Slippery Slope (1857); Water's Edge (1898)

Tue Jan 3 00:33:25 UTC 2006

Congratulations on Fred Shapiro for making William Safire's column this
Sunday.
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HOWEVER...Safire really should retire. Maybe he can write speeches for
Bloomberg and correct him about "O. Henry."
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Can Safire really have forgotten that his assistant had researched  "slippery
slope" for him years ago and had done a better job? Can he not check  the
ADS-L archives?
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"Water's Edge" he dates to 1907?
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Go ahead. Write to the NY Times with a correction. Does it matter anymore
with him? Safire doesn't have another column anymore. Why does he do such poor
work once a week?
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_http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01wwln_safire.html_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01wwln_safire.html)

Water's Edge
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Not content with his allusion to rhetorical jawboning, Senator Lieberman went
 on to say that in matters of war, "Politics should stop at the water's
edge." I had what I thought was the source of that metaphor of  nonpartisanship in
my political dictionary: Senator Arthur Vandenberg,  Republican of Michigan,
said in 1950, "To me 'bipartisan foreign policy' means a  mutual effort under
our indispensable two-party system to unite our official  voice at the water's
edge." The historian Richard Neustadt wrote a few  years later that President
Harry Truman played chief of foreign policy "like a  career official anxious
to obey his own injunction that 'politics stops at  the water's edge."'
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Vandenberg, who courageously went up against his party's isolationists, has
been getting credit for that felicitous phase for years. Sorry, Arthur, it
wasn't your coinage, and leafing through musty books and records is no longer
the way for etymologists to go. The Little Search Engine That Could huffs and
puffs through mountains of data to reveal that on Jan. 17, 1907, The
Washington  Post reported that at a banquet in D.C. honoring Secretary of State Elihu
Root,  President Theodore Roosevelt said that once in office, a public official
-  whatever party he belonged to- "must feel that he is the servant of the
people.  This is true of all public officials, but perhaps it is in a special
sense true  of the secretary of state, for our party lines stop at the water's
edge."
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Which slides us down to. . .
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Slippery Slope
The doctor-senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma asked support of his fellow
senators, most of whom are well-to-do, for an exception to ethics rules that  would
let him collect enough money from his medical practice to cover his  expenses.
Fifty-one senators agreed, but George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio,  who is
chairman of the Ethics Committee, shot down the request. "How will the
committee say no to other requests like this?" he asked rhetorically. "This  is a
slippery slope."
..
Google reports about two million citations of slippery slope, making  it by
far the most popular, if presumably dangerous, slope in the English  language.
Though the smooth alliteration is often derided as an example of  fallacious
reasoning - that the occurrence of one event means that it would lead
inevitably to another - it remains a clear and often persuasive warning to many  that
down a given route lies perdition.
...
The Oxford English Dictionary has a 1951 earliest citation, but that just
means they haven't been working on that entry lately. Here is an item from
Iowa's Davenport Daily Leader in 1894: "John Rademaker has an elastic and
sympathetic auricular appendage" - that's an ear - "that is always wide open to  the
reputable men in the profession who get stuck on the slippery  slope." Though
the metaphor was misused (you don't "get stuck" on such a  slope but slide
down ever faster), the subject was a San Francisco saloonkeeper,  eager to lend a
hand to down-on-their-luck actors.
...
It may be that a few years earlier, the phrase had its origin in an actual
slope of a bloodied hill. In Will Henry Thompson's 1888 poem, "High Tide at
Gettysburg," about Pickett's charge up toward the line of Union soldiers on
Cemetery Ridge, the defending men in blue held the line: "They smote and stood,
who held the hope/Of nations on that slippery slope.. . . "
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(ADS-L, 27 June 2003)
Researched this for Safire 2002.

Found 1857, "Chamber's Journal," When  the educated person of the middle
class is reduced to pennilessness ...what  but gives him the desire to
struggle again up the slippery slope of  fortune?"

You can find it on Cornell's Making of  America.

Kathleen E. Miller
Research Assistant to William  Safire
The New York Times
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_"THE  WATER'S EDGE."_
(http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=15&did=106354300&SrchMode=1&sid=2&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1136247649&c
lientId=65882)
New York Times (1857-Current  file). New York, N.Y.: Jun 29, 1889. p. 4 (1
page)
...
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_STEVENSON  MADE THE ADDRESS; Unveiling of the Monument to the Mecklenburg
Signers. A GREAT  DAY IN CHARLOTTE Tribute Paid to North Carolina In
ExPresident's Speech.  DISTINGUISHED GUESTS ON PLATFORM Magnificent Procession Reviewed
by Mrs.  Stonewall Jackson and Other Widows of Great Soldiers. Floats
Representing  Patriotic Subjects. _
(http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=539140912&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1136247946
&clientId=65882)
The Atlanta. May 21, 1898.  p. 3 (1 page)
_EX-VICE  PRESIDENT STEVENSON.; His Patriotic Utterances the Other Day in
North Carolina. _
(http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=30&did=102073190&SrchMode=1&sid=2&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP&TS=1136247901&clientId=6
5882)
New York Times (1857-Current file). New York,  N.Y.: May 29, 1898. p. 10 (1
page)
"Recent events have but emphasized the words of Webster. 'Our politics go no
further than the water's edge.'"