August 2005

Barbaric yawps in Yelm

by Lindsay Thompson

The law is a profession of words.
— David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law (1963)

There is, the press reports, distress in Yelm.

The Thurston County town is racked by controversy. Yelm’s yeomen are struggling over a moratorium on the use of the word “moratorium.”

Wal-Mart, press accounts say, wants to put up a store in Yelm. Some Yelmites are upset. They fear a big store will compromise the community’s essential Yelmness. Apparently the matter has come up so many times at city council meetings the council, fearing they might have to review planning authority decisions on the store, banned speaking the word “moratorium” at council meetings.

It’s an interesting word, moratorium. The OED calls it a legal term from modern Latin, connoting a legal authorization to a debtor to postpone payment to a certain time. From its first appearance about 1875, that’s how people understood it. But in the Depression it came to stand for a broader, more general postponement. In 1944, for example, Word Study called for a moratorium on “‘of course’ sentences.”

Of course, the usage continued to evolve, and in the late 1950s we had nuclear-arms testing moratoriums; later, the Vietnam War Moratorium marches of 1969, and a 1970 Daily Telegraph plaint “for a moratorium on Dylan Thomas records.”

In his Political Dictionary (1978), William Safire writes, “when political figures want to tell their friends to shut up while they try to settle a sticky situation, they find it more polite to ‘request a moratorium.’” The Yelm council appears to be made of sterner stuff. Running for president in 1968, Richard Nixon was so insistent on his moratorium on talking about Vietnam a frustrated reporter told Safire, “You ought to hold your next rally in a huge moratorium.”

I read that the ACLU has the yips about the Yelmish matter. But before anyone launches litigation, maybe there’s an alternative. Wear them down with euphemisms.

Now, you’re going to say, remember the council also said you can’t bring up Wal-Mart by name in council meetings, and when people started asking for a moratorium on “big-box stores,” the council nixed that as well. (In the late 1970s, in a British trial of a man accused of violating the Official Secrets Act, it developed that the name of the Post Office Tower, where some of the violations were alleged to have occurred, was itself covered by the Official Secrets Act. Witnesses had to be asked if they knew of the events occurring in “a rather large building in the Tottenham Court Road.”)

My plan is for the citizenry to swarm the field with synonyms. Yelmen and Yelmwomen! Gird yourselves with Roget’s Thesaurus. I pulled down my dad’s 1958 edition, and found dozens of alternatives you can use on the council, one after another, until at last they collapse from passing resolutions to ban them.

Call, for example, for a delay. More obsoletely, a delayment. One can seek a tarriance, a waiting, or a moration (rare, cautions Roget’s, and skating close to the edge with the council, I’d say). Seek a retardation of Wal-Mart, or a prolongation, a prorogation, or a postponement; a deferment, a deferral, an adjournment, or an adjournal; a procrastination, a cunctation, a play for time, or (not to put too fine a point on it) a stall.

There are stand-offs, hold-offs, stops, stays, suspensions, and holdups to be demanded. Pauses, respites, truces, reprieves, demurrages, leeways, redtape, redtapism, and redtapery, not to mention referral to a “circumlocution office or court” (Dickens, Roget’s helpfully advises). There’s the fancy French medicine expectante, and, in Roget’s last gasp on the subject, “delayage.”

And if nothing else works, try tossing a petition over the wall out at the J.Z. Knight property. I read she’s got a bud called Ramtha. He’s a warrior spirit from 35,000 years ago, but stays au courant on all kinds of modern conundrums, and gives his views to paying audiences through Ms. Knight. He needs to be taking more interest in his hometown. After all, Yelmocracy may be at stake.

Lindsay Thompson works on Salmon Bay in Seattle. For personal correspondence, contact him at tradelaw@hotmail.com. E-mail letters to the editor to letterstotheeditor@wsba.org or mail to WSBA, Attn: Letters to the Editor, 2101 Fourth Ave., Ste. 400, Seattle, WA 98121-2330.