Nuclear Option

29 April 2005

A term in the news quite a lot lately is nuclear option. The current usage isn’t the literal meaning of the words, some political or military strategy involving weapons of mass destruction. Rather, the nuclear option in the news is metaphorical. It refers to the US Senate changing the rules regarding filibuster to allow more of President Bush’s judicial nominees to be confirmed and take the bench.

For those non-Americans (and for those who don’t follow political news), the issue centers on arcane rules of procedure in the Senate. The Senate has the constitutional responsibility of approving the president’s judicial nominees and it does this with a simple majority vote. But in order to vote on an issue, Senate rules require 60 out of 100 senators to vote for cloture—the ending of debate. So the Democrats, who have 44 seats (plus an independent who votes with the Democrats on procedural issues), can prevent any nominee from coming to a vote—and they have blocked votes on 10 out of 215 Bush judicial nominees.

Evidently, a 95% success rate isn’t good enough for the Republican majority who are insisting that all the nominees come to a vote on the Senate floor. To do this, they are trying to change the Senate rules on filibuster and require a vote on judicial nominees. The filibuster is a venerable Senate tradition, one of the reasons why the body has the nickname of "greatest deliberative body in the world." This radical change is the so-called nuclear option.

Literal use of nuclear option has been around since the 1960s. The use in reference to the choice to develop nuclear weapons dates to 1966:

On the question of Israel’s potential for producing nuclear weapons, Professor Bergmann warned, "It’s very important to understand that by developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes, you reach the nuclear option; there are no two atomic energies.
--New York Times, 14 May 1966

And the literal predecessor of the current usage is in reference to using nuclear weapons during war:

Yet they urge a withdrawal of our forces from Asia, Europe and the Mediterranean; a "re-examination" of our commitments; and the abolition or severe reduction of foreign aid. How an American President could retain non-nuclear options in such a posture is never explained.
--New York Times, 18 Oct 1969

This last is particular telling because it leads to the current metaphorical usage. Nuclear weapons, while possibly quite effective in achieving a military goal, have long-term negative consequences and the damage inflicted violates any principle of proportionality. This is precisely what is meant by the current metaphorical usage.

This use of nuclear option in the specific sense regarding the filibuster of federal judicial nominations began with Republicans in 2002:

Still, some Republicans have raised the possibility of what they call the "nuclear" option—retaliating for Pickering’s defeat by tying up Senate business. "The feelings are running so deep on these issues, that that may well happen," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. "Any one of us can tie the Senate in knots."
--Chicago Tribune, 14 May 2002

But the term has been in use for longer than this as a metaphor for risky or potentially devastating political moves. The term was used following the 2000 election to describe the option of resolving the disputed election in the courts:

They could all but concede the White House to Vice President Al Gore on the basis of manual recounts in three Democrat-leaning Florida counties or choose the political equivalent of the "nuclear option"—a treacherous path through federal courts and legislatures where the outcome is anything but clear.
--San Francisco Chronicle, 23 Nov 2000

And this use is preceded by an even older one from the Clinton impeachment proceedings:

On that day the Republicans chose to surrender to the Scolding Tendency, the hectoring voices within their ranks determined to impose an unbending morality on the republic. This is a movement that cares little for public opinion, which continues to soar off the charts in favour of the President. (Impeachment, coupled with war in Iraq, boosted Clinton’s approval rating by 10 points.) It brooks no compromise, dogmatically insisting on the absolute punishment of impeachment even when less nuclear options were available.
--The Guardian, 23 Dec 1998

And from some eight years before the Clinton impeachment debacle, the following use of nuclear option is used in a very different political context:

If the [Endangered Species] act takes effect, the federal government would take control of at least part of the aquifer. Wynne once called that prospect the "nuclear option."
--San Antonio Express-News, 17 June 1990

Despite the fact that Republicans began the use of nuclear option in the current political context, some members of that party don’t like the term, believing that it makes them appear reckless and irresponsible. They prefer the term constitutional option, because they say the Senate has a constitutional responsibility to vote on all judicial nominees:

Supporters of the option, like conservative legal advocate Jay Alan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, prefer to call it "the constitutional option." They argue that filibusters aimed at judicial nominations are unconstitutional, and their option would simply restore majority rule on those nominations.
--Boston Globe, 2 June 2003

I guess even using the term nuclear option can be pretty devastating as well.

Taxing Terms

15 April 2005

In the United States, today is the day when tax returns and payments are due to the Internal Revenue Service. It is "tax day." The verb to tax appears in English usage as early as ca.1290. The word comes from the Old French taxe, which is after the Latin taxare. The noun tax appears in English sometime before 1327.

Internal revenue is the term used in the United States for taxes collected domestically, as opposed to custom duties levied on imports. The term dates to 1862, when the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue was appointed to collect income taxes to fund the U.S. Civil War. This first U.S. income tax was a wartime measure and was repealed in 1872. The income tax was re-imposed in 1894, but was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court the following year. It wasn’t until the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913 that explicitly permitted an income tax was the tax permanently instituted. In the United Kingdom, the corresponding term is inland revenue, a term that dates to 1849.

But taxes are much older than this and the oldest English word for a tax is toll. It is an Old English word, dating to ca. 1000. The word has always meant a payment or tax, although now it is primarily used to refer to a payment required for passage on a road or a charge for making a telephone call. Compare it to the German word Zoll, which is from the same Germanic root and has a similar meaning.

A relatively newer word for tax is duty. It dates to 1297 and comes from the Anglo Norman dueté, a word not found in continental French. The word originally meant an act of submission or reverence, but by ca.1386 it was being applied to payments that were owed to someone else. By 1474, duty was being used to mean a tax. Now it is used primarily to refer to a tax on imports, a customs duty.

The word custom originally meant a habitual action or usual practice, a sense that survives today. Dating to ca.1200, it is from the Old French custume. The sense meaning a tax levied on goods being brought to market is from ca.1400. This sense is a bit older in Latin, dating to 1325. The use of customs to refer to the area in a port or airport where goods are inspected and taxes levied is quite recent, only dating to 1921.

Another specialized form of taxation is a tithe. The word dates to ca.1200 and is a tax levied by the church. This is another tax word that is traced back to Old English, to the word teogotha, a tenth. The tax traditionally levied by the Christian church is a tenth of one’s goods. The idea of a tax to support the church has its roots in Mosaic law, which required all the people of Israel to support the priestly tribe of Levi.

Another tax word, probably less familiar to most than the preceding, is excise. This word, like many in English, is from an Old French root, but unlike most such terms does not come to us via the Normans. Instead, English gets the word via the Middle Dutch excijs. Ultimately, the word is from the Latin verb accensare, to tax. An excise is a tax levied during production or at the point of sale, most commonly a sales or value-added tax. The word appears in English in 1494, meaning simply a tax of any kind. The more specific, modern sense appears in 1596 in reference to excise taxes in Holland and by 1642 England was levying excise taxes as well.

Excise taxes are usually applied ad valorem, a Latin term meaning according to value. English use of this Latin phrase is from 1711.

Also less familiar is an impost, a word meaning simply a tax of some sort. The word dates to 1568 and is from the Old French. Ultimately, it is from the Latin imponere, to impose.

As we have seen, taxes have been with us a long time and will certainly be with well past our lifetimes. But you can take heart in the idea that not all types of taxes survive.

Scutage is a form of taxation that is no longer levied. Scutage is money paid in lieu of military service. The word dates to ca.1460 and is from the Latin scutum, or shield

Another is tallage, a word that dates to ca.1290. It is a tax on feudal dependents and is from Old French taillage. The word tail has a meaning of a cut, partition, or assessment and this is where the idea of a tax comes in, a count or assessment of the population.

Dot Com

8 April 2005

While conducting research for biztechdictionary.com I got to thinking about the domain name and the term dot com. The etymology isn’t very mysterious, but exactly when did the term and its various meanings arise.

The term dot com is used in the pronunciation of internet domain names and it is also used to refer to internet-based companies. But who decided that commercial internet addresses should end in .com and when did people start referring to companies as dot coms? And going further back, why and when did people start referring the "." mark as "dot"?

The use of .com as an internet domain name dates back to 1984, a decade before most people became aware of the internet. It was first proposed in October that year in RFC 920 (Request For Comments #920) of the Network Working Group. The title of the document was simply Domain Requirements and in it the authors, J. Postel and J. Reynolds, set up the basic top-level domains that we know today, .gov, .mil, .edu, .org, and .com. In it they define the com domain as:

"COM = Commercial, any commercial related domains meeting the second level requirements."

The use of "dot com" to refer to the top level domain of an internet address dates to at least 1990. The following appeared in a Usenet post in alt.callahans from 15 February of that year:

"Fuzzface whips out his handy DNS map of the Internet and starts flipping through the index. ‘Hmm <pause> COM <pause> MOT DOT COM.’"

Another early use is from a rec.humor.d posting from 3 July 1991:

"Yes, it is a full stop at the end of a sentence, but for computer filenames, I’ll call it a login dot com. I think my dad does, too, but then again, neither of us are computer illiterate, and he is originally from India."

The use of the word "dot" to represent the "." mark is, of course, much older. There is a single known use of the word dot in Old English, dating to around 1000, meaning the head of a boil. The word then disappears from English for over 500 years, reemerging in the 16th century with the meaning of a small lump. The sense meaning a speck or spot of color dates to 1674, and the sense meaning the mark made by a pen is from 1748. And famously, Morse telegraphy in the 19th century used "dot" to mean the shorter of the two Morse signals, the counterpart of the "dash."

The use of "dot com" to mean a company, especially an internet company, obviously comes after the domain naming convention. The earliest reference I have found is another Usenet post, this one from 1 July 1994, in which the author refers to her (or his?) company, Dow Chemical, as a "dotcom:"

"Cary K Black (Who’s opinions are his/her own and not those of his/her dotcom!)"

The use of the term to refer to an internet company in particular is from two years later and is recorded in the OED from the magazine Internet World:

"A broad discussion of what’s around the corner for dot.coms. What effect will ‘dumb-delivery’ devices have as they make the Web more accessible to the home market?"

Other variations of the term include dot-commer, an employee of a dot com company and dot bomb, a failed dot com company.

In Passing: Eleanor Gould

4 March 2005

Eleanor Gould is a name that is probably not familiar to most of you, but over the course of her fifty-four year career as “grammarian” for The New Yorker, Gould had a quiet, but profound impact on the world of letters. Miss Gould passed away last month at the age of eighty seven.