ON LANGUAGE; The 'Bizarre' Bazaar
By William Safire
Published: July 26, 1992
I think it's shocking and frightening," said Marlin Fitzwater, a man not easily shocked or frightened, "to see that kind of bizarre behavior."
The President's press secretary was talking about Ross Perot's investigation of Mr. Bush's sons. Barbara Bush agreed: "I think it's bizarre . . . particularly for someone who did come and spend a day with us." Soon afterward, Vice President Dan Quayle joined in the attack on Mr. Perot for "nullifying representative democracy with a bizarre scheme of government by polls."
If memory serves, Mr. Bush used bizarre during the initial stages of Watergate, to describe the activities of the group that broke into Democratic headquarters. However, this year he is into weirdsmanship: "This has been a tough, weird political year at home," he said, and on another occasion refused to go on "those weird little talk shows," as his rivals were doing.
In Spanish, bizarro has meant "brave," sometimes "handsome," perhaps an adaptation of the Basque word for "beard"; in Italian, biz zarro became a dialect word for "angry"; in French, bizarre began as "brave, soldierly" and then took on the senses of "odd; fantastic" that carried over into English. Its first use in our language dates back to 1648, as Lord Edward Herbert, a British philosopher, wrote, "Her attire seemed as bizare as her person." Horticulturists use the adjective to describe variegated flowers, like striped tulips. It has no connection to bazaar , which comes from a Persian word for "market."
Weird has a wonderful history; it is a word that began in power and has come, like many politicians, on hard times. The noun in Old English, as found in "Beowulf," meant "fate, predetermination"; the word evoked the power of destiny, and Allan Ramsay, a Scottish poet, wrote in 1718, "It's a wise wife that kens her weird." This usage developed into the sense of the supernatural: "magic, enchantment," picking up a connotation of evil, as a punishment inflicted by way of retribution.
As an adjective, weird took the supernatural quality of the noun, influenced by the three witches called "the weird sisters" in Shakespeare's "Macbeth." (The First Folio uses the spellings weyard and weyward , probably influenced by wayward .) The modifier was shaped by poets like Shelley ("mutable as shapes in the weird clouds") and Keats ("steep her hair in weird syrops, that would keep her loveliness invisible") into the sense of "extraordinary, fantastic"; this meaning then broke down to the more everyday "unusual, odd." Today, the word has at least two senses: from the supernatural, with its ominous overtones, comes "eerie, ghostly, spooky, unearthly," and from its milder extension, "outlandish, peculiar, aberrant, oddball."
In contrast to the bizarre, weird, strange behavior of his opponents, Mr. Bush offers not nostrums but normalcy -- "not experiment but equipoise," as Warren G. Harding liked to alliterate -- stressing steadiness and stability while professing to be an agent of nonradical change.
Although the President has also used the synonym strange -- "it's strange out there" -- he has not yet turned to far out and off the wall , which are modern slangy, and has stayed far from kinky , with its experimental-sexual connotation, and queer , now a self-mocking term taken up by militant homosexuals. Wacky and crazy are too blunt and carry no ominous connotation, and zany -- applied mainly to comedians -- conveys a likable, whimsical feeling, hardly Mr. Bush's intention. Grotesque is too highfalutin and eccentric too bookish, recalling the definition, "An eccentric is a nut with a million dollars."
The Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton, has not yet joined Mr. Bush in systematically using the synonymy of strangeness. His preference in derogation is noticeably milder, bemused but not disrespectful, not yet with a note of alarm; when I called him for a reaction to a Perot notion, he called it "kinda goofy ."
Goofy , which first appeared in Collier's magazine in 1921 and was later popularized by the Walt Disney cartoon character, may have been based on the African goofer , a "witch doctor" who cast a spell; the Oxford English Dictionary notes that goofer dust is a powder used in such conjurations. Weird. Policy Wonkmanship
MEG GREENFIELD OF Newsweek called the two men being nominated by the Democratic Party "tough, ambitious, leadership-minded policy wonks ." Jonathan Alter, in the same publication, quoted an economist who believes that "barn burners and hell raisers don't get very much accomplished," adding, "If Clinton's elected, the country will finally learn whether the policy wonks can do any better."
Sidney Blumenthal of The New Republic was the first to use the phrase in print, just before the 1984 election, deriding Walter Mondale's "thralldom to the policy wonks and wise men of the Washington establishment." A year later, the same magazine quoted Fred Branfman, of the Center for a New Democracy, as saying about Senator Gary Hart: "You have to be credible to the voters. You can't just be a policy wonk ."
A policy wonk is a too-studious student of public affairs, often a legislative aide heavy on position papers and light on practical experience. Both Governor Clinton and Senator Gore have been known to delight in the minutiae of program development, earning them the dubious honor of the label.
A wonk , as old salts know, was nautical slang for a wet-behind-the-ears cadet. It may have been influenced by the Chinese huang gou , "yellow dog," applied to animals that scavenge or work slavishly.
In 1962, Sports Illustrated wrote, "A wonk , sometimes called a 'turkey' or a 'lunch,' roughly corresponds to the 'meatball' of a decade ago." The Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, to which I have just turned, also notes a 1980 usage: "At Harvard the excessively studious student is derided as a 'wonk,' which Amy Berman, Harvard '79, fancifully suggests may be 'know' spelled backward. (In British slang, 'wonky' means 'unsteady.')"
Wait a minute; that citation is from this column. I was citing them on British slang as they cited me on American slang and I cited them on British slang. That's the convoluted, nose-inside-the-books way of lexical wonks .