary is horrid, perhaps because of the Longfellow poem about the good little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead "But when she was bad she was horrid." It gets worse with horrible, often applied to accidents and weather and by Queen Elizabeth II to a year she called "an annus horribilis." More frightening still is horrific, with its emphasis boosted by the urgency of "terrific." Most solemnly alarming is horrendous, as in Bush's "evil men who want to use horrendous weapons," with the word gaining size from the similarity to "tremendous."
The novelist and linguist Anthony Burgess, in A Clockwork Orange, introduced horror show to describe the pleasure taken by cruel men; it was a sly play on the Russian word khorosho, meaning "good."
April 15, 2006
Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the New York Times, based in Washington, D.C.
'So to speak' and other verbal stutter-steps taken
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
DEFERENTIALISMS, if you will, are rampant.
"There seems to be a virus going around on television," e-mails Olivia Hugill, "that causes people to make a sort of verbal parenthesis and insert the term if you will. This may have started with V.P. Cheney, who is fond of the phrase, and now it's spreading unchecked. Could you do a riff on the subject so that we might ridicule it into permanent retirement?"
A riff is an oral or written improvisation, often comic, with the phrase or approach repeated so as to become a kind of signature; a second sense is "a variation on a theme." The word (possibly a clip of riffle) is most likely an alteration of refrain, because it is derived from a 1930s coinage describing a recurring musical phrase played by an inspired jazz soloist.
I don't do riffs; I do weighty stuff for a hyperliterate, persnickety readership. The subject Hugill raises was touched on in this space 15 years ago, as Americans picked up the British habit of emphasizing understatement. Today it deserves more profound treatment than a mere riff; it has to do with the kudzu-like creep of deferentialisms, on which I have been assembling a dossier in the years since.
The vice president, as Hugill notes, is a frequent deferentialist. Asked a couple of months ago about threatened congressional restrictions on the National Security Agency's surveillance program, he told Jim Lehrer, on the NewsHour on PBS, that "the possible amendment, if you will, to additional legislation" would be damaging. (One year ago, Cheney used the same deferentialism on the subject of Iraq: "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.")
If you will is a shortening of "if you will permit me to say" or "if you will pardon my saying so," which is not quite what the clipped phrase means. The speaker or writer needs no such permission; on the contrary, the shortening means "I'm going to say this, and you may not like it, but that's just too bad, so here goes." The point is not to show deference, as the words say, but to make a pass at submissive respect while making a forceful point.
To Lehrer in the same interview this year, the embattled but unbowed veep used a variation about congressional critics who had been previously informed of the warrantless wiretapping: "We've had some members head for the hills, so to speak." Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, also employed the short form of in a manner of speaking: "The state of Louisiana's phased evacuation plan, which was revamped ... a year earlier, worked quite well," she told her Homeland Security committee. "Then, so to speak, the wheels came off."
In both cases, the speaker was using a familiar metaphor the last throes before dying, the wheels coming off before crashing and then seemed to apologize for the vivid word-picture or for the cliché. In Hawaii, Rosalyn Baker, a state senator supporting an anti-bedbug expenditure to protect the tourism industry, used the appended apology on a much less frightening metaphor, urging colleagues to "nip it in the bud, so to speak, before it becomes a real issue out here."
These verbal stutter-steps both call attention to the metaphor-cliché and simultaneously back away from it. They are the rhetorical equivalents of tugging at the forelock (difficult to imagine in Cheney's case) in a kind of uppity modesty, as it were.
And now to as it were, the clip of "as if it were so," with the subjunctive-mood were signaling "contrary to fact," or at least "not to be taken literally." David Hare, the British playwright of Stuff Happens, a fictional treatment of the buildup to the Iraq war, told a Times interviewer that "the terrible thing is that the two as it were benign characters in the play Tony Blair and Colin Powell ... both these men get mashed." In this citation, the deferentialism as it were acts as an adverb modifying benign, making that adjective slightly malignant, or at least less than "as if it were benign."
Rhetoricians have Greek names for phrases like as it were, so to speak and if you will, calling them metanoia or correctio. Professor Frederick Dolan of the University of California at Berkeley says that they are often "ways of ironically drawing attention to the fact that understatement is being used and so to the cleverness of the understatement (and understater)." I say that such deferentialisms are smarmily pretentious, not to put too fine a point on it.
Horror show
When Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter working for The Christian Science Monitor, was freed by her kidnappers in Iraq after three months in captivity, The Boston Globe reported that her first, cautious comments "evoked the horror of her experience."
The Latin horridus means "shaggy, bristling, menacing," and its many offspring send shudders through synonymists. The least scary is horrid, perhaps because of the Longfellow poem about the good little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead "But when she was bad she was horrid." It gets worse with horrible, often applied to accidents and weather and by Queen Elizabeth II to a year she called "an annus horribilis." More frightening still is horrific, with its emphasis boosted by the urgency of "terrific." Most solemnly alarming is horrendous, as in Bush's "evil men who want to use horrendous weapons," with the word gaining size from the similarity to "tremendous."
The novelist and linguist Anthony Burgess, in A Clockwork Orange, introduced horror show to describe the pleasure taken by cruel men; it was a sly play on the Russian word khorosho, meaning "good."
April 15, 2006
Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the New York Times, based in Washington, D.C.
for us by us 21.4.06
