Today is Presidents’ Day, Monday, February 17th – a federal and state holiday in most (but not all) states. It’s the birthday of neither Washington (Feb. 22nd) nor Lincoln (Feb. 12th), though it substitutes for both. Well, except in some southern states where Lincoln is purposefully ignored and that good old slave-owner Thomas Jefferson (who was actually born in April) is included instead. Go figure.
The good folks at Merriam Webster have summarized “8 Words and Phrases From U.S. Presidents.” You can read all about it here. Or, see below for my favorite Presidents’ WOTD.
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Lunatic fringe is defined as the members of a group espousing extreme, eccentric, or fanatical views. Theodore Roosevelt was among the first to have used the term in 1913 shortly after his failed third-party run on the Bull Moose ticket. While we often see the term directed toward outlandish political movements, Roosevelt’s subject was the art world. Writing about an international modern art exhibition in New York, Roosevelt was unimpressed with some of the more avant-garde works on display.
It’s worth noting that while Roosevelt may have popularized this use of the term, he did not invent it. In the late 19th century, lunatic fringe was a name for a women’s haircut featuring bangs. This use of lunatic fringe seems not to have lasted much past the 19th century. But boy, they did not much care for bangs back then.
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Bloviate means “to speak or write verbosely or windily.” While that might not sound like the kind of thing a president would boast about, it happened to be a favorite word of Warren G. Harding. He used it to mean “to spend time idly.” Though he didn’t coin “bloviate,” the Ohio native likely picked it up during his youth. But because he was a bit of a long-winded speaker himself, it developed a new connotation after it was picked up by commentators such as H. L. Mencken.
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Despite its colloquial nature, the adjective “iffy” was a go-to word for Franklin D. Roosevelt who is among the first to be quoted using it. Roosevelt used the versatile “iffy” to describe the hypothetical situations occasionally posed by journalists (i.e. those beginning with if) which he often dismissed as irrelevant.
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The original sense of sugarcoat comes from the practice of frosting bitter pills in sugar to make them easier to swallow. Abraham Lincoln caught notice when he used the verb in its figurative sense – “to make superficially attractive or palatable” – in an 1861 message to Congress about the folly of Secession.
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When used to mean “responsibility,” the noun buck turns up in the phrases like the buck stops here. This was notably emblazoned on a paperweight situated prominently on the desk of Harry S. Truman. The phrase “pass the buck” originates from poker, with buck short for buckhorn knife. Such a knife – with a handle made from a buck’s horn – was used as a marker designating which player’s turn it was to deal. If you didn’t want the responsibility of dealing, you “passed the buck” to the next guy.
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When it comes to WOTD, you can’t ignore Nixon’s Veep, Spiro T. Agnew. He never made it to the Oval Office because he was forced out for felony tax evasion a year before Nixon’s run came to its untimely end with Watergate. But for sheer moxie, it’s hard to surpass Agnew’s sneering dismissal of the press corps as “nattering nabobs of negativity.” I’m not gonna sugarcoat it: He took FDR’s disdain for the MSM to a whole new level.
