Sabbath Gasbags, Speak Up

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Published: June 1, 2013

Nearly a week after the television news coverage of Memorial Day, I’m still thinking about how much I envy Tom Brokaw for having managed to slip a phrase into the language. He slipped in “the greatest generation.” I’ve never slipped in anything.

Slipping a phrase into the language means inserting it so firmly that it no longer carries your name. Sure, Brokaw must be pleased when a correspondent, covering a program that brings World War II veterans to visit monuments in Washington, identifies them as “members of what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation ....” But the real kick has to be hearing the phrase stand alone, as if it’s some commonly used, modern-sounding phrase that only the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary know was first heard in a play by Christopher Marlowe in 1589.

When I first referred to the people who pontificate on Sunday morning talk shows from Washington as the “Sabbath gasbags,” it was part of a plan to systematically insinuate the phrase into the language. I first used it in a newspaper column. Then I used it in a book. Then I used it on television shows, gradually trying to drop modifiers like “the people I refer to as.” Still nothing. Oh, sure, I’ve seen “Sabbath gasbags” mentioned occasionally with my name attached, but that’s not slipping it into the language. I wanted to see it used routinely — say, “In addition to his newspaper work he appears as a Sabbath gasbag on ABC.”

I suppose you could say that “Sabbath gasbags” is too, well, judgmental to be slipped into the language. But my luck has been no better when I try to slip in a practical phrase like R.N.A. Placed at the end of a letter, R.N.A. means Reply Not Anticipated: you can reply if you want to, but the other person involved in this interchange is perfectly happy with things as they stand. R.N.A. didn’t catch on even after the advent of the Internet. When I put those initials at the bottom of e-mails, people tended to write back, “What does R.N.A. mean?” In other words, their response to Reply Not Anticipated was to reply.

All this time, I’ve thought that the best conduit to carry a phrase into the language was The New York Times. It is, after all, called the newspaper of record. My first attempt was unsuccessful. Many years ago, in discussing boosters who were intent on fitting out their hometowns with international airports and domed stadiums and the other trappings of “a major league city,” I said such people were suffering from rubaphobia — not fear of rubes but fear of being thought a rube. The Times editor said I’d misspelled “rubaphobia.”

“But I made it up,” I said. “It’s my word.”

“It’s not Times style,” he said.

So the spelling was changed. The word not only didn’t make it into the language, it didn’t make it into the newspaper.

Recently, I tried The Times again. Describing the tendency of older men’s hindquarters to flatten out, I spoke of a condition called D.T.S. — Disappearing Tush Syndrome — and mentioned that it could cause an otherwise respectable senior citizen to walk right out of his pants. So far, nobody else has mentioned D.T.S. Still, there’s time. In my optimistic moments, I envision NBC calling Tom Brokaw back to lead its Memorial Day coverage in Washington next year. “As I said on one of the Sabbath gasbag shows yesterday,” Brokaw says, “when I see these World War II veterans returning to the nation’s capital for this ceremony, I know that — though stooped, though gray, though suffering from D.T.S. — they remain the greatest generation.”

Calvin Trillin, a contributor to The New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of “Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse.”