Sometimes Even That Venerable Institution, Webster’s… [Derived Headline]

Sometimes even that venerable institution, Webster’s Dictionary, comes up short. Take its definition of the word, “writer.” Webster says, “A writer is a person who writes.” And I am reminded of a professor I once had who put us all on the edge of our seats with such statements as, “A card punching machine is a machine that punches cards.”

Webster’s has a more enlightening explanation of “wordsmith,” which is defined as person “who uses language skillfully.” There are actually a lot of those around. Consider the staffs of presidential candidates or presidents, for that matter, those speech writers who coin the immemorial phrases by which presidents are noted ever after.

Skillful is as skillful does, however. Presumably, all those fancy new titles given legislation in Congress are conjured up by some wordsmith on someone’s staff.

Consider, for example, the title of the 2005 bill funding our transportation systems: “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act – A Legacy for Users.” How’s that for a sufficiency of adjectives? Whatever happened to titles that take up less room like “Transportation Act. Of 2005.”

To make matters worse, this safe, accountable, flexible, efficient and equitable piece of legislation contained the famous Bridge to Nowhere slipped in by Sen. Don Young, of Alaska. The senator’s explanation of exactly how that becomes “a legacy for users” would surely tax the abilities of the most experienced wordsmith.

The bill also gives private firms a tax exemption on the funds they raise for road projects, which does not sound, from a taxpayer’s point of view, very efficient, to say nothing of equitable, although maybe there’s a pony in there somewhere.

More alarming, however, is the latest trend in highways exemplified by the legislation pushed through the Indiana Legislature under the leadership of Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and described in the latest issue of Mother Jones Magazine. Indiana has just OK’d a 75-year lease to a foreign corporation of its state- owned toll road.

Presumably, this foreign corporation will maintain the road, thus theoretically relieving the Indiana taxpayers of that perennial expense, but it also will control the fees charged and make such other rules and regulations as in its corporate wisdom it sees fit.

Daniels explained this questionable deal as “freeing trapped assets from underperformance.” Trapped assets? Visions of the old hidden-in-the-mattress caper come to mind. Or is it a case of words, in Rudyard Kipling’s descriptive language, as “twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools?”

Even though this new passion to turn our highway systems over to profit and foreign control seems to be an affliction of Republican governors, Texas and Virginia, having gone that route, we are surely safe in North Dakota from such shenanigans. We need not worry about some foreign corporation, or even a domestic one, coming in to lease Highway 49 or 83 or some other state highway, given that the traffic here would hardly merit such an investment. Undoubtedly even to propose such a project would be to invite a political firestorm.

The turning over of control of a previously governmental responsibility to private interests in Indiana was approved, naturally, by the Bush administration, which has already handed over numerous aspects of the military to private industry. If they had had their druthers, they would have handed over Social Security, too.

Presumably the cheating done by corporations that frequently received lucrative contracts for Iraq without so much as putting in a bid will be investigated now that Congress is under new management. Sadly, as professor Duane Windsor, of Rice University, put it, “There’s no reason to think the people in these companies are abnormally honest.”

In the case of the companies that were handed no-strings contracts for the war in Iraq, they frequently were not even competent. The full extent of the cheating, mismanagement and carelessness runs into the multimillions, and, at this point, the answer as to where it all went is, “We don’t know.”

Given the complexity of issues facing the country, a greater clarity in language would surely be not only a refreshing change, but an aid to better understanding. However ennobling, uplifting and glamorous the words “Operation Iraqi Freedom” may have sounded at the outset of the conflict, they increasingly sound pitifully grandiose.

Maybe it would be helpful if, at the risk of an increase in wordsmith unemployment, we somehow got back to plain language, to calling a spade a spade, a transportation bill a Transportation Bill, and a war in Iraq a War in Iraq.

(Betty Mills, of Bismarck, is a freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.) How about plain language

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