22. "Hegemony."

"Hegemony," a word meaning "predominant influence," is used mainly by academics. It did good work for a number of years referring to political domination like that of the Romans in Europe or the Han in China. Then it did good but more specialized work after the Marxist Antonio Gramsci used it to refer to cultural domination, as of one class over another. This licensed the word for use by postmodern theorists who wanted to disapprove of such domination. It made the reference but suggested, in the cold way of the neutral academic, disfavor.

You can see a lot more of this disfavor in the London Review of Books than in the New York Review, a periodical less welcoming of postmodern theory. It appears mainly in the adjective forms: "hegemonic power" (as of imperial Britain and post-WWII America), "hegemonic reason" "(of the Enlightenment, and male), "hegemonic project" "(that of Modernism in the 20th century), "hegemonic discourse" (what the hegemon engages in to retain its dominance), and "hegemonic masculinity" (what rugby promotes in New Zealand society).

At first these all look easy for a word-inspector like me to snap at. Hegemonic power? I become a Libyan in Misrata, longing to break Qaddafi's siege. "Oh for an assertion of NATO's hegemonic power!" I say. "Oh for the U. S.! Where is the hegemon when you need him?" Hegemonic reason? I become a moderate Republican candidate trying to keep the birthers on my right from embarrassing me: "Oh for respect of evidence! Oh for a little reason! Why weren't your teachers more hegemonic in the Enlightenment way? What's happened to their kind of discourse?" I even go back and become a Goth lacking roads, a currency, commerce, towns, and literacy. What am I missing? Roman hegemony.

But then, "hegemonic masculinity." Looks easiest of all, with the LRB trying to push all those Kiwi jocks off on us. Not so easy when I think of what kept a boy in my high school from admitting a love of poetry. There is such a thing as hegemonic masculinity. And I disapprove of it! Ah, but the big test. For "hegemonic masculinity" to make it as a qualifier there ought to be a hegemonic femininity. And that doesn't exist. Nobody talks about such a thing. Ha!

Then I think of Barbie. "Hegemonic" is just the word for her grip on my young daughters. I have been reminded again not to dismiss the postmodern vocabulary too quickly.

That, however, doesn't mean "hegemonic" works in those other put-downs. "Hegemonic reason" still fails the birther test. And that test is the kind we properly ask all theorists to submit their words to. "Take the words you use to each other out into the world of practical need and see if they work there." I'd have them become besieged Libyans, and moderate Republicans, and benighted Goths.

Theorists should be glad to submit their words to such a test. It will save them from disfavoring something they really favor — as we, with "making war on his own people," were disfavoring Abraham Lincoln. Writers should be glad for the test. It will save them from choosing blanket expressions without noticing how much they cover.

We all, in fact, should be glad. Few of us can resist flavoring our words. We want what we think is good to taste good, and what we think is bad to taste bad. The test in the larger world, conducted in our minds, helps us avoid mistakes. If it doesn't put good sweetly on our table at least it keeps us from bittering our own tea.

21. Dancing Around Clausewitz.

"It's war, stupid." That can well be on your wall, but if you are a leader of a NATO nation now you can't act on it. The people you are sending in to help force Qaddafi out have to be called "liaison officers" (NYT, 4-21-11), as the people Lyndon Johnson first sent into Viet Nam had to be called (as we are calling the people we will leave behind in Afghanistan) "advisers" and "trainers." Nobody wants to be "at war."

To fill in the wall message I like to go to Carl von Clausewitz, whom I hear saying, "Look, the only way you can make some leaders do things is kill their people. The people you send to do that are called 'soldiers' and the thing they will be doing is called 'war,' whose law of escalation into worse and worse killing I have explained. Don't deceive yourself into thinking your use of force leads to anything else."

Are the statesmen who send liaison officers and advisers deceiving themselves? If so Clausewitz's "realpolitik" shows up their "illusion politics." If they are not deceiving themselves, if they see the reality of war as they hide it, I think those statesmen are a rebuke to Clausewitz and to those who define "realism" so narrowly. They see a political reality that makes calling things by their right (that is, accurate) names unrealistic. They see a public that denies votes to speakers of "war." On Clausewitz's wall they'd put "It's the election, stupid."

This is the pain of U. S. Presidents: both wall statements are true. Sometimes they need to remind themselves of one, sometimes the other. The trick is in changing them to meet the times. What a problem! By now Obama's wall must look like a bad mathematician's blackboard.

The better leaders of democracies can calculate coming pain the better they'll know how to reduce it. What they need is a graph that would show them total pain, so that they could see how much a short, sharp pain, say, paid off. Go in with a big force and get the killing over with. There's the initial spike but look at the total. Maybe worth it, maybe not. Figure the area under the curve.

How would you figure this one: Obama's back-and-forth on the wall, starting with the destruction of the Qaddafi column to Benghazi (war), then "out of there in a week" (politics), then CIA on the ground (war), then the turnover to NATO (politics), and now (also NYT, 4-21-11) "sending Predator drones." The linguistic comfort in that last choice (he frankly makes war while satisfying the political need to keep our people alive) can't conceal the fact that Obama is in great pain. Now what you have to figure is the amount of pain there would have been if he had let the Qaddafi column go to Benghazi and smash the rebels right there.

I see we're going to have to factor in the ability of the American public to bear the sight of what clearly would have been a slaughter in Benghazi, but that at the moment is too much for me to go into. I welcome ideas and will take up the problem in a later post.

20. "Humanitarian crisis"

"To help avert a humanitarian crisis" is, President Obama explained, the reason our planes bombed Qaddafi forces heading for Benghazi. Now Qaddafi forces are using deadly cluster bombs against Misurata and Britain and France want him to join in on an air attack on them in order to "better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians" (NYT, 4-16-11).

When does a humanitarian crisis end? The first one must have ended when the Benghazi column was destroyed, since President Obama then turned operations over to NATO. No crisis, no reason for America to join in. Now, by the same standard of danger to civilians, we have another crisis. How long will they keep coming?

As I read yesterday's newspaper I kept hearing Carl von Clausewitz, the German war philosopher, telling Obama across 200 years that the crises will keep coming and likely get worse until one side gives in. Each side, according to Clausewitz, will think that its next inhumanity will be so unbearable that the other side will be the one to give in. Inhumanity (the right word for what's done to the enemy, soldiers or not) is the way to win, and once you start it, and trigger the spirit of revenge, it never turns itself off. Only the naive think war is anything but reciprocal inhumanity.

That's the law of war. But there's another law, applicable to observers considering intervention, which says that human beings can't bear to watch inhumanity. That law comes into play now when we (the U. S., Obama) consider what we might do to end the present inhumanity in Libya. One choice is to intervene and be so thoroughly inhumane to the Qaddafi forces that they give in. That could be quick. The other is to refrain from intervention and watch the Qaddafi forces be inhumane to the rebels. That could be quick too. Either way somebody is going to have to be seriously inhumane. That's the only way wars between determined people have ever been ended. Directed inhumanity by outside powers has ended many wars in the past. The difference this time is that we're all going to have to watch.

Watching the inhumanity could be so hard for the electorate to bear that the President will not be re-elected. How can he avoid that? By calibrating his intervention so that the visible inhumanity never becomes so hard to bear that voters hold it against him. (This is to read "humanitarian crisis" as "political crisis," and define it as "the point at which television images of inhumanity become unbearable.")

One danger to Obama in calibrating his inhumanity is that he won't ever inflict enough (it's the hardest kind of fine-tuning in the world) to keep the Qaddafi forces' infliction of inhumanity on the rebels from being successful. He'll discover that only through an unbearably visible infliction of inhumanity can he end Qaddafi's inhumanity. The closer this is to the election the more painful this will be.

The other danger is that his calibration leaves the two sides so balanced that low-grade inhumanity remains visible on the nation's screens for years. That might not endanger his election but it could well endanger his place in history, something Presidents are bound to worry about.

When you really feel for Obama in his pain, as I did after reading the paper, you have crazy dreams of what would soften it. I dreamed of an electorate that had studied Clausewitz. "There, there," they now say to him, "we know what war is. If you refuse to intervene we can stand to watch the rebels being slaughtered. We won't hold it against you. And if you intervene, as long as you do it realistically and intelligently — that is to say, with sufficient inhumanity — we won't hold that against you either."

19. "Humanitarian aggression," "globaloney."

"Humanitarian aggression" is a most unusual political expression. Rather than giving pain to the left or right, as most political expressions do, it gives pain in both directions. When we bombed Belgrade there it was, paining the humane left with the word "aggression" and paining the hawk right with the word "humanitarian." Democrats, trying to help the poor Kosovars, found themselves in a class with Nazi invaders; Republicans found themselves motivated to bold force by a bleeding heart.

So it's a centrist's word. And, to some extent, a wit's word, showing in its cleverness the bit of malice that is supposed to energize him.

Be that as it may, whatever was working for it continues now in its extension to "humanitarian imperialism," a Noam Chomsky expression applied recently to President Obama's action in Libya by George Will (Washington Post, 4-6-11). It obviously means "continued successful humanitarian aggression." We all can feel the President's pain. And now (ha, ha) Sarkozy's.

Among the people in politics and foreign affairs cudgeling their wits to give others pain there are so many clever ones that some of their products are bound to delight us. Calling Sweden a "moral superpower," for example, was a smash. Spiritual superiority mapped onto the world's power hierarchy, bullies and all! Picture the next Swede trying to point out America's faults.

Apolitical analysts may be amused, but there's no denying that in the Libya case very serious forces are at work, as witness the struggle in the United Nations the last several decades to resolve the claims of state sovereignty and humanitarian justice. In the beginning the world body had to honor the first to bring states in and keep them together. Now it may have to honor the second so that they can keep their values (or the values of the most powerful states) together.

We can see that sometimes the statists ("Stay out! Stay out!") need putting down and sometimes the humanitarians ("Go in! Go in!") need putting down. They're looking more and more like the old interventionists and isolationists I remember, inventing stronger and stronger put-downs for each other.

One of these is worth mentioning, "globaloney," Claire Booth Luce's word for what internationalist thinkers were coming up with. It helps us understand what makes a put-down superior. "Humanitarian aggression" is superior because the pained person is going to have such a hard time denying it. The bombing of Belgrade did fit the definition of aggression; it was done for a humane purpose. The reference was specific and fixed. "Globaloney" is unspecific and wild. It's a nyah-nyah word, easily denied.

Did Mayor LaGuardia do any better responding with his word for what the isolationists were coming up with, "isolhash"? Not in the judgment of the clever word people of that day. Nobody picked it up.

18. "Womanizer" (2).

David, in his comment, points to the negative in "womanizer" that is not found in the word I supplied as more accurate, "woman-enjoyer." I missed that and I've worried ever since that I've underestimated "womanizer" and ought to make an adjustment.

I follow David where he feels the word's strength, in the negative judgment that the man is taking advantage of women. Then, through "simonize" and "martinize," I follow him to an association with products, things industrial, made for our use, to seeing that the man is taking advantage of women in a pretty cold, mechanical way. That makes "woman-enjoyer" and "philanderer" look weak.

I get the best feeling for the strength of all these words when I picture them spoken within the man's hearing. I see him feeling put down some by "philanderer" and taking "woman-enjoyer" in stride. The word he would really like to hear, though, among those he has a chance of hearing, is "ladies' man." That's not far from the image he has of himself. He seduces women, he wins them, he romances them. That's his activity, a kind of romancing.

"The hell it is," says "womanizer." The word puts him in the sex industry. One of the categories in the workers' ads. "I do women." There's its great strength. Industrial strength. It blows all the romance away.

So now I think "womanizer" is a great word. So what if it doesn't fit the model "ize" form. A misfit is a small price to pay for such a benefit.

I'm wondering now about seeing the benefit in this word only in its suggestive power. To ridicule here, to laugh, is to put Casanova in the right perspective. The truth about seduction, according to Elizabeth Hardwick, is that though it "may be baneful, even tragic, the seducer at his work is essentially comic." If she's right the word I found inaccurate is right on the button.

17. "Womanizer"

The coinage "womanizer" has been used to describe a lot of famous men— Casanova, John F. Kennedy, Mike Tyson — but what does it , the word itself, tell us they did? Say I come across it knowing only the words it is analogous to, the verbs made by adding "ize" to a noun.

All right, here's Mike Tyson. Could he have made a woman, as "deputize" makes a deputy? No. Given her the qualities of a woman, as "modernize" gives old things modern qualities? No. Maybe made her more woman-like, as "brutalize" makes somebody more brute-like? Highly unlikely. I'm getting no place and the fact is that no matter how far down the list I go I'll never get anyplace. This is an "ize" word like none other in the language.

Go ten words down the list and you see it. The suffix "ize" says, "Change into the condition the root noun names." It can make a non-colony into a colony (colonize), a non-criminal into a criminal (criminalize), and a non-magnet into a magnet (magnetize). That and a hundred other things can be done with "ize." What can't be done is make a woman into a woman. That's already been done to her, at birth. The principle governing the whole operation has been violated.

Well, we return to the world of experience, look at Tyson, and see what the coiner of "womanizer" really wanted to say about him. He's a woman-enjoyer. So were they all. That odd use of "ize" just confused us for a while.

Confuse a reader, though, and it's hard to say where his mind is going to go. Readers keep trying to fit new meanings into the old forms. Here actor, receiver of the action, who's doing what to whom, get all mixed up.  I, strangely, on the analogy of "simonize," began to see women as car wax. I had Tyson smearing himself with them, rubbing them into his body. A writer or coiner might want me to see that, and there is, I'll admit, a kick in it, but the kick comes at the price of great confusion, and damage to respect for the logic built into our language.

16. "Boots on the ground."

As a way of referring to the presence of soldiers, "boots on the ground" appeared in the New York Times only 12 times between 1851 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then it took off, rising to 34 in 2007, slacking to 17 in 2010, and now, with the Libyan action, it's hit 16 in three months and is getting play at every level, journalistic and political. Its attraction, apparently, is in the way it brings the distant ("troops present") close to the concrete reality. General Bernard E. Trainor made sure nobody would miss the political bite in it when he said, in 1999, "If you want to radically change the behavior of your opponent, it takes boots on the ground to do it.'' Lose the lofty pretensions. Boots. There. "With," he could expect us to add, "flesh in them." An expression that makes a dangerous semantic situation even more dangerous is not going to be welcomed by the Obama administration but they have to deal with it. "Are there going to be boots on the ground in Libya?" Everybody knows that some of the people in those boots will be killed. The administration knows that they will not just be killed but that they will turn into what Serge Schmemann called "televisable casualties." "No," says their spokesman. What else can he say? The public grieves over televisable casualties. But it also grieves over the victory of evil-doers. Gadhafi is an evil-doer, as Saddam Hussein was an evil-doer. If only there were a way to remove the evil-doer without televisable casualties. Here's where the old semantic try comes in. You send pilots, whose boots are in the air. Or you put CIA people, who don't wear boots, on the ground. Your "no boots on the ground" stands. Linguistic analysts can find the administration's choice of words entertaining (ha, ha, those booted pilots, those CIA guys in sneakers) but they have to recognize that Obama's people are wrestling with a very old, very difficult problem: how to balance the public's attractions to both goodness and security. Love of the good moves them to action against evil, as seen in Gadhafi. Love of security holds them back, making them ask, "Will the action make us safer?" Only a yes answer justifies the casualties. I remember once when the public was very grateful to an administration for putting security ahead of goodness. In 1942 it was good to have nothing to do with fascists. Then the administration, to secure the safety of American troops landing in Africa, cozied up to Admiral Darlan, a despicable fascist, and made a deal with him. The boots made it to African ground with few casualties. We saw that if you love good purely you weaken yourself, take high casualties, give Hitler a better chance, and maybe lose out to the big evil. Thank you, thank you, President Roosevelt. On the other hand, pure love of security can, in the end, itself weaken security. It was love of its own security that, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, kept the U.S. from joining any international effort that might have stopped Germany before it was too late. I remember the isolationist argument that yes, he was an evil-doer, "but we've got three thousand miles of ocean" to give us security. No boots for the Rhineland, where Hitler could have been most easily stopped. Every president contemplating military action has to measure public desire on two scales, a good-evil scale and a safety-danger scale. When the contemplated object of the action is both evil and a danger, as Hitler was, the president has it easy. When the object is neither evil nor a danger, as China has been most of its life, he has it easy. When both register, but one is higher than the other, he has it fairly easy. He just has to make sure of his reading. It's when they're close, as I think they are with Qadhafi, that he's got the big balance problem, and can't help trying to solve it with words.