Safire's Political Dictionary
by William Safire
Oxford, 896 pp., $22.95

Mr. William Safire would have made--indeed he does make, in another of his incarnations--a highly serviceable lexicographer. But he would have chafed under Dr. Johnson's humble self-definition of the calling as that of "a harmless drudge." Drudge maybe; harmless never. There must needs be a sting, as in this most seemingly innocuous and topical of derivations and definitions:

Candidate ... The word comes from the Latin candidatus, wearer of a white toga, which the Roman office-seekers always wore as a symbol of purity. The same root gave the language candor and incandescence, qualities that candidates occasionally have.

One admires the dryness here, which comes partly from Safire's appreciation of the antiquity of political discourse and, indeed, of cliche:

Most of the seemingly "new" language is surprisingly old: Henry IV's chicken in every pot, Al Smith's cooing doves and Thomas Jefferson's war hawk accusation, Henry Clay's struggle against the can't win technique, Alf Landon's borrowing of New Frontier from Henry Wallace, Teddy Roosevelt's blast at the lunatic fringe ...

And indeed, Aristotle's political animal. Safire himself is so politicized a beast that he helped begin the vogue for attaching the "-gate" suffix to any Washington scandal, in the conscious hope that over time the habit would make Watergate appear just one offense among many. In his entry on the subject, he rather modestly downplays his own role in this euphemizing of Richard Nixon.

One of the pleasures of toying with dictionaries is the discovery--akin to the delight of the now-vanished index-card system in a library--of the useful reference for which one was not looking. Had I not taken care to pursue my old anti-Safire vendetta all the way to -gate construction on page 275, I would not have discovered that Elbridge Gerry's name was pronounced with a hard "g" and that he's probably been unfairly saddled with the etymology of the term "gerrymander."

Thus you may want to look up the deeper meaning of the phrase inside baseball, and then find yourself musing on the subsequent entry for inside the Beltway, and perhaps be amazed to find, as I was, that this expression was partly launched by Vice President Bush on Meet the Press in 1984. (He employed it in its original populist sense, to denote a topic that was of no interest to the broad masses, and thus additionally helped to establish it as a term used largely by Washington elitists who claim to know what it is that the Great Unwashed really do and do not care about.) Great Unwashed itself, I was amused to discover, entered our language as a manifestation of defiant pride rather than as a piece of insulting condescension: It didn't even go through the metamorphosis of words--such as "Tory," "suffragette," and "Impressionist"--that originated as insults and were then adopted ironically by their targets.