Books : The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time : Excerpts

From "A"

Acronymania. Who affixes glorious names to acts of Congress -- with words whose initial capital letters spell out a hard-selling acronym?

When you ask a spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee who in the vast federal establishment came up with the USA PATRIOT Act, you get a bravely bureaucratic, "It was a collaborative bipartisan effort of the full committee." That'll be the day. When you press further, you discover that a partial coiner was a determinedly anonymous staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who called the initial antiterrorism statute the Uniting and Strengthening America Act. (USA -- get it?)

But USA is a set of initial letters pronounced individually, not forming an acronym that can be pronounced as a word or is already a word. The key to infusing the quickly drawn legislation with a rousing title in which the flag fairly flapped came from House Judiciary. A junior staff member there named Chris Cylke achieved acronymic immortality by coming up with this inspiring moniker: Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. Put it all together, and it spells PATRIOT.

Now join the House contribution with the Senate's name, and you get Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism -- the USA PATRIOT bill, promptly signed by President Bush into law and, with a label like that, hard to criticize in any way.

This posed a challenge to the professional acronym-creators at the Pentagon, home of FATE (Fuse Arming Test Equipment, though often embarrassingly confused with a different program, Female Acceleration Tolerance Enhancement). Within that Puzzle Palace, an accidental acronym was formed when the phrase Global War on Terrorism became popular among military briefers and point-sheet writers. This group of words was initialized, as is the custom with all Department of Defense phrases; unfortunately, it produced GWOT, universally pronounced with a rising inflection as "Gee-what?" The image it projects is of a brass hat scratching his head, however, which is why the phrase may be dropped from internal DOD communications.

More recently, the Students for Global Justice and other opponents of globalization who demonstrated peacefully at the World Economic Forum in New York were organized under the banner of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. However, the initials ACC hold no meaning for anyone outside the NCAA's Atlantic Coast Conference, and capitalism is not the dirty word it used to be. To deal with questions raised by the bigwigs huddling in the Waldorf-Astoria, some anarchists, Marxists and other image-makers converged to create International ANSWER. The title is an acronym of Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. Executives inside the Waldorf suspected that the demonstrators created the title to fit the word.

Some acronyms are standing the test of time. In 1960, as optical scientists were studying maser -- from Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation -- along came the bright idea of amplifying a highly coherent beam of light, promptly dubbed a laser. (Tangent: Will somebody explain to me why every focus is now laser-focused? Lasers can guide, ignite, heat, drive and print, but focus? This is the hottest compound adjective around today, leaving all other focuses fuzzy. In Enron's 2000 annual report, the company claimed to be "laser-focused on earnings per share," at which point I should have become suspicious. End of tangent; this column is determinedly laser-unfocused.)

In Jennet Conant's book Tuxedo Park, about a social setting in which key scientists worked during World War II, the origin of radar is recounted: United States Army scientists used RPF, for "radio position finding," while the British preferred R.D.F., for "radio direction finding." The Navy liked "radio detection and ranging," or RADAR, which the British accepted by 1943. That's a partial stump word, using a first syllable and then initials; a purer stump word is hazmats, familiar to drivers of trucks containing nitroglycerine and similarly hazardous materials.

A pure acronym -- NIMBY, "not in my backyard" -- long ago took hold among zoning lawyers and environmentalists. MADD -- Mothers Against Drunk Driving -- has become well known, spoofed by DAM, Mothers Against Dyslexia. The recent spate of acronymania (and do not write that as acronymphomania) can be combated only by resolute ridicule. A cartoon in Punch showed marchers under a banner titled COCOA, the Council to Outlaw Contrived and Outrageous Acronyms. This was topped by Jack Rosenthal's satire in the New York Times calling for the Action Committee to Reform Our Nation's Youth Morals.

Several years ago I described a condition in professional voice users analogous to exercise asthma. That condition is not related to exercise itself, but rather to the airway drying that is associated with hyperventilation from exercise. We noted that some singers, who have an exquisite sensitivity to subtle changes in airflow, had an analogous condition. Even though they might have had no other signs of asthma, when they were treated, their voice issues improved. I labeled this Airway Reactivity Induces Asthma in Singers (ARIAS).

John R. Cohn, MD
Thomas Jefferson University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Adjust That Season. Alistair Cooke rang me up to say, "Do something about seasonable when you mean seasonal." (I use the Britishism rang me up instead of phoned because my nonagenarian friend is a BBC stalwart.) When I wrote recently that a week in January had been "unseasonably warm," another reader, John Connor, e-mailed: "Shouldn't the word be unseasonally? To me, unseasonable implies that you can't add salt or pepper."

No; as even the most roundheeled permissivists admit, "There ain't no unseasonal." Seasonable means "normal for that time of the year" -- icy in February and muggy in August. I am now shopping for cruise clothes because that is what will soon be seasonable, although cruises make me seasick. By extension, it has come to mean "apt, timely, opportune."

Contrariwise, seasonal has nothing to do with such suitability; rather, its meaning is "occurring in a particular season of the year," like "seasonal unemployment." That honking you hear overhead is the "seasonal migration of geese." If you're talkin' winter, spring, summer or fall, you're talkin' seasonal; only if you're talkin' about what's right and proper for those times are you correct to use seasonable.

Just as seasonable is a big word with weather forecasters, seasonal is a favorite of economists. The great economist Herbert Stein, familiar with the works of T. S. Eliot, used the right word many years ago when he seasoned his prediction to taste: "The poet tells us that April is the cruelest month, but seasonally adjusted, January is the cruelest month."

The Agnostic Bit. "Bits are agnostic," Bill Gates, self-dethroned boss of Microsoft, told Forbes's ASAP magazine. "They don't care how they get where they are going -- only that they arrive in the right order and at the right moment."

William Marmon of Chevy Chase, Maryland, demands a ruling as soon as possible: "Has agnostic -- 'holding the belief that the ultimate reality on matters such as the existence of God is unknowable' -- been successfully morphed by high tech to mean 'indifferent'? Everywhere one hears the word used in this perverted manner. Where do you stand?"

Hier stehe ich, in the phrase of one unwaveringly opinionated Worms dieter. In theology and usage, I react religiously.

The etymology of agnostic is plain. It's Greek for "not known." Here's how it was coined to describe the position held by people who are neither atheists nor believers: "It was suggested by Professor [Thomas] Huxley at a party...one evening in 1869, in my hearing," wrote R. H. Hutton in 1881. "He took it from St. Paul's mention of the altar to 'the Unknown God.' "

Henry Kissinger, in his 1979 memoirs, The White House Years, was among the first to give the word a metaphoric stretch: "I favored European unity, but I was agnostic about the form it should take." The intended meaning (I have always been able to read Henry's mind) was more "noncommittal" than either "undecided" or "indifferent." In 1983 Warren Buffett, the investor, treated the word as a verbal shrug: "I look at stocks, not markets. I am a market agnostic."

Broadbandniks in the computer world have adopted that stretch toward neutrality. "We will deliver 'infrastructure agnostic' solutions," announced Steven Francesco, CEO of N(x) Networks, "that can handle both voice and data and be deployed over virtually any network." (The odd-looking company name is pronounced "nex" or "nix"; the new agnostics, professing a hands-off attitude, sometimes take a negative approach.)

Another computer executive, holding that the alliance of Dell and Red Hat came as no surprise, commented, "They've always been operating-system agnostic." At Microsoft, Gates's usage gives the reheated term about bits a sense of "indifferent" to the point of "uncaring."

Can we ever know if this new meaning -- as in "Frankly, Scarlett, I'm agnostic" -- will overtake the theological sense?

Sure we can. Give the voguish jargon a little time; this anomie-tooism will pass because it is a highbrow term that lacks specificity. Neutral passively takes no side; noncommittal suggests a more active refusal to take a side; indifferent describes a mild state of apathy; unconcerned imputes aloofness; and uncaring has a hint of cruelty. But the new agnostic wanders all over the lot.