Sun, May 02, 2004 page9

• `Cut and run' phrase enters political speech

  • By William Safire / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  "We're not going to cut and run," said President George W. Bush last month, "from the people who long for freedom."

  The next day, John McCain asked rhetorically, "Is it the time to panic, to cut and run?" His answer, as you might expect, was, "Absolutely not."

  And a week later, John Kerry used the derogation as a compound adjective: "I don't believe in a cut-and-run philosophy."

  The phrase circles the English-speaking world. "If we cut and run," warned the British prime minister, Tony Blair, "their country would be at the mercy of warring groups." And from Down Under, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, answered a question about an "exit strategy" with "We don't have a cut-and-run strategy."

  Paul Lacey of Richmond, Indiana, expressed the wonderment of many who e-mailed onlanguage@nytimes.com: "Doesn't it seem time to examine where cut and run comes from and why it has taken on the resonance it has? Why is it worse to cut and run?"

  To paraphrase a favorite saying of US president John Kennedy's, advance has a thousand fathers but retreat is an orphan. Sometimes, when a retreat is justified, a euphemism is sought: The Union general George McClellan called his withdrawal from the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, after the Seven Days battles a "retrograde movement," and the modern military has come up with strategic withdrawal. Contrariwise, when a retreat is to be vilified, it is called a rout or a headlong flight, and critics of the disengagement deride the decision with the phrase cited so frequently above, to sever and skedaddle.

  The phrase, imputing panic as in the McCain usage, is always pejorative. Nobody, not even those who urge leaders to "bring our troops home," will say, "I think we ought to cut and run." It is a phrase imputing cowardice, going beyond an honorable surrender, synonymous with bug out (probably coined in World War II but popularized in the Korean conflict); both are said in derogation of a policy to be opposed with the most severe repugnance.

  Eleven years ago, as many in the US urged a pullout of US troops from Somalia, General Colin Powell said, "I don't think we should cut and run because things have gotten a little tough." After our hurried retrograde movement from that hostile environment, I provided readers with the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary: In 1704, The Boston News-Letter reported that "Capt. Vaughn rode by said Ship, but cut & run."

  The nautical metaphor was defined in the 1794 Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship as "to cut the cable and make sail instantly, without waiting to weigh anchor." In those days, the anchor cable was made of hemp and could be cut, allowing an escaping vessel to run before the wind.

  Sailors extended the metaphor to fit other hasty, though not panicky, departures: Herman Melville, in his 1850 novel, White-Jacket," had a midshipman cry out, "Jack Chase cut and run!" about a buddy who ran away with a seductive lady. The poet Tennyson wrote to his wife, Emily, in 1864: "I dined at Gladstone's yesterday -- Duke and Duchess there ... but I can't abide the dinners .... I shall soon have to cut and run."

  That lighthearted sense has since disappeared. Like the word quagmire, the phrase has gained an accusatory edge in politics and war.

  VOGUE WORD WATCH

  Some words move through the language like comets. Here are three spotted in the Vogue Word Watch:

  "Ben Kingsley is an actor of immense, often ominous interiority," wrote Karen Durbin in The New York Times. The word is hot in criticism of poetry and art movies. It is "the quality of being inward," defined back in 1803 as "the attributes of an object as originally existing in itself." In today's usage, it is applied to people (or their work) who are not merely introspective but are also able to peel the onion of the self right down to where the tears are.

  Default, dear Brutus, long ago left the legal meaning of "failure to perform an obligation" to leap into computer lingo as "the option selected by a computer when the user is too lazy to choose." Now it's hopped into use by the fashion world: "Do you have a default outfit?" asked Kate Novack of Sarah Jessica Parker in Time magazine. (Answer: A T-shirt or a black shift.) The phrase became the name of a musical group whose latest album purports to offer "a straight ahead, take only the clothes on your back" journey for which you presumably pack only default outfits.

  Phishing made the front page of The New York Times recently. "Phishing got its name a decade ago when America Online (AOL) charged users by the hour," Saul Hansell wrote. "Teenagers sent e-mail and instant messages pretending to be AOL customer service agents in order to fish -- or phish -- for account identification and passwords they could use to stay online at someone else's expense." Today, a coalition of technology companies, banks and police officers calling itself the Anti-Phishing Working Group is going after these identity thieves. Said Christopher Wray of the Justice Department, "Phishing is the identity theft du jour."

  You might assume that phish -- also the name of a musical group -- was a blend of "phony fishing," but the lexicographer Sol Steinmetz tells me that "a broader influence was probably the practice in American slang to change the word-initial f to ph, as in phat, meaning "great, wonderful" [altered from fat in the 1960s] and phooey [a variant of fooey, popularized in the 1920s and possibly borrowed from the German pfui!]."

  As a privacy nut, I hope they catch those phishers and let them examine the soul-searching interiority of an institution in which the default outfit is a suit with stripes.?
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