The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Read Free Page B

less pejorative sense is developing: “off-beat, intriguingly unbalanced.”
    Asymmetrical warfare is defined by the Defense Department as “countering an adversary’s strengths by focusing on its weaknesses.” Michael Krepon wrote in the May-June 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs that “ asymmetrical warfare allows a weaker opponent to level the playing field by unorthodox means.”
    The earliest citation of the phrase I can find, and one that suggests earlier military use, is by Robert Fox, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, in 1991. He quoted a British commander, Lt. Col. Mike Vickery, who compared the coming allied attack on Iraq to an unconventional maneuver by the 14th Hussars in the Peninsular War, as the English under the future duke of Wellington drove the French out of Spain: “The regiment was detailed to move round the flanks, sneak round the back, you might say, to harry the rear and baggage train. It was what today we call asymmetric warfare .” (A trophy of that unconventional engagement in 1813 was a solid silver chamber pot given by Napoleon Bonaparte to his brother Joseph.)
    In the past decade, the phrase was applied to war that might be waged against a superpower. Clinton’s defense secretary William S. Cohen, in a farewell speech in January, defined it as “indirect, but highly lethal, attacks on our forces and our citizens, not always from nations but from individuals and even independent groups.”
    Until recently, the meaning was limited to the application of surprise force by a terrorist against a stronger force’s vulnerability, but ever since the Sept. 11 attack, Pentagonians have been applying asymmetric warfare to the kind of commando and anti-guerrilla techniques, drawing heavily on intelligence data, to be used against Taliban forces in Afghanistan—using non-superpower strength to go after a weaker foe’s vulnerabilities. The idea is to fight asymmetry with asymmetry .
    Lopsidedness (from lop, “to sever”) is in fashion, too: “Only squares will be wearing straight hems next spring,” writes Holly Finn in the Financial Times, “but fear not. Done well, an asymmetrical hem looks sexier.”

    Attention All Alliterators. “Apt alliteration’s artful aid”—Charles Churchill’s famous foray was not wholly alliterative, since not all the first letters are pronounced the same way—is alive and well on the political scene.
    You need at least a triple to qualify as an apt alliterator. At a conference of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described his centrist alliance with a fellow centrist Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman, as “the Kosher-Cajun Caucus.”
    According to the man who taught me English in sophomore year at prep school, the Charles Churchill phrase you quote, with or without its flaws, would not represent alliteration. For alliteration, the initial letters have to be consonants. When the initial letters are vowels, the gimmick is called assonance. *
    John Strother
Princeton, New Jersey

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    Baldfaced. As the 2000 campaigners practice their endgamesmanship, each side accuses the other of baldfaced lies. In some instances, the accusers prefer barefaced lies, and in a Virginia race, the mouth-filling modifier has come out sounding like boldfaced lies.
    Where does the truth lie? (Yes, in this instance, the truth does lie; unless your subject is a hen, lay must have an object.)
    It seems that the unadorned lie no longer has its old puissance. Time was, that word was so inflammatory as to need a euphemism: fib was the slang gentler, prevarication the bookish term. But to score as an emphatic charge, it now needs an adjective. “That’s a dirty lie” used to have a ring to it, but that adjective is now almost exclusively applied to jokes and lyrics. “ Damned lie,” once popular, is too closely associated with statistics.
    The denunciator has a menu from which to choose: outright is forthright, blatant has a ring to it, flat is