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can be found Hold the line
Filed Under March 2007, columns | Leave a Comment
Dear Word Detective: My co-conspirators at the office and I have been debating the origin of “hold the line,” which might so easily derive simply from the era of the plug-and-socket manual telephone exchange. Then it occurred that it could have had military beginnings. Are you able to clarify for us? — Ian Wheeler, England.
You don’t say in what sense you’re using “hold the line,” but there are two primary meanings in English. One is, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “to maintain telephonic connection during a break in conversation.” In such a situation, I might say “Hold the line” (or, more commonly today, “Please hold”) before I push the hold button, the purpose of the phrase being to let the caller know that I will be back and am not simply hanging up. This sense appeared around 1912, but it’s not really related to the old days of manual switchboards where lines were actually plugged in, and the imperative “hold” does not mean “don’t unplug.” “Hold” here is used in the very old sense of “preserve, keep or maintain.” A figurative use sometimes heard in the US is the expression “hold the phone,” meaning essentially “wait a minute” and indicating surprise (”Hold the phone! You mean Larry won the lottery?”). My sense is that “hold the phone” is more common than “hold the line” in this meaning.
The other sense of “hold the line” means “to maintain and preserve a position against attack, opposition or change” (”It’s important that the School Board hold the line against licentious apparel”). Given that you mention a possible military origin in your question, this is probably the sense you mean. But while this “hold the line” does conjure up visions of brave soldiers defending a position against an onslaught (probably of other brave soldiers), the source of the metaphor is not, in fact, military. The reference is to American football, and the “line” is the line of scrimmage where the ball sits at the start of each play, beyond which each team would rather its opponent not progress. Metaphorical use of “hold the line” in this sense is, no doubt, nearly as old as football, but, interestingly, the earliest usage recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1956, in singer Billie Holiday’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues: “But 52nd Street couldn’t hold the line against Negroes forever.”
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Issues
Filed Under March 2007, columns | 3 Comments
I hope it’s oatmeal. I have issues with oatmeal.
Dear Word Detective: A few years ago (very few, it seems to me) people started substituting the word “issue” for “problem.” People stopped having “problems” and suddenly had “issues” instead. This usage still sounds awkward and forced to me, even years later, and I wondered what you could tell me about how and why this got started. You’ve pointed out before that when enough people want to re-coin a word or retool its meaning, there’s not much we can do about it (e.g., your recent comments about “mute” points). But maybe we can at least find out the hows and the whys. I’m not conservative about most things (in fact, I’m quite liberal), but I resist this sort of alteration of traditional modes of saying commonplace things. I have issues with it. — Jerome Norris.
Yeah, that’s me. The Grinch who lets language-manglers off the hook. But that doesn’t mean I personally like all the changed usage and new coinages in the past few years. My job is just to offer up the data for you folks, and if you decide that it strikes you as ugly or silly, feel free to say so. I report, you deride. Personally, the one that really annoys me is “substance abuser,” which always, to me, conjures up a vision of a guy beating a large lump of some unidentified material with a baseball bat.
The use of “issues” as a stand-in for “problems” is a relatively recent development. A 2003 draft addition to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) pegs the earliest appearance of the term found thus far in print to 1982 in the New York Times (”Then it becomes how do you deal with the emotions and intimacy issues that were largely dealt with previously through alcohol?”). But I’d be amazed if this use of “issues” were not eventually discovered somewhat earlier, perhaps in the 1970s, in psychology books or journals.
As to the “why” of “issues” used in this sense, I think that it, like “substance abuse,” is primarily a therapeutic euphemism designed to soften the impact of reality and especially to dodge the question of culpability. If one were to ask a patient about, for instance, the “problem” he has talking to his father, the patient might well respond angrily that the “problem” lies with his father. Better to neutralize that stumbling block with the blame-free “issue.”
The percolation of “issues” in this sense into daily life is certainly annoying, but I think there may be a natural limiting factor to its spread. It’s difficult to imagine news reports referring to the US government “having issues” with avian flu, for instance.
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