“Haircut Politics Bad for Big Three,” headlined The Detroit News, as hometown automakers made financial sacrifices to get what the government resolutely terms a “rescue” and the rest of the world scornfully calls a “bailout.” The Asia Sentinel in Hong Kong headlined a lead article “Asia’s Top Tycoons Take a Haircut.”
The metaphor, probably based on the weakening effect of the biblical Delilah’s shearing of Samson’s invigorating mane, is clipping along at a great rate. A Lexicographic Irregular calling himself Mark Tomarket asks: “Why is this fine word being given a pejorative connotation? What’s so bad about getting a barber to make you look your best?”
Look, Mark, your attempt at pseudonymity is transparent. According to a hotly e-mailed update to The Associated Press Stylebook, the phrase on every bean-counter’s lips — mark to market — means “an accounting requirement that securities must be valued at their current price, rather than the purchase price or the price they might fetch later. Also called ‘fair value.’ ” Opponents of this requirement argue that when buyers disappear en masse, there is no market to mark to, and wild guesses about value are unfair. The question about the origin of haircut’s new sense, however, is worth an investment of time in this space.
J. Sinclair Armstrong, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the Dallas Security Dealers Association on Nov. 1, 1955, about rules to “provide more stringent standards in valuing the broker’s assets. . . . These are the so-called ‘haircut’ provisions” that sought a 30 percent deduction from the market value of stocks in computing the broker’s net capital. Armstrong used the colorful term in subsequent Congressional testimony, but always with “so-called,” a dignity-conscious person’s way of dissociating himself from bean-counter slang.
Discovery of this early usage was provided us by the netymologist Ben Zimmer, executive producer at the lively Visual Thesaurus Web site (www.visualthesaurus.com).
(I thought I just coined netymologist, combining net and etymologist, to mean “one deft at using the Internet to track the origin of words and phrases.” But when I Googled the word to make sure no other great mind was thinking alike — drat! — up popped a previous usage by a communications-design group named M2 urging, “If you think you’ve got what it takes to be a Netymologist, contact us.” When it comes to coinage-claiming, the increasingly omniscient Web won’t let you get away with a thing.)
Haircut, however, which the world has adopted to mean “a sudden loss of equity or drop in income,” is not the best word to characterize the past year’s near-universal economic turmoil. Jack Rosenthal, my Times colleague and yearly pinch-hitter in this space for the past three decades, writes: “There’s still no agreed name for what’s happening. Journalists call it the global economic crisis or downturn or credit crunch. The lead piece by Roger Altman in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine is titled ‘The Great Crash, 2008.’ That puts ‘crash’ in the nomenclature sweepstakes. I’d be interested to know what word you have settled on.”
Let’s see: market crash, with some 16 million Google hits about the 2008 hyperhaircut, is clearly in the lead. Market meltdown has a nice alliteration with a nuclear connotation but is limited to stocks and bonds, not the loss of jobs and the worry about impending hard times. Recession has lost credibility because its economic arbiters of nomenclature, after nine months, changed the definition to backdate it, but Great Recession is showing early foot. Slump is too cheerful and depression too alarmist, especially when capitalized. Economic Armageddon is panic-stricken, though the combination of four-syllable words nicely fills the mouth.
This is a job for the Lexicographic Irregulars. Mail in your cards and letters (Who sends cards these days? Who even writes letters? Can you remember your last telegram?) or send your e-mail messages to Name That Plunge, safireonlanguage@nytimes.com. I have long used this mail-pulling device, and bloggers have recently given it a name: crowdsourcing. Whoever coined that, please identify yourself, but better check Google first.
VERBAL TIC PATROL
Look, the unconscious repetition of a “filler” word or sound is, y’know, annoying.
Vice President-elect Joe Biden, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, began no fewer than 16 answers with the attention-demanding “Look. . . . ” In this tic, he follows the example set by Ronald Reagan, who began most of his answers with “Well. . . . ” Both these introductions give the answerers a second to compose their thoughts, but look carries a minatory note just short of see here.
Biden, in response to friendly chiding, is striving to eliminate the word literally from his speech. We can hope for a similar response to his look problem, dropping the opening admonition from his answer on ABC: “Look, I love Caroline Kennedy.”
As for Kennedy, she loves you know, a phrase to occupy what would otherwise be a silent pause. In an Associated Press print reporter’s act of kindness, her use of the phrase was edited out, but the accompanying A.P. video clip showed her use of the words dozens of times, which was widely noted.
Y’know reached its usage peak among teenagers in the 1980s, later replaced by I mean, then by like and of late by an elemental uh.
Look, you know, a grunted uh, I mean — which is what I use to fill up a silence to show I’m conscious while I’m groping for a word — is, like, prelinguistic language.
William Safire, New York Times
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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11wwln-safire-t.html
