The third book of William Gibson’s most recent trilogy, Zero History, was released recently, and I bought it and read it last month, along with re-reading the first two books, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. I really enjoyed the books, individually and as a whole. William Gibson might be the only writer who could write a novel with marketing as one of the central themes and make it interesting.

In Spook Country, a drug addict who is being forced to work for a corrupt government contractor is observing the city of Washington, D.C.:

• “He had spent three weeks here, once, in the salad days of the first Clinton administration, as part of a team translating Russian trade reports for a firm of lobbyists.”

I really had no idea what was meant here. I’ve heard salad days once or twice before, but never got a definition. The American Heritage Dictionary gives this:

• A time of youth, innocence, and inexperience.

This is one of those ones coined by Shakespeare, from the play Antony and Cleopatra, in a speech by Cleopatra in which she regrets her affair with Julius Caesar when she was young:

• “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood.”

Well, my wife and I are settled in our apartment in Quincy, Mass., the city that borders Boston to the south.  The job is going well, the boxes are unpacked, and it’s time to start Talking Wordy again.

I finished reading David Halberstam’s The Longest Winter early last month. In it was a word that I come across a lot when I am reading military history, especially if it includes a chapter about boot camp: martinet. In The Longest Winter, it wasn’t used in that context:

• “For the men of Second Division, [General Ned] Almond had gained an unwelcome ‘reputation as a martinet who often commanded by instilling fear in subordinates.’ “

I always got from the context that a martinet was a hardass, be it a drill sergeant or a general. I looked it up in the new OED Online (review upcoming once I’ve had a chance to use it a bit more):

• Originally: a person who leads others in military drill. Later: a military or naval officer who is especially concerned with strictness of discipline; generally a rigid, inflexible, or merciless disciplinarian

The OED etymology:

• The name of Jean Martinet (died 1672), French soldier, whose attention to drill and training as Inspector-General of the infantry helped to shape the regular army of Louis XIV.

I was a professional reporter for only a year, at a small Kentucky paper called the Bowling Green Daily News. Probably the best story I wrote there was for Veterans Day, about  local man who spent almost the entirety of World War II in Japanese slave-labor camps. He was going to be speaking at a school on the morning of Veterans Day, and I was assigned to cover it.

We were an afternoon paper, and  our deadline was around 10:30 a.m., so I would have had to run to the school, scramble for quotes, and dash off a really fast story. I suggested that instead, I go visit him ahead of time and write a feature. My editors bit, and I drove for an hour to a house in the middle of the woods in Muhlenberg County. I spent most of the day there, just listening to Joseph Sterner tell his story. The article I wrote began like this:

In February 1941, Joseph Sterner wanted a transfer from his cavalry regiment to a new unit, preferably one overseas. His captain said there were two choices: Puerto Rico or the Philippines.

“I said, ‘Well, I can go to Puerto Rico any time, send me to the Philippines,’ ” said Sterner, now 82.

His captain warned him the United States was going to get into the war raging in Europe and the Pacific. He said the Philippines, then an American territory, would be one of the first places Japan would attack.

Sterner, who was 17, brushed off the warning.

“Everyone that age is invincible,” Sterner said.

That decision set him on a path that led to five months of combat and 40 months in Japanese slave-labor camps.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Note: This post contains racial slurs, in an educational context.

I finished reading David Halberstam’s book about the Korean War, The Longest Winter, last week. It was a really terrific overview of American involvement in that  war. It also had a lot of really interesting background material, including the etymology of the slur gook, in a passage about U.S. troops fighting alongside Filipino guerrillas during the Spanish-American War at the close of the 19th centruy:

• “Two very powerful American instincts were evident — a missionary drive that demanded the United States assume colonial responsibility over the islands in order to civilize the natives as part of a Christian white man’s burden, and at the same time racism of the most virulent kind, so that the guerrillas were called either ‘niggers’ of ‘gugus’ (or ‘goo-goos’). The latter name came from the bark of a local tree that women used when they shampooed their hair. It was a term that eventually morphed into the more all-purpose word for Asians, gooks, that American troops used to identify Asians from World War II right through Korea and Vietnam.”

I am reading Spook Country, the second book in the loosely-connected William Gibson trilogy that began with Pattern Recognition, the book from yesterday’s post.

Spook Country is all about people working in the shadows — artists, criminals, government intelligence contractors. It is from a meeting of men in that  third group that today’s word comes from:

• “From what little he’d managed to see, he knew that they were white and conventionally dressed, and that was it. He wondered if they too had been staying here, particularly as two of them were in shirtsleeves and carried no coats and jackets.”

I’ve wondered before exactly what shirtsleeves meant, though never in a place where I had a dictionary handy. There is a clue in the context here. The American Heritage Dictionary defines shirtsleeves as:

• The state of wearing no coat, jacket, or other outer garment over one’s shirt.

I couldn’t find any real etymology for this. It’s an interesting term, though, as opposed to jacketless or coatless or something. I also can’t find if it refers specifically to a button-down shirt with a collar, though I think it must, because I’ve never read or heard it used in the context of a T-shirt.

This is, of course, the preferred look for any male politician  – Republican or Democract  – wishing to show of that he is a regular guy. Always with the sleeves rolled up, of course. Because he is working hard for America, that’s why.

What’s that you say? You want posts about words, not about feelings? Oh, I weep for you cold-hearted lexiphiles, but here is a word: gimlet-eyed.

I finished William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition a few days ago, and it contained this passage, from the main character’s point of view:

• “He looks somewhat gimlet-eyed now, though maybe she’s misreading some Chinese-American nerd thing, an unabashed intensity of focus.”

As an adjective, the American Heritage Dictionary defines gimlet as:

• Having a penetrating or piercing quality: gimlet eyes.

That derives  from the first definition of gimlet as a noun (with picture from Answers.com, where I get the AHD definitions):

• A small hand tool having a spiraled shank, a screw tip, and a cross handle and used for boring holes.

A gimlet is also a drink:

• A cocktail made with vodka or gin, sweetened lime juice, and sometimes effervescent water and garnished with a slice of lime.

The AHD etymology for gimlet:

• Middle English, from Anglo-Norman guimbelet, perhaps from Middle Dutch wimmelkijn, diminutive of wimmel, meaning auger.

When I was hired on the sports copy desk of The Courier-Journal four years ago, I was moving into a world that was completely foreign to me. I never really followed sports, and I told the sports editor that before I went up for the interview. But they were willing to take a chance, and I had decided that I wanted to move from reporting to copy editing. This was a great chance to jump from a pretty small paper (The Daily News in Bowling Green, Ky., circulation about 23,000) to a big one where I could learn a ton. (The C-J’s circulation was in the 190,000 range when I was hired, I think.)

And I did. The sports desk at the C-J was filled with really smart people who taught me a lot, both directly and indirectly. I learned a lot just listening to other people talk about what they were doing. The only thing they didn’t teach me was to be more of a sports fan. (Though I did get to like horse racing.) But no one ever held that against me. And it prepared me to take on this new challenge in Boston.

More than just learning though, I made friends at the C-J who I hope I will have for the rest of my life, both on the sports desk and out in the news department. When you work in such a small group (less that a dozen on the sports desk when I left) under a lot of stress during weird hours and days, one of two things can happen, I think. You either get to be good friends or you get to hate everyone around you.

I made good friends.

Thanks to everyone at the C-J who helped me, and thanks for your friendship.

*Sláinte is the traditional Irish toast. It translates literally as “health.”

Wow. It’s been a long couple-three weeks. I’ve had my first week at The Boston Globe. I am going to be a slot editor, but I’ve been working on the rim to start absorbing as much as I can before I take on those responsibilities. It’s going well.

I’m living in a temporary place in Quincy, Mass. It’s a city just south of Boston, and it’s a pretty decent commute from here to the paper, which is in the Boston neighborhood Dorchester, on the south side of the city. (South of Southie.) I spent the last week looking for an apartment. I found one on the first floor of a Victorian in Quincy that I liked  a lot, and it looks like we’ll be signing a lease for it this week. So things are getting settled and regular blogging shall resume.

Life is good.

Lauren is still in Kentucky, and the movers are coming on Wednesday. She flies up Thursday. Can’t wait. I miss her. We used to do the long-distance thing, but the past two weeks have been the longest we haven’t seen each other in more than three years. I’ll feel like this is all real once she is here.