I Don ’t Do ‘Do’

[Harold Schiffman]

 I Don’t Do ‘Do’ Michiel Schuurman


By WILLIAM SAFIRE<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=WILLIAM
SAFIRE&fdq=19810101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=WILLIAM
SAFIRE&inline=nyt-per&inline=nyt-per>
Published: April 10, 2009

*When **Larry Summers*<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/lawrence_h_summers/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
*,* the top White House economic adviser, was asked in February whether he
backed the Treasury<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/treasury_department/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’s
decision to introduce a bank-bailout plan before it could provide specifics,
the Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote: “Mr. Summers, well schooled in
Washington’s ways, invoked newspaper slang for behind-the-scenes tales. ‘I
just don’t do *ticktock*,’ he said flatly.”
 Skip to next paragraph<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12wwln-safire-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine#secondParagraph>
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/english_language/grammar/index.html>My
first reaction, as a student of politico-journalese, was to run my
computer’s mouse up the clock on *ticktock*. First citation, it turns out,
was in a query directed at me by Henry Hubbard, the White House
correspondent for
Newsweek<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/newsweek_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>in
1971: “I’m doing a
*tick-tock* on the new economic policy.” He wanted to learn the chronology
of Nixon administration decision-making on a plan to stop inflation and a
run on U.S. gold reserves by imposing wage-and-price controls and ending the
convertibility of the dollar into gold (not, in retrospect, such a hot
idea). Only when assured he was not working on a gloomy *violin piece* — the
monicker for a purple-prose mood setter in the front of the then-thick
newsmagazines — did I, the speechwriter-source, do the *ticktock*, a term
from the era of mechanical clocks that lingers on (although it has since
lost its hyphen).

But then I started thinking about the front end of Summers’s dismissive
comment: not his concluding noun *ticktock*, but the beginning verb *do*.
Soon after straight-talking George W.
Bush<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per>became
president, Candy Crowley of CNN recalled having asked him, years
before, about “the nuance of your answer.” She said, “He looked at me, and
he said, ‘In Texas, we don’t do nuance.’ ” In 2000, The Times reported that
a former colleague of the digital analyst Esther
Dyson<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/esther_dyson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>said
that “she just doesn’t
*do* small talk.” Before that, the O.E.D., in its exhaustive history of *do*,
cites Charles Dickens<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/charles_dickens/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
other 19th-century writers using the phrase “to do the [adjective like
“grand” or “lazy”] thing”; then came a burst of usage in the 1990s of the “I
don’t do” phrasal template followed by the likes of “nuance” or “small talk”
or “ticktock.” Last month, Michael Neal, president of GE
Capital<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/general_electric_company/general_electric_capital_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
told analysts that his company shunned the complex securities now in
disrepute: “We don’t do bad acronyms, like C.D.O.’s or S.I.V.’s” (which are
initialisms, not acronyms, words formed from a name’s initial letters).

It struck me that this latest fad use of *do* was rooted in the stern
warning of the prospective maid (later domestic servant, later domestic
worker, now cleaning lady): “I don’t *do* windows.” I ran this speculation
past Ben Zimmer of visualthesaurus.com, who replied: “I think your hunch is
correct about the provenance of the ‘I don’t do X’ phrasal template. There
must have been a major influence from the stereotypical maid’s stipulation,
‘I don’t do windows,’ which attained catchphrase status by the mid-1970s as
a staple of sitcoms and cartoons.”

But does the ready acceptance of this “phrasal template” mean we are living
in syntax, undermining the rules of order and word relationships in sentence
structure on which we base our grammar? “An interesting syntactic aspect is
that the complement of *do*, regardless of whether it’s a noun or adjective,
can take on a highly abstract quality,” Zimmer said. “When Larry Summers
said, ‘I don’t *do* ticktock,’ he was taking the journalistic sense of
‘ticktock’ and abstracting it into a mass noun for the disclosure of
behind-the-scenes gossip.”

I do usage, I do etymology, I do synonymy, I do nuance, I do metaphor, I do
slang, I do a little light grammar, but I don’t do syntax.
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