Booknotes

Professor ALLAN METCALF (Co-Author, "America In So Many Words"): Well, it began with a project that the American Dialect Society had. I'm the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society which is a small group of scholars who study American English. And starting in 1990, we decided to have a word of the year chosen at our annual meeting each year. And so 1990, an unmemorable word, bushlips, that quickly dropped out of--out of sight; some other years, more important words. And two of the people, myself and David Barnhart, who've done the words of the year, decided that we should really go back and do the entire history of America, choosing the most significant words for each year. And with the benefit of hindsight, we got rid of bushlips and a few other mistaken choices of the early 1990s.

Prof. METCALF: Well, it's supposed to mean--it comes from `read my lips' that George Bush said. And so bushlips is an insincere remark. It was noted by one of the American Dialect Society members in the year 1990 as a--a clever word, I guess. And for some reason it was voted word of the year. But that just shows that word of the year is not a scientific, philosophical, carefully based choice. At the time--it was the first time we had even done that kind of thing, as a matter of fact, trying to choose a word of the year. And after that, the society has done a little bit better. Last year, the phrase soccer mom was word of the year. That seems fairly significant.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Looking back on it, PC for politically correct--of course, PC also means another kind of technological gadget, so that gets in there, too. But PC is a way of--even abbreviating the whole concern about politically correct certainly seems much more important nowadays. So we use the benefit of hindsight to go back and improve on the choices made earlier.

Prof. METCALF: That was founded in 1889 by a couple of professors at Harvard. So we celebrated our centennial about 10 years ago. And at the time, it was thought to be--well, the aim of the American Dialect Society was to produce a dialect dictionary just as the English Dialect Society had done in England. We never got around to producing our dictionary. So the English Society, once they produced their dictionary, disbanded. The American Dialect Society has never disbanded. And now, finally, our dictionary is under way. In fact, three volumes have been published. It's called The Dictionary of American Regional English. Fred Cassidy at the University of Wisconsin is the editor of that. They still have three volumes to go. But even when they have finished the dictionary, we're going to keep on going.

Prof. METCALF: Well, OK is, I think, the quintessential American word and that came fr--in 1839 in Boston. It must have been a dull summer because the newspaper columnists were filling their columns with humorous abbreviations. OK was an abbreviation for all correct, which, of course, isn't all correct even in its spelling. The letters are both incorrect, and all the other letters--all the other words that they can--they made up then have faded away, but OK kept going mainly because in the very next year Martin Van Buren, old Kinderhook, was running for president. And OK clubs supporting him sprouted up all through the country. And so saying, `OK is OK,' really carried the day.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, that's right. Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Well, not as often perhaps as we could expect. Take a word that's in the book but is regrettably just about obsolete now. The word newt--N-E-W-T--which was our word for--I think it's about 1994 or maybe '95.

Prof. METCALF: The--we put it in there because at the time Newt Gingrich was such an apparition in Washington that the mere mention of his name suggested doing negative things to the agencies of government. Yes, there's a picture of him, too. But in the past year or two, I don't know if even--anyone would even recognize the name n--or the word newt.

Prof. METCALF: Well, for this book it was David and I who decided.

Prof. METCALF: Well, the choices for 1995 weren't that exciting. I don't remember the other choices for that particular year. But that brings up an important problem with recent years. It seems to me that it takes about 40 years to decide if a word is going to permanently reside in the vocabulary. And until then, until you've had about two generations--not only one generation using it fashionably but another picking it up and using it, and then it seems as if it's perfectly at home, then a word is really in the vocabulary. So for recent years, we have words that are maybe prominent in that year, but who knows? We'll take the word for this year, ebonics. That was the talk of everyone earlier in 1997. And the bonics suffix was used humorously to indicate any kind of language study or any kind of dialect. The word itself was coined in 1973 and first published in 1975. But it became prominent this year. Now whether that's going to become maybe even a standard way of referring to a kind of dialect or whether it's a flash in the pan, that remains to be seen.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes.

Prof. METCALF: Right.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes.

Prof. METCALF: Well, Gardenia--there's a man named Alexander Garden, who was a botanist--a wonderful name for a botanist. And in his honor, he was, I think, in South Carolina. This was in the late 1700s. A--a flower that we now know as the gardenia was named in his honor. During the Revolutionary War, it turned out that he was a loyalist, so he fled back to England or Scotland or whatever. But he was in America while the plant was named for him. So we get to count that as an American word.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Lynch--well, that's one of the downsides of American history that gets included in our vocabulary.

Prof. METCALF: Captain William Lynch. And, in fact, there were two different Lynches, both I believe in Virginia.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, I don't have all 327 words and phrases fully memorized. But in any case, they--which of the Lynches is responsible for the term is still debated. But in any case, it's someone who takes the law into his own hands, and we continued lynching unfortunately well into the early 20th century.

Prof. METCALF: Ah, bloomer, there was Miss Amelia Bloomer, who devised a new costume for the liberated woman of the 1850s.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. Yes. Well, the kinds of things that women conventionally wore in those days were very constricting, so she had bloomers, things that developed into pantlike things and women could suddenly move their limbs around better.

Prof. METCALF: Teddy bear is from President Teddy Roosevelt, of course. And, in fact, Roosevelt is the cause of our having two words for 1906. It's the only year when we have two different, completely separate words. But he's responsible for teddy bear. He went hunting but spared a little bear. And a poem, I believe, in a cartoon commemorated that and very soon the enterprising American manufacturers began producing little bears and calling them teddy bears. And that was in 1906.

Also in 1906, if can bring it up, is the great word muckraker. And the great journalistic muckrakers were operating at the time, but Teddy Roosevelt, though he was a reformer, was denouncing the muckrakers, the reporters who were looking around in the dirt and muck instead of looking at more noble causes.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: I would think that would be a sentiment in the mouths of many politicians nowadays.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, I think so. There have been politics like this and politicians complaining that the media were not treating them properly for a long time; although the word media comes from 1921. It's a relatively recent word, and it began with advertising, of course. Nowadays we talk about the media very casually, but it was the journalists back in those days.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. And they--as long as your own ox isn't being gored, you're happy about the muckrakers, and when it gets pointed in your direction, there you go.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, that was H.L. Mencken who also should be noted as one of the most prominent people to study American English. His great book, "The American Language," is perhaps the most famous book on American English. But he came up with the term Bible Belt, not entirely compliment--tarily, in the 1920s.

Prof. METCALF: Well, that's thanks to the scholars who've done great studies of American English. There are two great dictionaries. One is called The Dictionary of American English in four big volumes, and the other is called The Dictionary of Americanisms in two volumes, published both by the University of Chicago Press in mid-century. And then there are some wonderful new dictionaries coming along in addition to The Dictionary of American Regional English that I was mentioning, there's the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. And there have been many excellent books on American English including Mencken's.

The thing that David and I tried to do here that makes this distinctive is that we decided to look for the top American words, because there have been something like 20,000 new words or new meanings, maybe 30,000--depends on how many you count--introduced into the English language in America. And our search was always which words are the most important, the ones that tell us most about ourselves and our way of thinking and our history and so on.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, David Barnhart.

Prof. METCALF: Well, he comes from the illustrious Barnhart family of lexicographers. And he himself is a lexicographer--a professional lexicographer.

Prof. METCALF: Dictionary maker. Lives near New York City, and his father, Clarence Barnhart, is author of the Thorton--the--the Barnhart-Thorton--wait. I forgot. Anyhow, the--the Barnhart dictionaries used in schools and...

Prof. METCALF: And David Barnhart himself is editor of the Barnhart Dictionary Companion, which is a quarterly journal that consists of new words. It's like a dictionary but it consists entirely of new words.

Prof. METCALF: Well, I'm the--being the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, one day I decided that we ought to have our words of the year. And David, I knew, was one of the people who was expert on new words, so I wrote to him and said, `How about words of the year,' and then wrote to another person who was conducting the American Dialect Society's column among the new words in our journal American Speech. So the three of us started the words of the year and we began talking about that year after year. And then a couple of years ago, David and I thought, `Let's do it for the whole 100 and--several hundred years of American history.

Prof. METCALF: Well, we first started drawing up lists, of course. We had our favorite words and OK was at the very top of the list. Frontier was a word we knew we would have to include since that is such an important word in American history.

Prof. METCALF: Well, it's a perfectly ordinary English word. Actually it comes from the French meaning the boundary between two different places. But in America, as Frederick Jackson Turner said in a very famous lecture about a century ago, frontier took on the new meaning of the boundary between the so-called civilized areas and the free or uncivilized. And so we thought of America as having the civilized colonies and then the United States and the free area to be colonized to the west of us. And the idea of the frontier and of settling it and bringing civilization to it dominated American thinking--well, even to the present day. Once we ran out of geographical frontiers, we looked for new frontiers in space and everywhere else.

Prof. METCALF: Jacksonville, Illinois.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Well, thank goodness for e-mail. If it weren't for the electronic means of communication, I'm not sure we would have managed to collaborate so promptly because we would send our drafts and our lists back and forth on e-mail all the time. We came up with lists of--oh, I don't know--our final list must have had several thousand candidates and from them we picked about 300.

Prof. METCALF: Well, I'm not sure I would have picked `keep the ball rolling.' That was from the early 1830s or 1840s, for example. But I couldn't...

Prof. METCALF: Well, yes. And it's a political term. I've kind of favored just simple words or phrases rather than a whole phrase myself but...

Prof. METCALF: Well, it comes from a political campaign. As a matter of fact, it's that campaign of 1840 when OK was against Tyler, I think.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, Henry Harrison.

Prof. METCALF: Some--yes, that's right.

Prof. METCALF: That's right.

Prof. METCALF: It was a big ball--just a huge inflated ball that the candidates would roll along in political parades. And we don't have parades of that sort, or at least we don't have balls of that sort these days. But we certainly keep the ball rolling.

Prof. METCALF: Well, we were perhaps horse trading. I'll put my word in here; you put your word in there. With 327 words and phrases, there's room for maneuver.

Prof. METCALF: I can't even think of it. He was so polite that he never objected. Or at least I would always slip in there first. So my--one of my favorite words, though, thinking of political words is mammoth, which I think you could count as a political word. That's from the 1st of January, 1802. A cheese made in Cheshire, Massachusetts, that had taken several months to come down here to Washington, on the 1st of January, 1802, was installed in the White House. And it was--now I got the name mammoth through a curious process. Thomas Jefferson was president. And Jefferson was in love with mammoths--at least in love with the idea of mammoths. Mammoths were these extinct creatures whose bones were found all throughout North America. And Jefferson, of course, was hoping that someday they might discover one of those mammoths. Maybe even the Lewis and Clark Expedition might have looked for them. But in any case, Jefferson was concerned that--to show that the American flora and fauna were more robust than those of the defeat Old World. And the mammoth showed that our big creatures were bigger than elephants.

When he went to the White House, there was a large room at the White House which Jefferson called the mammoth room, thinking, well, I guess it--it was a room fit for a mammoth. And when the cheese was installed in the White House and installed it really was. It wasn't eaten for about another year or two. So it just sat there. You can imagine--I--maybe they scraped the mold off. I don't know what would have happened, but in any case, the cheese was put in the mammoth room and, therefore, it was called the mammoth cheese. And suddenly the term mammoth, no longer just referring to an animal, meant anything big. And so we had mammoth sales and mammoth opportunities. The--the language of advertising, the language of politics picked up mammoth which we have even to the present day.

Prof. METCALF: Not a book year by year. Again there are many books that have the words of American English that have heaps of words. But we're always trying for the really significant ones, the ones that--well, let me give you some examples from the 20th century. I'm--I think maybe the most important word of the 20th century is teen-ager. And it's--was surprising to me to discover that teen-ager--we have it for 1938. You can date it a little bit ahead or back, but that--there were certainly people who were 13, 14, 18 and so on in centuries before, but only in the 20th century do we have teen-agers, and that has obviously had a profound effect on our culture. In fact, you can arger--through teen-agers we have rock 'n' roll. Through rock 'n' roll we have elements of show biz. That's our 1945 word. There's a controversial one.

I was--a newspaper columnist recently sent me an e-mail message complaining that for 1945 surely there was something more important than show biz. For example, World War II was ending and you could easily use the term atomic bomb, which might be thought to be more important than show biz. But I would argue, at least nowadays with the benefit of hindsight, with the collapse of communism, that it was show biz, rock 'n' roll, teen-agers, the American culture that undermined communism in a way that atomic bombs never did. And so the most potent term, the most potent concept perhaps of the 20th century in America is teen-ager.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. I'm--I don't know how the people at Houghton Mifflin managed it. But it's--certainly seems like a reasonable price for an--a hardback book.

Prof. METCALF: Well, I hope they printed a lot. I--I don't know what the print run was.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Well, hotdog is a tremendous American word. It refers to things like the corruption, the making of sausages out of dogs. All through the 19th century, the big joke was that a stray dog would end up in a sausage despite whatever claims might be made for the contents of the hotdog. Perhaps that eventually led to the pure food and drug laws of the 20th century. And in--it was at Yale University that some students began calling it a--well, it began being sold by a lunch wagon as a--as a hotdog. And that term then gradually spread. And the old term frankfurter--well, it's still around, but hotdog is our standard term.

Prof. METCALF: Right.

Prof. METCALF: It's a commuter train ride.

Prof. METCALF: Right.

Prof. METCALF: It is. It's not far from Springfield. It's 80 miles north of St. Louis.

Prof. METCALF: Right.

Prof. METCALF: Well, at first, we thought--we spent quite a while deciding that. So we went through our list and began thinking, `Well, I'll do this and then I'll do that.' But what really happened was instead of having a complete lists of 327 words and then saying, `OK. I'll write this and you write that,' we found ourselves with, oh, 100 that we knew we really wanted to do. And we began writing them. And as we wrote them, the ideas for others came to mind. And the question of choosing them became clearer as we fit some into place. So doing the last few words was much easier than doing the first few.

And there were some last-minute discoveries. I think one of the most interesting is underprivileged, which I think is 1897, a century ago. That was just a--a little word when you think about it. But underprivileged implies that--well, until underprivileged, everyone--there were those who had privileges and those who didn't. There were the rich who had privileges and there was everybody else. To say someone is underprivileged is like saying someone is undernourished. That means there's a level of nourishment which you are more or less entitled and, therefore, you deserve the nourishment. To say someone is underprivileged suggests that there are privileges to which everyone is entitled, and I think you can see the term underprivileged gradually leading to the sense of entitlement that we have today.

Prof. METCALF: That's pretty difficult. We went over them, edited them, smoothed them out. I'd say that it's very hard to tell. In fact, if you ask me, I can't remember most of them myself.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. Well, yellow journalism--it's funny that it was named after the cartoon figure, the yellow kid, one of the very first comic strip figures. And it was another one of those terms like muckraker. It was not--well, I guess it still isn't a very complimentary term, but it was used for the newspapers that were stirring up the Spanish-American War, the remember the Maine campaign. And that's been with us ever since.

Prof. METCALF: I think it's sockdolager. But there you have one word that we don't use very often. So I'm not quite sure how you use it.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, there's a play called "Our American Cousin," which I guess is still performed now and then in that theater. And the greatest laugh line in that play is where one character accuses another of being a sockdolagizing old mantrap. Now the author of that particular play was an Englishman and he knew that sockdolager was an American word. It turns out that sockdolagizing--it's not a verb. And the word doesn't really have--it doesn't make much sense in that particular context. Sockdolager originally meant just a strong blow, like i--`That was a sockdolager of a punch you landed on me,' or, `That was a sockdolager of a speech.' In fact, blizzard, which is from 1825, is a similar word. We had strong--strong words, strong language in the early 19th century.

But I put that in there partly because those were the last words that--presumably that Lincoln heard at least before he was shot. And that was a line, incredible as it may seem, `You sockdolagizing old mantrap,' that was the line that brought down the house and that John Wilkes Booth knew that that line would create a lot of noise, a lot of laughter. And that was when he shot Lincoln.

Prof. METCALF: I'm a professor at MacMurry College in Jacksonville, a very small college. In fact, its number of students which is about--little over 600 is about the same as the number of members of the American Dialect Society.

Prof. METCALF: For almost a quarter century.

Prof. METCALF: Well, I was looking for a job at the time. I had been teaching at the University of California at Riverside. There was an interesting position there in the English department, and I enjoy the opportunity at MacMurry College in an English department. There are five of us, and I was able to teach everything. At the University of California at Riverside, I had been teaching old English literature and linguistics and a few other things. And--but that was one of the nice things about MacMurry. It's also in Illinois. I grew up in Chicago. And I enjoyed being back in Illinois.

Prof. METCALF: I went to Cornell University. Then I went off to the Free University of Berlin for a year. I was in Berlin during the very interesting year of 1961-62. And then I went to...

Prof. METCALF: Yes, right. I got to Berlin two weeks after the wall first went up, but they were, of course, just building it then. They had the standoff at Checkpoint Charlie and all sorts of interesting things then. Then I--in the fall of '62, I went to the University of California at Berkeley and I got there in time for some interesting events--the free speech movement of 1964. That's where I got my MA and PhD in English literature.

Prof. METCALF: Well, I can remember when I first got interested in words when I was very little. I've always been in--interested in language and writing, but I was especially--when I got to the University of California at Riverside, in my first teaching position, there was a Professor Carroll Reid there who was an expert on American dialects, and he pointed out that no one had really studied much about California dialects. So I did some studies in California English, and that led me to the American Dialect Society and my interest in all things having to do with American English, and that led me eventually to dealing with American words.

Prof. METCALF: Well, it means a variety of a language. They sometimes say that a--that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. You can take low German and Dutch, for example, they're both rather similar, but the--but the Dutch speakers have their own army and navy--or at least they used to--and the low Germans are simply part of the German language, so they were just a dialect. So you can say that every variety of English spoken in the United States is a dialect. There are regional dialects. There are social dialects, ethnic dialects. There are--jargon.

The American Dialect Society has sometimes discussed changing the name because we study much more than dialects. We study the history of American English. We study usage. We study all sorts of things. But to call it `the society for the study of the English language in North America' doesn't necessarily sound like an improvement, either.

Prof. METCALF: It's headquartered wherever the executive secretary is, so for the time being, and for the past 17 years, it's headquartered in Jacksonville, Illinois.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. Well, of course, that was known as the president's house, starting in 1800, and it wasn't until about 1900 that it was officially renamed the White House. So the--but apparently, the very first mention of it is in 1811.

Prof. METCALF: You'll have to read it to me.

Prof. METCALF: I have forgotten that one.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, so apparently, it was always painted white, and I guess it was called the White House even before the repainting.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. Well, you're pronouncing it right. I think most people say gerrymander (pronounced with soft G), but his name was Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with hard G), and that's, perhaps, the most famous political term that's ever come in to American English. That wonderful drawing that showed the redistricting of Massachusetts, I believe, into a thing that looked like a salamander and the editor who saw the cartoon said, `That's a gerrymander.'

Prof. METCALF: Yes, Gilbert Stuart, so the man whose picture of Washington we see everywhere also drew the first gerrymander.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Well, a slave driver--we have to include some language involving slavery. And in addition to the word abolition, which comes from 1787, we have slave driver. The thing about it that suggests the way slaves were treated is, it's like mule driver; it suggests someone who is dealing with animals. It's interesting, though, that even nowadays, though than--slavery is, thankfully, long gone, we still talk about someone as being a slave driver.

Prof. METCALF: That's a very curious term. For some reason, people pick up on matters of usage, and Thomas Jefferson, I believe, used belittle, and the British were very upset with him for using belittled. They--not that there was anything wrong with belittle, with the meaning of it--but for some reason, they just couldn't stand it. There has been occasional complaining about that. Also, another usage matter, George Washington o--talked about, too, progress: `Our--our country will always be progressing.' And the British were very upset at that, so that's our word for the late 1700s.

Prof. METCALF: American. Now, of course, we could have that word for almost any year, but we decided to put it in for 1776, which was the year when you had to decide, `All right, we have the United States of America. What do you call a citizen of America?' And you can be called a Columbian or a United Statesian, and there've been debates ever since and, of course, people from pe--places like Canada or Mexico complain about us being Americans, but we haven't come up with anything better.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Every now and then I forget them. I'm surprised at how many I remember, though, because they do kind of sear into your mind, this giant jigsaw puzzle of all the words, forming a picture of an America where, first, we were naming the plants and animals and observing the Indians' customs, whether they were tomahawks or caucuses. Then we began establishing our own institutions in the 1700s. I like 1753; Ben Franklin was the first to invent and use the word mileage, the very first person to suggest that you should get paid for the miles you traveled to go to a meeting.

Prof. METCALF: I don't know. I'm not sure how much h--I don't think he got very much, but he was--he was proposing a convention in 1753, of the united colonies, to suggest a united front against the mother country, and he suggested that since some delegates would have to come a long way, they should have mileage for their expenses.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, apparently, we were the first to use the term mother country, and this was, of course, from the colonies' point of view. And I guess, like all per--parent-child relations, the mother and child relations weren't always harmonious.

Prof. METCALF: Yeah.

Prof. METCALF: The first year is almost cheating a little, 1555. We decided on the word canoe, which is a word that Christopher Columbus heard from some of the Indians. It was from the language of some of the Indians that he talked with, and then, an English book translating some of Columbus, uses the word canoe. And since canoe is such an American vehicle, we decided that we'd put it in there, and besides, David Barnhart likes to canoe very much, so we also put in portage. That was one of David's choices.

Prof. METCALF: Well, I'd like them to consider that these--to--to ask themselves how much our way of thinking is conditioned by the words in this book, and also to ask themselves whether they agree that these are the words that have really shaped our way of thinking, especially, I'm interested in whether the words that we've chosen for recent years are going to be the ones that remain. We even chose a word for 1998. We already have a decision for that. It's the word millennium bug or year 2000 problem. We think that since it's recently been estimated something--$300 billion to $500 billion to solve the computer problem, that computers will think that the year after 1999 is 1900, that that's going to be what everyone is talking about next year.

Prof. METCALF: Well, that's one that seems to have caught on a great deal, although the US Postal Service isn't happy about it. But the--at least, the folk imagery of postal workers going berserk because they couldn't stand the conditions under which they worked has caught on so that anyone who goes on a shooting spree is going postal. And berserk is an old Norse word, so going postal is a nice new American word.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Well, I think from the point of view of the Postal Service, that's a very small number. I mean, think of all the hundreds of thousands of postal workers, the...

Prof. METCALF: Yeah, so my--that's probably less--you have a greater chance of getting killed in a highway accident. But on the other hand, that's--those things get lots of publicity.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. That's--or rather, it's not, coming from the movie "Wayne's World," not that it was not heard before then. In fact, there were some attestations going back to about 1900. But making a statement that is blatantly untrue and then adding the exclamation not! seems to have peaked around 1992.

Prof. METCALF: Well, a few of them maybe are going to last a long time, but it's very hard to pick out of all the ephemera and all the cute words of recent years, ones that seem destined to stay with us. And one of the things that we were trying to do, and especially with the earlier words, is to look for words, not that were the cutest or cleverest or strangest, but words that are so intrinsic that, perhaps, we don't even think of them as being new or having been invented.

Prof. METCALF: Yeah. Skid row comes from logging operations where logs were sent down on skids, and then eventually a part of town where people would live who were, perhaps, loggers down on their luck, and in the 1930s, of course, a lot of skid rows became prominent.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, because our--the skid road was a road made of skids or logs down which logs would actually be sent, you know, rolled or poled.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. Well, of course, in politics Harry Truman, in the--in 1948, made whistle-top--s--whistle-stop so prominent. But--and, in fact, apparently, whistle-stop was brought up as a derogatory term. I think candidate Dewey joked at Truman for making campaign stops at whistle-stops at unimportant places. And Truman, of course, took that as an insult to the people of America and turned it around on him.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Boondoggle was a simple, nice little handicraft activity that Boy Scouts or cowboys would do when they had idle moments. And in 1935, there was a hearing in New York City on some of the make-work of the--of the WPA, I think, and some of the city councilmen were outraged at these boondoggles, and so it became a name for wasting the public money.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Juke is a term--it refers to a kind of place, a roadhouse, a place where you might get beverages or other things that African-Americans were involved in, in the early part of the century. Now jukebox was a box of, obviously, playing music, and I think whoever coined jukebox tried to combine--tried to bring in the flavor of the--excitement of the juke houses.

Prof. METCALF: Well, the American Dialect s--Society meets once a year. We're meeting this year in early January in New York City, and during that time we vote on word of the year. We also have serious talks by about--oh, 30 or 40 people talking about their research into American English, its pronunciations, its vocabulary, the--its changes, its history--everything that possibly can do with American English.

Prof. METCALF: I teach English. I teach the--I teach freshman composition. I teach a survey of English literature. I teach linguistics.

Prof. METCALF: No, it's MacMurray College, a private college in Jacksonville, Illinois. Mm-hmm.

Prof. METCALF: I teach four courses each semester, and then also in our January term.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Well, there, that's getting into the heavy political terms. We put them both under the same heading because they're so obviously related. Iron Curtain is especially noted in Winston Churchill's famous speech of 1946, at Fulton College, I think.

Prof. METCALF: Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, right. And Cold War was introduced around the same time, not by Churchill but by--I forget.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. Apparently, a very famous person of the time.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, and they were particular about who got credit for Cold War there. But Cold War and Iron Curtain certainly set the stage for the next 30 or 40 years of political struggle.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Because there really is no absolute principle on them, you just have to argue, `Well, these words tell us more about ourselves than any other.' And going back to the one we began with, OK, I think that you could really argue that OK sums up America, not so much in the 19th century, when it got started, but I think ours, I hope, is ending up as an OK century in which, instead of a dictatorship, a totalitarian state where everything is absolute, it's just that, `Well, we have a pretty OK form of government, pretty OK way of life, a pretty OK society. I'm OK; you're OK.' So OK has really--maybe it's--it's subtly influenced our American way of thinking.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Right.

Prof. METCALF: Well, and accountants were using it, of course, earlier than that. The question that always comes up is exactly when should we put the word in? What year should we choose for that word? There are a few words--and OK is one of them--where the word not only began to be used, but was pretty prominent in that year. But so often, a word will be like a--well, like, you ligh--light a wick, and it smolders and then it explodes maybe 20 years later, ebonics being a good example, the word was coined in '73. It appeared in a book in '75. It was known to just very few people. And in December of '96 and early '97, everyone was talking about ebonics. So what year do you use for that? And thank goodness for that kind of leeway, because otherwise, since we had all sorts of words we wanted to put in, we--we could put in the words in the years that we thought were--that we--we could fudge without fudging. We could truly, honestly, put in words in the appropriate years. And we're always straightforward there. We tell you what the first year of citation is, and then we try to explain why we have it in the year that we have it.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes, another fine Washington word. Buncombe County--was it South Carolina?

Prof. METCALF: North Carolina, yes. Well, a--a representative from Buncombe County, North Carolina, made such a long-winded, pointless speech for the benefit of hi c--his constituents back home, th--rather than for any other purpose, that he was said to be speaking for Buncombe. That then reduced itself simply to buncombe, being any kind of ridiculous or pointless or worthless speech. And in the 20th century, we shortened that to bunk, and in the 1920s, someone came up with the term debunk as an antidote to bunk.

Prof. METCALF: It is, indeed. So I guess--I don't know if they have any historical plaque there in Buncombe to commemorate the fame of that place.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. It's--it's funny, you know, pork barrels had, obviously, been around for, easily, a century or so before then, but it was in 1907...

Prof. METCALF: ...1909--well, around then--that people in Congress began referring to projects that were suiting their own districts as pork-barrel prodence--projects.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Well, it would--pork used to be stored in barrels and shipped in barrels. So their--the pork barrel had been around for a long, long time.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, meaning either government issue or galvanized iron, or perhaps both. But it began to be a term towards the end of World War I for the American soldier.

Prof. METCALF: Right.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. Well, a galvanized iron trash can, and then, seeing it on the trash can people saw GI, and they associated it with military things and soldiers.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. That was the campaign slogan of--Who was president then?--or...

Prof. METCALF: Harding. Excuse me. Yes. And he was taken to task by the--the precursors of William Safire for--if--if Safire had been running his column back then, he would have had a column on normalcy. Normalcy was considered not a real word by those who didn't like him, although, in fact, then those who liked him, found that it had been used as far back as 1880 or so. They thought that normality was a fine word, but normalcy, ever since, has become so normal that we don't even argue about normalcy.

Prof. METCALF: Well, Safire is the reliable commentator on political words and on usage nowadays. I say reliable because he's one of the--perhaps the only one who's a member of the American Dialect Society, and furthermore, listens to advice from members of the American Dialect Society. So his columns--and furthermore, he's happy to be proved wrong, where a whole lot of them pontificate without regard to the facts.

Prof. METCALF: Well, in 1989, when we had our centennial meeting in Washington, DC, he came to that meeting, otherwise, he's been a little busy.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. That's a very interesting one, about its origin, whether there ever was a Colonel Murphy, who managed to get things wrong. But in any case, around '58 and thereafter, stories about a Colonel Murphy, who managed to botch things up or who said that `if a thing possibly can go wrong, it will go wrong,' and numerous corollaries of that law have developed since.

Prof. METCALF: Mm-hmm.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. And it's interesting, that's almost one of the earliest citations we have, yet they say it's an old military maxim. There are many words whose origins are in deep obscurity, and if there are people who are looking for a hobby or activity, searching for the true origins of words, you can spend a lifetime searching for the origin of one word, and maybe get no closer to it.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, he invented some goo, which was useful in making radio equipment, and whether he invented the word goo entirely on its own or whether it was already a slang term in use for meaning a liquid--it apparently had been used in colleges for that--but he invented something that he actually called goo and described it as goo.

Prof. METCALF: Yes, you do.

Prof. METCALF: Right. Yes. Now...

Prof. METCALF: Now 19--that was 1902, wasn't it?

Prof. METCALF: Another term for 1902--and I'll give you some examples of ones that, if we had more room, we'd put them in--there's a wonderful term for 1902 that almost strikes me as the word for the century, and that's foolproof. It seems to me that in this century many people thought they had foolproof solutions to problems.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes. Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Well, that's going--I'm not sure if we know much about the origins of it--but it's going back to the sense of finding out where the true sentiment of the people is to be found.

Prof. METCALF: Right. And that's the literal meaning, and then, in the early 1900s, we got the grass roots--and, of course, recently, we have AstroTurf, which is pseudo grass roots.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. There is an example of one where we chose to put it in at the very first use of the word, multicultural, simply referring then to a world--or the ideal of a world dominated, not by a single ideology and a single dictatorship, but allowing for different cultures to have their own expression. And that's a word that, obviously, simmered very low on the horizon for a long time, and then, in the '80s, I guess, or even the '90s, has finally become very notable.

Prof. METCALF: I was just hedging. I was trying to be totally unbiased. I wrote that particular one--in trying to--and also, I was really hedging because who knows 10 years from now if someone picks up this book, what they're going to think of multicultural, especially the recent words. One of the things about this book is that they're all written from the perspective of the present day, and from the present day, we look back on multicultural, but if somebody was writing a book like this in 1950, I don't think they would have noticed multicultural.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes.

Prof. METCALF: Well, now one of the things that we did in our book--we--we could have used all kinds of vulgar language and all kinds of disagreeable terms--some of them are disagreeable, but there's nothing vulgar--and so it means--it's an acronym, and the word that we like to use for the fourth letter is, `situation normal, all fouled up.' And a stronger term was used for the fouled, but it was a military term from World War II, and there were a number of other abbreviations using the F-word.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. So the very term acronym needed to be coined for all of the acronyms that were emerging during World War II. And one of the interesting things there are--of course, there's OK, we have PDQ from the 19th century, and there are other ones also, but those are--although those also can be called acronyms, the kind where you pronounce them as if they were a word, like snafu or scuba, those are, for the most part, 20th century phenomena.

Prof. METCALF: That means self-contained, underwater breathing apparatus. But I don't think it's American, so--so we didn't put it in.

Prof. METCALF: Yes.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. We wanted to be sure to include terms that referred to both of those ethnic groups and, of course, in those essays we mention how the terms have changed from time to time. Afro-American is--that's one of the earliest uses of Afro-American, and Hispanic was around for a long time before the 1880s, but referring to the population of the United States with a Spanish background, Hispanic is first used then.

Prof. METCALF: I think it's used considerably. Hello is a telephone word. It comes from having telephone exchanges. At first, they had boys operating telephone exchanges, but they would shout obscenities at the customers, so instead, they hired young women, who, instead of saying, `Helloo,' would say, `Hello,' and they were immediately known as hello girls. And they were a great civilizing influence, also, because American businessmen used to be able to talk with each other whatever vulgar language they wished, but when they had to converse on the telephone with young ladies they would be more decorous.

Prof. METCALF: Ah, yes, a health food, of course.

Prof. METCALF: Oh, yes.

Prof. METCALF: Yes. You could eat a graham cracker and feel that you were nourishing yourself.

Prof. METCALF: I have another in mind about the whole world.

Prof. METCALF: Well, the--the English language has words from, perhaps, 300 different languages in it, and so I'm beginning to get the notion of a book that would have one word from each language. The--it--it--it's--a challenge like this one, it's not as if people haven't written about it before, but which one to pick. If you pick a language that has hundreds of words, which word do you pick? And if you have a language that has just a very few words, are there any interesting ones?

Prof. METCALF: You're welcome.