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Lex maniac

“Investigating changes in American English vocabulary over the last 50 years”

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May 5, 2024 a-list celebrity, b-roll

A-list celebrity

(1990’s | journalese? | “VIP,” “creme de la creme,” “superstar”)

Like a lot of things, an A-list celebrity is something you know when you see, not subject to rigorous definition yet subject to change over time. There is the Ulmer Scale, which computes a numerical score that purports to measure a star’s “bankability” — reliably appearing in high-grossing films being the main factor. It’s partly a matter of talent and charisma, and partly a matter of attracting publicity. The Ulmer Scale is divided into a series of letter grades A through D analogous to the grading system most of us had in school. Correspondingly, there are B-, C-, and D-list celebrities as well. In fact, there seems to be a pretty clear taxonomy:

A-list: the most glamorous and influential movie stars, who consistently draw well and whose artistic projects and personal lives are infallible news

B-list: well-known and widely recognized, but less ubiquitous

C-list: widely recognized but not well-known, such as character actors

D-list: faded stars, reality-show upstarts, hangers-on.

Some commentators have broken out further lists as well — here’s one example.

The term “A-list” (noun) was in use well before 1990; the relationship with celebrities goes back at least to the 1970’s — though the phrase “A-list celebrity” doesn’t occur in LexisNexis before 1994. Judging by Google Books, for a long time “A list” was an arbitrary designation, just one letter of many that you might reach for to name a particular catalogue or roster. Over time, the idea took hold that the A-list included only the most important or desirable people. By now we have been schooled to associate the A-list with the culture-spanning category of celebrity, the biggest names with the largest followings. The term may still be used in more circumscribed contexts, but that usage feels incidental now.

I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that the only A-list celebrities are film actors, but of course there are others, many of whom are performers like the Kardashians or Taylor Swift. It’s hard to think of an author today who would qualify, much less a public intellectual like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Henry Louis Gates. If you can think of an exception, please write in, but I suspect nearly all A-listers are performers of some kind, at least now that Henry Kissinger is gone (and who am I kidding — he hadn’t been on the A-list for years).

b-roll

(1980’s | film)

This expression can’t help having a dismissive sound, but there is also something comforting about it. Anything that involves video in any kind of promotional campaign presents the main attraction (which might be called A-roll, but no one does), and often provides additional video with it — background material, footage cut from (or never used in) the main event, stock footage, etc. Just as in dramatic films there are supporting actors to help the leads do their stuff, in a product rollout there is supporting video, of interest to the geeks, the bored, and reporters who really have to understand the new phenomenon, but something the rest of us can skip.

“B-roll” started turning up in the 1980’s, according to LexisNexis, an industry term from the beginning. According to Wikipedia, it once referred specifically to stock footage without voiceover (as recorded for television news, for example), but today’s definition is far less precise. Any video related to the main eye-catcher, if it is provided by the sponsor, agency, or producer and counts as secondary or supplementary, would qualify.

There are two kinds of new expressions in the world: those that are glossed and explained frequently; and those that are rarely or never defined, even in their earliest appearances. (I’m oversimplifying; there are many gradations, but some expressions stand out in the corpora as remaining firmly in one camp or another during their incubation.) “A-list” and “b-roll” were seldom explained when they began to appear. True, “A-list” was already established, and it sounds pretty intuitive anyway. “B-roll” does not, but because it was first used among people already versed in the world of video, definitions weren’t necessary. The word had other meanings in film and video editing before 1980, but I know too little about them to offer any comment.

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April 28, 2024 business casual

business casual

(1990’s | fashionese? journalese? | “informal dress OR attire”)

I’ve always disliked formal dress after a childhood crammed into Sunday clothes every week, complete with clip-on tie. I go to the opera in jeans; my only suit is closing in on thirty years old, and I don’t even try to get into it any more. My timing was good in entering the workforce in the early nineties, right when business casual began its conquest of American offices. (It had started innocently enough as casual Friday, a way to take off a little pressure at the end of the week.) Many employers large and small soon adopted the practice, and employees were freed of the obligation to don neckties and skirts. The tech boom, led largely by young men who regarded a button-down collar as an insufferable burden, certainly boosted the trend; a new generation simply refused to show up for work in suits and ties and forced employers to play along. Sometimes the problem was customers, rather than bosses, who weren’t comfortable dealing with people in the standard business uniform (now known as business formal or business professional).

A novelty in 1990, requiring definition and explanation, the phrase was settled by 1995. It was not unusual for commentators to point out that “business casual” has an oxymoronic air, and it does; definitions varied, and standards have tended to fall over time. In the early nineties, a rough general definition might have run like this: no jeans or shorts, no t-shirts, no tennis shoes. Men did not have to wear neckties, nor women skirts. Pants and jackets might be cut a little different and made of softer material. Loose rather than buttoned up. Employees, deliberately or not, were always testing the limits, and without an official dress code, which many employers were loath to impose, it was hard to enforce them.

Thirty years on, little has changed. It is striking, actually, how closely today’s disquisitions on business casual follow those of the nineties. The rules are a little less strict; jeans and t-shirts are allowed nowadays if they are neat, at least in most offices. (As one writer put it, it’s “more about avoiding a list of ‘don’ts’ than following a list of ‘dos.'”) Even more striking is the fact that many observers think of business casual as a recent development, a result of the pandemic, remote work, etc. The idea that it wasn’t really necessary to wear a suit to the office was current in the early nineties — though hardly universal — but to hear the story told today, you’d think it never crossed anyone’s mind before 2020. I’m exaggerating, I’m sure, and haven’t done the research required to bolster such a sweeping claim. The point remains: business casual is still around, and it’s still confusing enough that everyone wants to take a crack at defining it.

One effect of business casual was to force a large swath of the labor pool to spend more on clothes; the old work wardrobe wasn’t enough now that a new class of clothing had arisen. Some writers suggested that the rise of new sartorial customs went with an increased interest among men in fashion. Some went so far as to suggest that the trend got started in the first place because men were jealous of women’s relative freedom to wear a variety of colors and accessories; they wanted a piece of that, and the only way to get it was to shed the dark suit and monochrome tie. More simply, once men were given the opportunity to titivate, some of them grabbed it. Of course, not all employees liked business casual; some preferred the old uniform and never got comfortable with the change. Now that my generation is in sight of retirement, there aren’t many people outside of fancy banks and brokerage houses that get alarmed at the prospect. Money and the law still rely on sober, old-style formal clothes to convey a sense of security and responsibility — those people are too well-dressed to swindle me. Everyone else just wants to relieve the stiffness and inhibition wrought by formalwear. At least let’s relax while we make money for the boss.

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April 15, 2024 hit the wall

hit the wall

(1980’s | athletese | “run out of gas OR steam,” “crap out,” “collapse”)

I have always understood this picturesque phrase to come from long-distance running, specifically marathoning; it was understood that way as it trickled into the language through the early eighties, as I am old enough to remember. Yet if you look through examples of the exact phrase in sportswriting, it came up a lot more often in auto racing and baseball — which reflects the fact that those sports used to, and still do, get much more coverage than marathoning, which casual sports fans were not generally aware of until the seventies, I would guess. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that it’s originally a runner’s term, but it does seem like there ought to have been some influence from auto racing, where the bottom line is similar: you can’t continue the race and might be seriously injured. In baseball, hitting the wall is closely associated with running out of room, for outfielders, or a well-struck ball, for batters. The connection is less clear in that case, but “hit the wall” is occasionally used figuratively to indicate that one has exhausted available capacity.

The more I think about this expression the odder it becomes. The runner hits the wall, right? Not exactly; forward motion may stop as if one had run into a barrier, but the more relevant direction seems to be down rather than ahead. Shouldn’t it be “hit the pavement”? If there’s any impact, that’s where it will take place. And there is no obvious connection with “hit the roof/ceiling” (fly into a rage), either. There’s just something dodgy about the whole thing.

It’s necessary to distinguish “hit the wall” from “hit a (brick) wall,” even though the two often blur together now. “Hit the wall” will probably maintain its athletic meaning indefinitely — unless a better expression, like “hit the pavement,” comes along — but it appears destined also to take over the less specific sense of “encounter an imposing obstacle that may prove insurmountable.” Distinguished by something as humble as an article, the two phrases can hardly expect to remain separate; such growing together seems almost inevitable.

The phrase has another, nastier meaning in the “manosphere” — populated by manosaurs — where it used to allude to a point after which women are no longer desirable, due to age or wear and tear. (Compare a related idea handled in a non-misogynistic way in Amy Schumer’s “Last Fuckable Day.”) Apparently the idea is popular among bitter straight men who know little about women except they’ll never get one they want; it is their way of gloating over women who in their judgment are past their prime. It’s not clear how much traction this retrograde usage will gain over time; it is already commonplace among male supremacists and may make further inroads into our already debased culture.

In a more primitive era — my childhood — “hit the wall” often meant simply punch the wall. It was something men did when they got angry, put their fists through walls. A more innocent time . . . A runner with a gift for parody should rework Percy Mayfield’s classic into a song about the marathoner’s bane. I can’t get “Hit the Wall, Jack” out of my head. (No more, no more!)

Lovely Liz from Queens has supplied several expressions for the raw list lately; this isn’t one of them. She fed me this one oh, I dunno, ten years ago? The well never seems to run dry.

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April 9, 2024 push one’s buttons

push one’s buttons

(1990’s | therapese? | “drive one crazy,” “piss one off,” “get one’s goat,” “find one’s weak spots,” “stir one up,” “get one going OR excited”)

Let’s begin with the button, shall we? (And sew a vest on it.) It jumped from clothing to machinery well before the twentieth century, early on becoming primarily associated with what we would now call a machine’s user interface. Even in those early days buttons were pushed or pressed. And so it went, through elevators, remote controls, telephones, nuclear missiles . . . not forgetting the good old panic button, or hot-button issues as covered by Lex Maniac. In the fifties, Ford manufactured a car with a push-button transmission; now you can start the car with a button. The adjective “push-button,” meaning automatic or knee-jerk, goes back quite a ways as well.

America’s long love affair with the button has taken a new turn. In the eighties, the metaphorical understanding of pushing a person’s buttons — not a machine’s — turned up occasionally, frequently with a modifier added to narrow the field, as in push one’s stress button, guilt button, nostalgia button, etc. The stimulus appeals to an emotion or effect that can be named. (The more general usage, sans modifier, also appears sporadically through the eighties in LexisNexis.) The stage is set for the nineties, by whose beginning the fixed phrase “push one’s button(s)” had taken on three different meanings:

— introduce a subject in which one’s companion is knowledgeable, leading to intelligent if lengthy comment (also rendered in the singular, as “push one’s button”);

— give someone pleasure by producing or alluding to something they enjoy, rather like “turn one on” in the sixties, which makes sense, because pushing the button turns on the machine (also rendered in the singular);

— annoy another person, often but not invariably deliberately, by referring to specific subjects or taking specific stands that irritate them (not generally rendered in the singular).

They all have in common the idea of provoking a predictable or consistent reaction. We are like vending machines or automats; insert the right stimuli and the product pops out. The phrase probably occurs most in scenarios involving close friends or family members, who know better than anyone how to aggravate you. It’s the people who know exactly where to stick the needle, and have been doing it for a long time, who can knock you off your perch the fastest.

As our metaphorical usage shows, the button assumed great power when it took its place in the mechanical universe. It starts even a big machine with a simple, almost effortless gesture, or activates an essential process in the machine’s operation. The action is both reliable and disproportionate to the small size and unprepossessing appearance of the button, and that’s why what may seem like a bland, emotionless act — punching a button on the remote to change the channel, say — takes on striking emotional force when it comes up in figurative language.

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April 1, 2024 sugar high

sugar high

(1980’s | journalese? | “hyperactivity,” “euphoria,” “mania,” “burst (of energy, spending, etc.)”)

There is a firm consensus among scientists that there is no such thing as a sugar high. Or if there is, it’s because sugar causes your brain to release dopamine (um, a lot of drugs work like that, actually, and we don’t accuse them of failing to produce a buzz). Or your kid is acting up because you expect him to act up, or because he’s excited about something else. The waters are muddied by the fact that the same scientists will tell you that there is such a thing as a sugar crash after the non-existent sugar high, which occurs when insulin levels remain elevated even after neutralizing all the sucrose, thus causing your glucose level to drop, which makes you tired and grouchy. The hangover without the intoxication — thanks, science!

Parents, on the other hand, have been to too many birthday parties to doubt the existence of the sugar high, so this has become one more battleground between the mandarins and the laypersons. I recall a visit to Fenton’s, the famous ice cream parlor in Oakland, years ago with three girls, all under ten. We walked around a park afterwards, and the kids were positively loopy. I’m sure some of that was a conscious response to the grownups’ jokes about the effects of so much sugar, but they really did seem to be tripping a little bit. I don’t recall any crash later, but it may have been mitigated by the exercise. The phrase has always had a strong association with children, although adults can court the experience, complete with crash, and often do.

“Sugar high” and “sugar rush” began bobbing up in LexisNexis around 1985 and were always interchangeable; other phrases, such as “sugar buzz,” are not as common. It’s not clear where the term was invented or who invented it. By 2000, it had entered general usage as a word for any short-term bliss and had crept into the vocabulary of economists and financiers, where it has earned a well-wrought niche. While it remains even now most frequently used in nutritional contexts, some secondary meanings have become firmly part of today’s English.

Economists’ adoption of “sugar high” falls squarely into a long tradition of protesting and bemoaning any government action that helps non-millionaires. A chorus of legislators, bank presidents, and professors intones the old anthem: Easy money and easy credit lead to rack and ruin. Yet the chorus falls strangely silent when the government dispenses easy money to millionaires, and fails to notice when rack and ruin in fact follow. Government stimulus intended to help ordinary people? Disgraceful! Only last month Jamie Dimon warned that the U.S. economy is artificially buoyed by a “sugar high of debt.” From a historical perspective, Dimon has a point; too much deficit spending and debt lead to unpleasant reckonings that most people do not see coming. But we get the real, crippling crashes when the big boys have too much free money and not enough regulation, not when wealth is redistributed broadly among the population. The reason the scolds detest broad-based stimulus is that they can’t stand it when government helps regular people. They prefer a world in which government and big business operate as a loose conglomerate, with lots of dubious money sloshing around and a spirit of good fellowship among the men who are writing and cashing the checks.

The main thing to observe about the sugar high is that it is irresponsible. Its most common meaning goes straight back to our old puritan disapproval of candy (covered here), which brings deceptive and short-lived pleasure that will punish you afterwards. (Stories of people doing stupid, short-sighted things and swiftly regretting them are popular among Americans puritan and otherwise.) That same contempt underlies the financial sense of the phrase as well. It doesn’t always hold; when a sportswriter uses “sugar high” in reference to a team celebrating a championship, for example, the implication of irresponsibility disappears, while the implication of ephemerality remains. Most of the time, however, the phrase all but gloats that we have overdone it and will richly deserve the resulting bellyache.

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March 26, 2024 (a) feature, not a bug

(a) feature, not a bug

(1990’s | computerese | “no, it’s a good thing,” “making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” “dressing something up,” “how we do things around here”)

It’s an old salesman’s trick, passing off a defect as a virtue. Convincing the customer that the biggest problem with your product is really the best thing about it was a rite of passage for drummers and presumably still is in a land where so much depends on money changing hands. The computer age has brought forth a neat new expression which has swept all before it and become the preferred idiom. “It’s a feature, not a bug” started to appear in the mainstream press in the eighties, when it was already a punch line, firmly the property of the software salesperson eager to unload some product. Since then, as the term has spread, “feature” has come to refer to any essential part of the operation, whether obviously advantageous or not.

“Bug” meaning unintended problem with a mechanism goes back a long way, perhaps to a source as illustrious as Edison (Lighter’s slang dictionary credits the earliest citations to him). It was adopted seamlessly by computer geeks as soon as there were computer geeks; there are colorful origin stories about how it entered cybervocabulary, but one suspects that the geeks just grabbed a term already in wide circulation. “Feature(d)” has long had positive associations as an important or valuable element (“feature presentation,” “featured attraction”) and was already the dominant word in my childhood for a useful or enjoyable function of a car, a blender, or a recliner, not to mention a fiscal plan or sewer system. Neither term was unique to software-related discourse, and there is no reason this phrase had to arise in the age of mass-market personal or office computers. Yet it has, and we are stuck with it.

“Feature” and “bug” are easily mated because they complement each other; I would go so far as to say that bugs owe their existence to features. A bug occurs when a feature fails, but it has to fail predictably, the same way every time under a given set of conditions. Otherwise, it’s a glitch, and therefore inexplicable. A bug can be repaired, and that improves the feature. Passing off a bug as a feature requires the listener to accept the idea that the screw-up was part of the plan all along.

The phrase retained a firm association with computer programs well into the nineties, by which time most people who worked with computers had heard it and understood that it was usually a grim joke. More recently, the phrase has been hauled into political and economic journalism, most generally to describe an action or policy contrary to the stated aims of the entity undertaking it. It has become a refrain in the endless gotcha wars that have overtaken political commentary, within which a virtuously outraged observer points to a crime of great magnitude being committed by the enemy, whoever that happens to be, and smugly declares that the offending stratagem is a feature, not a bug, meaning that it the enemy is doing it deliberately even as it issues outraged denials. On the one hand, government hypocrisy is hardly new, and hyperventilating about it as if Talleyrand and Henry Kissinger never existed seems naive and self-indulgent. On the other, doubletalk leaves cracks for distrust and conspiracy theories to worm their way through, which has a corrosive effect over time. “A feature, not a bug” bears a lot of weight now; it has come a long way from those innocent times when software salespersons merely had to persuade clients that they were better off with the thing that didn’t work.

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March 19, 2024 serial monogamy

serial monogamy

(1970’s | academese (anthropology))

Is serial monogamy a euphemism for polygamy? As anthropologists used the term, it was characteristic of cultures described as polygamous, whose practices lay closer to serial monogamy than group marriage — one partner at a time, but no partner is permanent. That’s about how we use the term today, but we wouldn’t be pleased at the implication that we’re a bunch of polygamists.

The phrase was in general use by the mid-seventies, after incubating for a while in scholarly language. It was usually glossed and treated as a technical term well into the eighties. At first commentators used it narrowly to talk about people who married and divorced repeatedly, so that the association with marriage remained strong. In the eighties, blasé pundits assumed serial monogamy was an inevitable consequence of sexual liberation and rising divorce rates, and they were right, at least to some extent. Before long the legal/religious status became unnecessary, while the implication of commitment within each successive relationship remained. The range and meaning of “serial monogamy” have not changed since then. We might as well call it “serial fidelity,” but that hasn’t caught on.

My impression, confirmed by a medium-deep dive into Urban Dictionary, is that when “serial” appears in a recent phrase, it’s generally bad news. “Serial killer” is the most obvious example; the word forms part of many phrases, almost all of which suggest a person who is irritating at best (serial texter), deathly dangerous at worst. I don’t hear a strong negative implication in “serial monogamy (or monogamist),” except in old-fashioned puritan terms, but an old-fashioned puritan likely wouldn’t use the expression to begin with. If a serial monogamist is a person who jumps into a new relationship every time an old one ends, then the term takes on a contemptuous tinge. But if it’s someone who has longer-term relationships with a decent interval between each one, the phrase is not an insult, and serial monogamy remains an acceptable way to conduct one’s love life. The phrase does not seem to have an inevitable implication, positive or negative.

From the point of view of the jaded citizen of the 21st century, monogamy is attractive because it demands less effort than keeping up with multiple amours. Even if one is intrigued by people other than one’s partner — as most of us are from time to time — and enjoys taking risks, one may well be restrained by the thought of the work involved of keeping two people (or more!) satisfied. I know there are those who do it, but it just seems like too much trouble to me. There are many better reasons to abjure cheating, I’ll grant you, but laziness is definitely one of them.

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March 13, 2024 cryptocurrency

cryptocurrency

(2010’s | computerese? businese?)

An uncomfortable compound. “Digital currency” and “virtual currency” are synonyms; the money issued by government is somewhat disparagingly called “fiat currency,” provided it isn’t backed by gold or something similar. There is doubt about whether cryptocurrencies are money (generally regarded as at least a rough synonym of currency) in the usual sense, but they can be used as money is used, so most people seem comfortable dropping them in that bucket. The prefix “crypto” — which doubles as a common abbreviation — suggests concealment, whether used as part of “cryptography” or to modify a political position, such as “crypto-Communist” — not a declared party member but someone who offers sympathy if not subterranean support. Both seem related; “encryption” is also in the mix. Cryptocurrency lacks physical manifestation, apart from the huge amount of energy and hardware needed to mine it, but has powerful symbolic value as an unregulated means of exchange. Even though the blockchain, or ledger of transactions, is public, the taint of the surreptitious clings to cryptocurrency.

The word arose along with Bitcoin, which came on the scene in 2009; both new words began to appear in the press that summer. Skeptical articles soon followed, and they are not hard to find even today, but given the number of cryptocurrencies and their gradual acceptance in financial circles, they look to be here to stay. As far as I know, El Salvador is the only nation to declare Bitcoin legal tender, but surely more will follow.

I have read many explanations of what cryptocurrency is and how it works. By now I grasp the basic idea, but there remains something opaque about the whole thing, which I suspect is rooted more in “why?” than “what?” or “how?” As far as I’m concerned, blockchain and all that jazz is window dressing; the essential feature of a cryptocurrency is that it lies outside the strictures imposed by government. (Sort of — now they are figuring out how to tax and regulate it, so failing to declare cryptocurrency on your 1040 form can get you tangled up with the IRS, where most of us would rather not be.) It starts with the desire to create your own money, then puts it into practice with the incomprehensible technical stuff.

Not surprisingly, crypto has a strong libertarian appeal, and regular readers know what I think of libertarians. Defense of individual liberty is a bedrock of American thought; when you forget — or pretend — that it doesn’t have limits, you go off the rails pretty quickly. Knee-jerk anti-government railing in the name of individualism has become de rigueur in some circles and is tolerated in the mainstream; two generations of Americans have been raised to believe unquestioningly that gummint at all levels is feckless and corrupt, capable only of taking your money and spending it on stupid, unreasonable things. You don’t have to look very far to find support for that view, but it ignores an even more fundamental fact: the government is us. Government is how we work together to reach goals we can’t accomplish as individuals or small groups. Building roads, collecting garbage, fighting an organized enemy, promoting the general welfare . . . anything done on a large scale, which means the government has to get bigger along with the population. Government is also how we regulate ourselves. Striving to exist outside it breaks a fundamental compact with your fellow citizens, denying that we are all in this together. Cryptocurrency fits comfortably into an anti-government (i.e., anti-fellow citizens) world-view that has become near-dogma on the right. It may never lose all its libertarian glamor, but crypto-based funds now appear on the menus of the big financial players — the kiss of death for the would-be outlaw. Then again, it can’t get too mainstream, because it’s exorbitantly complicated. Will the forces of respectability overwhelm its insular techie appeal? Cryptocurrency is caught between two worlds.

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March 4, 2024 code-switching

code-switching

(1990’s | academese | “going along to get along,” “acting the part,” “doing what you have to do”)

Originally a term in linguistics, available in noun or verb form to refer to speaking multiple languages in the same sentence or utterance, “code-switching”/”codeswitch” has shifted from language in particular to culture writ large. It has to do with all aspects of human interaction and has most to do with adopting prevailing customs, even if unwelcome or alien. It tends to be associated with minorities, because they are usually the ones who have to do it in order to succeed at school or at work. It is related to the older idea of “passing (for white).”

Definitions abound on-line; I’ll reproduce the first one I came across on LexisNexis: “the practice of changing your tone, expressions, body language, or appearance to fit in with a dominant culture” (Quartz, Feb. 1, 2024). Another recent article links code-switching to Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, which Black people in the U.S. must adopt, seeing themselves always through the eyes of white people. The expression is most often tied to Black people in predominantly white education or business environments, but any minority within a dominant culture may engage in it, even a white kid in a Black neighborhood. Today, it is typically presented as a betrayal or deformation of some kind that the privileged impose — often tacitly — on everyone else.

As its definition has broadened, code-switching has become more sinister. In the early days, when code-switching involved using vocabulary or grammar from different languages, it wasn’t seen in adversarial terms so much — Spanish speakers forced to knuckle under — as practical terms, a quick way to keep the lesson or conversation from getting bogged down. The dominance of anglophone culture was less explicit and less threatening, and bilingual children were less likely to feel that their heritage was disrespected. In a nation where white people continue to do their damnedest to retain supremacy, it is hardly surprising that everyone else feels compelled to safeguard contrary beliefs and practices. Another, less loaded, way to look at it: as a technical term in linguistics, “code-switching” could remain more or less neutral, but when it took on a wider range of meaning and application, that was no longer possible.

Civilized society forces all of us to conform one way or another, even members of the dominant culture, yet it makes harsher demands on those outside the reigning group. (For some reason, civilized society always seems to involve dominant cultures and oppressed minorities, but I suppose uncivilized society, if that is not an oxymoron, does as well.) The only culture in which code-switching would never be necessary would be entirely uniform and homogeneous. It is also possible to imagine a world in which code-switching exists but is less freighted with feelings of resentment, where people dip in and out of others’ mores and folkways for the fun of it, without a sense that they are stealing, or denying something important inside themselves. Maybe someday.

Why “code” when that word most often denotes non-natural computer languages? I hear at work two influential predecessors: David Kahn’s book “The Codebreakers,” published in 1967 and immediately popular; and the code talkers, Native Americans recruited to create ciphers based on indigenous languages, particularly the Navajo during World War II, though members of other tribes also participated. Their exploits were first declassified in 1968. I suspect that these expressions are part of the reason that mixing of vocabularies from different languages was dubbed code-switching and not something else, like “language alternation” or “vocabulary swapping.” Now that the expression’s territory has broadened, “code,” reflecting anthropological phenomena far more varied than language alone, makes more sense than it should.

Finally, a plea: If anyone out there can explain to me exactly what “code” means in the context of Australian professional sports, you win a free subscription. There is constant talk in the antipodal press of athletes switching codes, but I can’t figure out if a code is analogous to a team, league, or sport in the U.S. system. In the case of football — of which Australia has several varieties, some more like rugby and some more like soccer — “code” seems to refer to a league or sport interchangeably, so that when a player jumps from one code to another, he or she may be changing sports and leagues at the same time. Is there a sympathetic Aussie out there who will enlighten me?

May 7, 2024: I recommend an excellent firsthand account of code-switching and its significance from fellow WordPress blogger Aesha Duval.

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February 25, 2024 flood the zone

flood the zone

(1990’s | athletese | “overwhelm OR overload (someone or something),” “pour it on,” “cut OR let loose”)

“Zone” has come up twice in Lex Maniac’s maunderings: “comfort zone” and “zone out.” The word has undergone a change in recent English that I will try to define. In twentieth-century America, most often it denoted a piece of land considered in terms of its permitted or forbidden uses. A given area may be designated this or that sort of zone — no parking, empowerment, residential, whatever it is. Among athletes, it refers to a specified area on the field of play (as in zone defense). Performers have given the word a more mystical meaning: the zone is a mental state in which you do your best work, and one tries to get in the zone by zoning out. “Zone” has taken on a new quasi-spiritual dimension, without sacrificing the old one.

“Flood the zone” goes back directly to sports lingo, originally associated with American football. In the zone defense alluded to above, the court or field is divided into contiguous areas, and a defensive player is assigned to each — for example, a cornerback or linebacker in football. Any time an offensive player comes into that area, it’s their job to guard him. If several offensive players enter the area, that’s flooding the zone — overtaxing the defense and creating a weak spot to exploit. The concept of a zone defense has been around for a long time; the first flakes of “flood the zone” started falling in LexisNexis ca. 1985, always in sports talk. By 2000 military people had adopted it, in yet one more instance of government officials snapping up jock jargon. Now it is firmly associated with media coverage — the press talking about itself — while remaining available in other contexts, particularly political reporting.

I’m sorry to say that today the expression is inextricably linked with right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon’s elegant formulation, “flood the zone with shit.” In other words, use the public airwaves as a means to mislead the population. Bannon is one of the Trump mob’s political overlords, and it is not surprising that he should resort to deceit. After all, the truth of Trump — who he is, what he stands for — is tawdry, dishonest, vengeful, contemptuous of moral standards, and ruthlessly self-seeking. The white right — who feel their supremacy slipping away and cling to it all the harder — stays with Trump because he delivers for them. If you want to win over other constituencies, it helps to tell lies, both about your guy and the people who oppose him. When it comes to the opposition, the more scurrilous the better.

It’s easy to feel helpless before such relentless onslaughts, and we must remember that flooding the zone often doesn’t work. It may be a very effective tactic; it can also wear out its welcome and wind up shrieking at an ever-dwindling audience. When enough listeners are inoculated against the shit [sic] spewed forth by Bannon and others, it loses a lot of power. I wonder if right-wing resistance to vaccination has a figurative dimension as well. There are steps we can take to immunize ourselves against gullibility and ignorance, so that we analyze rather than internalize what we hear, even from trusted sources. Trump and Bannon don’t want that; they want unswerving fealty, no matter what they say or whom they hurt. Some Americans have already fallen into the trap. Over the long haul, it still isn’t clear how many of our people will be led into totalitarian temptation.

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