Bill Safire has been wrong about a lot of things, but he does know about words. I hadn't realized he's still writing his On Language column -- I stopped getting the NYTimes magazine when I realized that Safire and the foodie endpaper were often the only things in it that I read, and then the Times had their online firewall thing, so. In a recent column, he traced the history of the phrase "Kitchen Sink," starting with various recent usages in politickery:
Later that month, however, the welcoming, wide-mouthed sink became a sinister repository of innuendo: The Times reported plans for "unleashing what one Clinton aide called a ‘kitchen sink’ fusillade against Obama, pursuing five lines of attack" that CNN’s Anderson Cooper dubbed the Clinton "kitchen-sink strategy." That was a phrase defined back in 1996 by The Washington Times, covering Bill Clinton’s legal defense as a "tactic in which lawyers routinely throw in every possible argument that could bolster their case, however absurd."
Obama seized on the phrase as ammo for a counterpunch: "The Clinton campaign has been true to its word in employing a kitchen-sink strategy." Obama explained away his setbacks in the Texas and Ohio primaries with, "The kitchen-sink strategy I’m sure had some impact." His campaign staff soon seized on an opinion expressed by Geraldine Ferraro, a political feminist pioneer and a Clinton supporter, that Obama’s race was giving him an advantage: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." (Some of my readers took umbrage at this, too: "Get this," Sam Pakenham-Walsh, member of the Nitpickers League, said in an e-mail message, "we no longer use the subjective tense! Has all our education been for naught?" Because Ferraro’s statement posed a condition contrary to fact, her "if Obama was a white man" should have been were. Neither campaign demanded a correction.)
It might be interesting to review his 'language' columns for what Bob Somerby calls (political) novel writing, but a quick search of his Daily Howler site doesn't show much recent mention of Safire, and I don't know who else to check on that.
A new edition of "Safire's Political Dictionary" has been released. It's almost certainly worth taking a look at, especially since it apparently includes a scholarly etymology of the term "moonbat." I've been wondering about that for quite a while now. But not everyone is enthralled by Safire:
Politics is verby. It's full of actors and audiences, people doing, resisting, manipulating, leading, apologizing, dealing, sneaking around. In other words, putting words to work. We're fascinated by the Spitzer scandal because of its salacious verbiness. As static as it has become, the Democratic presidential nominating process is still fairly verby.
"Safire's Political Dictionary," now out in a new paperback edition, is overwhelmingly nouny....
Want to tell me the language of American politics? Give me in-house style memos at K Street spin shops and Senate men's room graffiti. Give me Google searches as trends over time, then show me the words that political Web site developers use to get their sites higher on search engines. Above all, tell me something about how people make sense of words and images—give me brain scans of average Americans as they watch CNN and Fox News side by side. But don't ask me to believe in the mystical power of words. "This is a lexicon of conflict and drama, of fulsome praise and fierce ridicule, of emotional pleading and intellectual persuasion," Safire writes. But the conjunctions "and," "but," "or" and "so" are also a lexicon of conflict and drama—in fact, little drama could take place without them.
Safire's dictionary certainly has its charms. It charts how some words and phrases became political tools (see the entries "is is, meaning of" and "macaca"), and it's packed with historical and political arcana (see the entry on "root, hog, or die," a political proverb from the 1830s), compliments that are slurs, slurs that look like something else, and even ventures into foreign politics with an entry on Adolf Hitler's use of the phrase "the night of the long knives" and a reference to Winston Churchill's poodle. "Great men do well to have small dogs," the lexicographer writes in the entry "Checkers speech," about Richard Nixon's 1952 speech denying he had received secret funds for personal use. The longest entry appears to be for " CIA-ese," or "spookspeak," which includes the terms "family jewels" and "wafflebottom" ("Rendition" gets its own entry).
But once I realized Safire's book isn't comprehensive enough to be a reliable reference work, it struck me that it's not even a dictionary, and it's not about words. It's not a phrase book either. What Safire has written is a postmodern political novel, arranged in a nonlinear fashion. It's a sprawling epic of American politics from the Revolution to the current day (with special emphasis on Watergate), arranged as fragments full of characters and scenes, in which the narrator, who calls himself "the lexicographer," pops up at random moments of political insiderness, claiming to be tracing the political lives of words. This kind of kaleidoscopic novel about American politics is one that Jorge Luis Borges or Roberto Bolano might have written if Safire hadn't, a novel about a made-up political system.
That review, from the Chicago Tribune, is worth reading in full. And the interview tonight will probably be worth watching.
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