Judging Words

6 May 2005

It seems everyone wants to be a lexicographer. Even the 7th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals wants to get into the act. Judge Terence Evans writes in his opinion in the case United States v. Murphy on 4 May 2005:

On the evening of May 29, 2003, Hayden was smoking crack with three other folks at a trailer park home on Chain of Rocks Road in Granite City, Illinois. Murphy, Sr., who had sold drugs to Hayden several years earlier, showed up later that night. He was friendly at first, but he soon called Hayden a “snitch bitch hoe”* and hit her in the head with the back of his hand.

*The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”

British Electoral Speech

6 May 2005

On this past Thursday the United Kingdom held a general election to choose a new parliament and government. As expected, the Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Blair, despite losing a few seats, won a majority of seats, giving Blair an unprecedented (for a Labour politician) third term. Despite both being democracies and sharing similar political traditions, the United Kingdom and the United States have different political mechanisms and different vocabularies to describe them.

Both nations hold general elections (1800), where the legislatures are selected, although the schedules are different. US general elections are held every two years, where the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate runs for election. In Britain there is no regular schedule of elections. Usually, the prime minister selects the date for election when the political advantage rests with the ruling party, but an election must be held at least every five years. Occasionally, an election is forced on the government when the parliament votes a bill of no-confidence (1846). In between general elections, vacancies for parliamentary seats are filled in by-elections (1880), or what are called special elections in the United States.

The parties in Britain put forward their ideas for leading the country into a manifesto (1620). In the United States parties have platforms (1803) instead. The parties go head to head on polling day in Britain, or election day in America.

The object of these elections are seats in parliament (ca.1290, from the Latin via Old French, meaning place of speaking) in Britain or congress (1678, from the Latin meaning coming together, meeting) in America. Both legislatures are bicameral (1832), or two-chambered. The British Parliament is divided into the House of Commons and the House of Lords, with the lower house possessing almost all the real power. The prime minister and most of the cabinet ministers are members of the House of Commons. In the US, the two houses of Congress are the House of Representatives and, taking the name from the ancient Roman Republic, the Senate. By law, members of Congress are prohibited from serving in the cabinet; they must resign their seats in the legislature before joining the president’s administration.

Each seat represents a constituency in the UK or a district in the US (and riding in Canada). Constituency is used in the U.S. to mean those that are represented, but rarely as a synonym for the area where the constituents live. Those elected to parliament are Members of Parliament, or MPs. Their counterparts in the U.S. are congressmen, or the non-sexist member of congress. The term congressman is sometimes restricted to those elected to the House of Representatives, but it can include senators as well. Those who wish to be MPs must stand for election; those who want to be congressmen run for office.

The biggest difference between the British and American systems of government is that in the United States the executive functions of government are separate from the legislature. The president appoints the cabinet (1644). In the U.S., this is the administration; in Britain it is the prime minister who forms the government. This latter term is used in the US to refer to the executive, legislature, judiciary, and civil service.

The main opposition party in Britain forms a shadow cabinet (1906) of politicians who would run the cabinet ministries if their party comes to power. This allows for a swift transition if the government falls. The term shadow cabinet is unknown in the US, although the District of Columbia elects shadow senators because, not being a state, the capital city does not have representation in that branch of the legislature. (The District has a delegate who officially serves in the House of Representatives, but who cannot vote on the House floor.)

The British cabinet consists of ministers, or secretaries of state, who have a portfolio and run a ministry. The head of the government is, of course, the prime minister. The number two official is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who runs the treasury. In the US, cabinet officials are called secretaries and the organizations they run are generally called departments instead of ministries. There is only one Secretary of State, who runs what in Britain is called the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Those MPs who are not in the cabinet (either real or shadow) are called backbenchers (1874), from the fact that they sit behind the ministers. There is no equivalent term in the US. Both the House of Commons and the House of Representatives have a Speaker, although the position is ceremonial in the UK while the Speaker of the House of Representatives wields great power, able to set the agenda for the house single-handedly. Parties in both countries have whips (1850), who are responsible for ensuring members vote the party line. The US parties also have majority leaders and minority leaders who lead the party delegations in their respective houses of Congress. In the UK, the prime minister (real or shadow) is the head of the party. In the US, the president leads his party and there is no single leader for the party that is not in the White House.

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.