Books : No Uncertain Terms : Excerpts

Barry's Ghost

"William F. Buckley Jr. tells us," writes Jackson Williams of Austin, Texas, "that Brent Bozell was the ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater's 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative. The very next day, William Safire flatly credits Stephen Shadegg....One of them might actually be right. I wonder which one."

Nobody's righter than Buckley. Shadegg (whose son John now serves in the House) wrote many of Goldwater's speeches in the late 50s, but Bill Buckley, who was inside that conservative circle, informs me that "Brent wrote the entire thing ex nihilo, from nothing. He had been writing speeches for Barry for a couple of years, but the book we're talking about, which I saw prepartum, in partu and postpartum [before, during and after birth] was Brent's." (The bracketed translations of Buckley's Latin are mine; I presume antepartum would have spoiled the alliteration.)

But what of the most memorable line Goldwater spoke? At the Republican Convention of 1964, as Rockefeller-Scranton forces were calling themselves "moderates" and calling the Goldwater supporters "extremists," the victorious candidate intoned the words that split and sank the party: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

I credited that to Karl Hess. This is disputed by Seth Leibshohn of Washington, who holds that "the author of that speech was a then-professor of political science at the University of Ohio and now at Claremont, Henry Jaffa."

As best I can reconstruct it, the inflammatory speech was largely written by Hess, with a quotation -- of Marcus Tullius Cicero defying the conspiratorial Catiline -- contributed by Professor Jaffa; Goldwater (or one of his acknowledged ghosts) wrote later that "I had heard it earlier from the writer Taylor Caldwell."

Cicero, criticized for his hasty execution of five of Catiline's supporters, said, "I must remind you, Lords, Senators, that extreme patriotism in the defense of freedom is no crime, and let me respectfully remind you that pusillanimity in the pursuit of justice is no virtue in a Roman."

It may have worked oratorically for Cicero but backfired when used by Goldwater.

"BE THOU AS PURE..."

When independent counsel Ken Starr went before the House Judiciary Committee, he complained that "a number of my prosecutors are being calumnied and criticized." He repeated the unfamiliar verb: "To criticize and to calumny the men and women with whom I'm privileged to serve...is unfair, and I think it's unfortunate."

The use of calumny as a verb is infrequent. Although the verb form has a history in the language -- in 1895, the Pall Mall Gazette wrote, "The President has not been in office 12 hours...and is already calumnied" -- the preferred form is calumniate. "The highest personages have been calumniated," wrote Miles Smith in the "Letter from the Translators to the Reader," the preface to the 1611 King James version of the Bible.

It is as a noun that calumny is best known. The word is rooted in the Latin calvi, "to trick, deceive, intrigue against" (also the root of challenge), which progressed to calumnia, "false accusation." The old Century Dictionary defined it well as "untruth maliciously spoken, to the detraction of another; a defamatory report; slander."

Calumniate is to be preferred as the verb, because the perpetrator can then be called a calumniator, which has a zestier flavor than calumnizer and avoids the calumnist/columnist confusion. For an adjective, calumnious has the usage edge over calumniatory; Shakespeare, in Hamlet, had Laertes observe, "Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes." The Bard liked the word; later in the play, after one of his bawdiest puns, Hamlet says to the innocent Ophelia, "Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny."

In mock modesty, an unidentified columnist is sometimes referred to in this space as "a vituperative right-wing calumniator," but it was not until Starr's use that the word was widely heard in political discourse. Its origin in that sense was the ancient Latin advice to solons, Fortiter calumniari, aliquid adhærebit; its English translation, "Throw plenty of mud and some of it will be sure to stick."

BELLYBUTTON

A full-page color advertisement in respectable newspapers for the movie American Beauty zeroed in on a female abdomen. Staring out at the reader, like the inescapable single eye of a Cyclops, was the model's umbilicus.

Showing that portion of the anatomy was not in bad taste because umbilici are omnipresent these days. Fashion models sashay down the runway with the smooth flesh of their flat stomachs proudly exposed, and nubile shoppers parade through malls with breezes causing goose bumps on their midsections. And at the center of attention is the rounded depression or the sometimes slight protuberance, the dialectical synonymy of which we examine today. We're talking bellybuttons, the focus of fashion at the fin de millénaire. A post-monokini shock was needed. If the display of nipples no longer titillated, designers asked one another, could the showing of bottoms be far behind? But when even the thong lost its shock value, fashion's eye landed on the center of it all.

"Between the emotion and the response," wrote the poet, "falls the Shadow." Between the halter and the hip-hugger, or between the cropped top and the low-slung pants, falls the Navel.

The Romans called the point at which the cord connecting the fetus with the placenta was cut and tied off the umbilicus, from umbo, "knob, projection." Speakers of Old High German and Old English preferred a Greek root, omphalos, which led to nabalo and nafela, and then popped up in Shakespeare as "he unseamed him from the naue to the chops," and developed into Sir Thomas Browne's 1646 observation, "The use of the Navell is to continue the infant into the mother." From there to James Russell Lowell's 1873 poetry: "He lifted not his eyes from off his navel's mystic knot."

That notion of self-absorption was picked up by the playwright Eugene O'Neill: "I had a mental view of him regarding his navel frenziedly by the hour," and by the BBC's publication, the Listener, in 1966: "One sits in a New York traffic jam, contemplating, as it were, the city's navel." Those who do this religiously are called omphalopsychic, from a sect of quietists who induced hypnotic trances by gazing at their navels.

Today, many continue the introspective study. "Bellybuttons -- there are two kinds," said a character in the 1973 Odd Couple, "the kind that go in and the kind that go out. I want an outie! No, no! I want an innie!" But today many more of us are contemplating the navels of other people, forcing synonymists to consider the varied nomenclature.

Bellybutton was first noted by John Bartlett in the 1877 edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms. Rudyard Kipling liked that noun in 1934, scorning fights with those "who do not come up to your bellybutton." Although Aldous Huxley preferred tummy-button, J. B. Priestley in 1946 minted a nice trope with this sign of stomach-tightened nervousness: "with your bellybutton knockin' against your backbone." (It's two words in Merriam-Webster, one word in Webster's New World. I go with the analogy of bellyache, not belly dancer.)

Dialect-delighting Americans, however, have worked out a variety of names for the same anatomical place. Thanks to the editors of the Dictionary of American Regional English (now hard at work at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on their fourth volume, covering the letters P to S), we can examine a few answers to their Question X34/1: "What are some other names and nicknames for the navel?"

One-eyed Mabel was one response, probably derived from the popular nabel, a variant of navel recalling the Old High German nabalo. Button and buttonhole were frequent choices, and a fair sampling called it a belly-hole. Chicken butt and chicken peck were noted. Those interested in content preferred lint-catcher, lint-getter and lint-strainer. Perhaps a Greek influence can be found in one respondent's oompalikis and several piko answers. The midriff midrash includes the Yiddish pupik.

Many responses to DARE's survey began with the word where. In the South, it was where the Yankee shot you; in the West, where the Indians shot you, and across the country, where I got shot in the war. Two interviewees eschewed the violent gunfire-bullet hole metaphor and replied with the less bellicose where you got hit with a pick.

Shucks! Any pre-television senior citizen could tell you that an umbilicus is where you keep the salt while eating celery in bed.

Joe McHale

Houston, Texas