If future generations of Americans wind up actually using the term “Monicagate,” not to mention “full monty,” “digerati” and “yadda, yadda, yadda,” one can perhaps blame Anne Soukhanov.
Soukhanov is the Virginia-based general editor of an epic endeavor, the new Encarta World English Dictionary, a gargantuan 7-pound, 2,078-page, 400,000-reference work that is a joint effort of New York’s St. Martin’s Press, Microsoft and London’s Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and, no surprise, already the subject of grumbling in the staid universe of dictionaries.
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A New York Times story brought up the carping of competitors, who noted a few errors here and there, and the use of a Bill Gates photo in a brief identification of him but not one of President John F. Kennedy.
That is true, but misses most of the strength of the new work, which incorporated the labor of several hundred editors and consultants from 20 nations to create a look at “World English.” As Soukhanov puts it, that’s English spoken “in all its geographical and regional varieties and subvarieties in eight major regions of the world, including Canada, East Asia and Africa.”
It is a rather remarkable foray into differing cultures, marked by the dictionary’s “cultural notes” and reminders that the same words used in different places, such as “robot,” “mail slot” and “swing voter,” have very different meanings. As an example, “robot” means a stoplight in South African English.
Further, one learns that “hotel” is a restaurant in South Asia and a bar in the Outback of Australia. And there are, obviously, terms totally distinctive to an area, like “slippery dip,” namely a child’s sliding board, or “whipper snipper,” a lawn trimmer, both in Australia.
And there are words that I can’t repeat here and are further cause for a few raised eyebrows. They’re included precisely “to warn off non-native English speakers from using them” and “to help families and teachers in educating kids to get them off this sort of coarsened language that seems to be increasing in intensity.”
Trust me, some are raw.
Soukhanov has been a dictionary editor for 23 years, including doing 1992’s The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition. When we last spoke, she’d authored “Word Watch: The Stories Behind the Words of Our Lives,” the outgrowth of a wonderful column on new words and phrases she has written for Atlantic Monthly since 1986.
This endeavor, published in print and on line, is the first global partnership she has been involved in and came after she had sworn never to do another major dictionary. It’s just too much work.
“But when they said this would be different and offer Americans a world view of English, as well as going one step further in dealing with fighting words, words that hurt people,” she joined up.
Now, as for “Mon.i.ca.gate n.the 1998-99 sex scandal involving U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton and a former White House intern, culminating in his impeachment and subsequent acquittal (slang) (From, Monica S. Lewinsky, the name of the intern + -GATE.)” Why include it?
As with the use of “Filegate,” the controversy over the improper use of FBI background files,” Soukhanov felt that “both had to go in. Even if Monica Lewinsky winds up as a tiny footnote to history in 40 years, it is important to recognize that the term was used in the press for a sustained period of time. This is a criterion for deciding whether something goes in.”
Then, again, there is no Dianagate or Fergygate. “Those were here yesterday, gone today,” though Squidgygate might show up in the separate British edition.
Having spent too long in Washington, I found myself asking her about distinctly political terms to be found in her new handiwork.
The historic, if fragile, “Dayton Accords” are to be found, as is “New Democrat,” the centrist philosophy that was associated with Bill Clinton.
And so is one which you have likely never heard or seen. It’s not so much a new word, as an abbreviation, namely NEW, for non-explosive warfare, and it is found for the purely subjective reason that Soukhanov thinks it may be the most critical new term she’s stumbled upon.
“It was coined by Richard Danzig, Clinton’s secretary of the Navy,” she said, and surfaced in an op-ed piece he wrote for The New York Times in 1998. Her inclusion of it is thus based on purely one citation, the one that day in the Times.
“I felt it had to go in due to the danger of weapons of mass destruction that can be created by a rogue nation or an individual in a garage,” she explained. “Chemicals in a subway, or the real possibility that a rogue nation or leader of one could deploy computer viruses that shut down computer systems, particularly systems involved with power or transportation grids.”
She sincerely believes it is a significant notion and “encapsulates what could happen in the 21st Century, and (is) obviously something government is spending a hell of a lot of time trying to combat.”
The abbreviation and phrase thus passes what she drolly refers to as her “Sputnik and AIDS test.” When Sputnik burst on the scene in the 1950s, “it changed our whole national life, forces students to take more science, study Russian, etc. We knew we were in a space race.”
“And when the term AIDS appeared on a Dan Rather newscast, I took it down instantly, though it seemed at the time to be restricted to other continents. I knew instantly it would affect the way we lived our private lives forever.”
“When I saw NEW, I knew it would affect the strategic military and civil defense policy in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. It will sustain currency if only for the fear it denotes and connotes until we have defense against such attack. And with teenage hackers able to penetrate Pentagon Web sites, it makes it all the more frightening.”
According to Soukhanov, by the 21st Century, we will have 1.5 billion English speakers. “That puts us way over Mandarin Chinese.”
That helps explain why she feels the cultural notes are relevant, and why one finds notes on movies such as “Dirty Harry,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Wag the Dog,” following definitions of the words or phrases “dirty,” “fatal” and “Wag the Dog syndrome.”
The note for “Wag the Dog syndrome” details the movie about a fictional president’s advisers starting a phony war to deflect media attention from a scandal and how the film’s premier in early 1998 coincided with a grand jury investigation of Clinton.
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“During this period the President responded to military aggression and terrorist acts affecting the United States by launching cruise missiles against Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan,” the note says. “The U.S. media and the pop culture soon drew a figurative connection between the movie and the presidential scandal, leading to expressions such as `It is Wag the Dog?’, `Was it a Wag the Dog scenario?’, and the phrase Wag the Dog syndrome.”
One of the most curious usage explanations she gives is itself political, or at least included only due to her learning of a little-known Washington flap. It didn’t even involve Congress or the White House but, instead, the woeful District of Columbia government.
It stemmed from an aide to the mayor resigning several months ago after disclosure that he had used the term “niggardly” in a meeting, describing how he’d manage a particularly tight budget. Some city employees took umbrage with his use of the word, though perhaps they overreacted. (The mayor later decided to rehire him.)
Niggardly has a Scandinavian origin, according to the usage note, “not associated historically with the origin of the offensive word Negro and its related offensive racist slurs. These are derived ultimately from Latin. Niggardly, then, is in no way a racial slur. However, the fact that the word sounds as if it might be one is reason to consider context very carefully before using it.”
Some will thank Soukhanov for such distinctions. Others may not. They may turn to page 2,060 and conclude such references are a lot of yadda yadda yadda, or “boring, trite, superficial, unending talk,” whose late-20th Century origin is uncertain.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.