Sunday, September 20, 1998

Lewinsky affair adds to scandal lexicon

By Dale McFeatters

Previous political scandals have enriched the American vocabulary with such words as "gerrymander," "stonewall" and the recondite "modified limited hangout route" from Watergate -- gate itself being an all-purpose suffix for scandal.

The Monica Lewinsky affair -- and one day a "lewinsky" may become a common noun for something or other -- promises to add new words, phrases and euphemisms to our lexicon.

When the White House fired Lewinsky, the aide who did the deed, Timothy Keating, told her she wasn't being fired, "merely being given a different opportunity."

People do not conspire to tell lies; they tell, according to the White House, "different versions of the truth." You are not lying; you are engaged in "linguistic parsing."

The new grammar is still evolving because there are substantial disagreements about precise meanings. Take "perjury, subornation of perjury, witness tampering, obstruction of justice."

According to independent counsel Kenneth Starr the phrase is: "not about sex."

To the White House lawyers it is: "sex."

When Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle used the phrase "hairsplitting over legal technicalities," it turned out he was talking about sex. When GOP Sen. Fred Thompson referred to "absurd legalisms," it turned out he, too, was talking about sex.

Many of the details in Starr's steamy best-seller, Internet hit, report to Congress and best read legal brief of all time were described variously as lurid, salacious, graphic and gratuitous.

The White House lawyers, in their rebuttal, opted for "pornographic specificity." Close readers of the Starr report know that the phrase, "I have some papers for the president," is code for, "I want to engage in a pornographic specificity."

Erotica stores may soon offer a line of manila folders.

And any future chief executive who hears, "The girl is here with the pizza," will immediately pack the Oval Office with reliable witnesses unless he later wants to hear the snickers when his defenders say the indiscretion did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

President Clinton inadvertently did more for his anti-tobacco campaign than all his preaching on the dangers of smoking because, thanks to him, "cigar" is now synonymous with "sex toy."

Once U.S. Vice President Thomas Marshall was able to observe, "What this country needs is a really good 5-cent cigar."

It is hard to imagine Vice President Gore similarly observing that what the country needs is a really good budget-priced sex toy.

The process also works the other way.

Thanks to President Clinton's bad season and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's good season, the expressions "getting to first base" and "hitting a home run" are once again purely baseball terms.

Scripps Howard News Service