Gotalottasay, but no time to say it

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Updated: January 29, 2012 8:08AM

“Hodon,” the young man on the telephone said. “I’ll transfer you.”

The transfer took a moment, long enough for me to pick apart his language. Of course he meant “hold on” — itself a contraction of what operators in previous years might have said: “Please hold the line while I connect you,” or some such thing.

Nothing new, a standard way language gets mashed — a “portmanteau” to use the proper term, which literally means a suitcase, back in the days when a suitcase consisted of two hard halves that would squash together to pack a lot into a single unit.

The word itself is an artificial coinage, the product of no lesser writer than Lewis Carroll, who indulged in the practice, combining “lithe and slimy” into “slithy,” for instance, and put an explanation into the mouth of that august authority, Humpty Dumpty.

“You see it’s like a portmanteau,” the star-crossed egg man tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass. “There are two meanings packed up into one word.

So perhaps someday readers — assuming there are still readers — will be surprised to learn that the commonly used demand for patience, “hodon,” is actually a contraction of “hold” and “on,” in the way that you may be surprised to learn that “bash” is a blend of “bang” and “smash.”

My job is to decry all this: Barbarians at the gate! The seventh seal broken! A sign of impending apocalypse! Break out the jug of lemonade and pine for days gone by. But I am a living language kind of guy. Yes, it strikes me as deeply wrong that The New Yorker uses “insure” to mean “make certain” when Neil Steinberg’s Correct Usage demands using “ensure” and saving “insure” for when making bets on the likelihood of future calamities. But I’m not going to tell The New Yorker how to write. It’s a free country.

Words change. “Terrific” used to mean, “full of terror,” which is why Herb Morrison, of Chicago’s WLS, could watch the Hindenburg blow up, see the flames rising into the sky and the burning passengers, and say, “It’s a terrific thing ladies and gentlemen.”

“Special” used to mean something was extraordinary, valued, good. Then schools started using the term as a euphemism for students who lag behind the norm — “special needs kids” — and now, eavesdropping on teen conversations, “special” has become a term of contempt.

That’s hard to combat. We do have some control, at least in our own lives, over the urge toward quickness. The young man answering the phone has lots of phones to answer, hence “hodon.” But not everybody in a rush has good reason. Sometimes it’s just habit. A voice on a newsroom flatscreen spoke of “the chance of precip for Wednesday.”

“Precip” is an ugly word — “precipitation” itself is a showy, scientific meteorologist’s fudge, meaning maybe rain, maybe snow, depending on how cold it is. Moisture from the heavens. (Now there’s a better phrase. Why couldn’t the weatherguy say that? Particularly since TV meteorology seems to consist of filling 10 minutes of dead air at the end of a newscast. “A chance of moisture from the heavens, of winds from the east, and ....”

But the world always gets faster. No practice or fashion is so antique that it wasn’t greeted with boggled horror. Aspects of culture we now view as the zenith of studied sophistication were seen as symptoms of hurtling busyness when they showed up. Writing in the 1840s, British essayist Leigh Hunt saw top hats as “chimney tops with a border,” so much more streamlined than the good old floppy cocked hats of old. “With our close heads and our tight succinct mode of dress,” he wrote, “we look as if we were intended for nothing but to dart backwards and forwards on matters of business, with as little hindrance to each other as possible.”

That sounds like today, doesn’t it? A time when, if it takes five seconds for a computer to start up, that’s a long time. I know my boys often issue blasts of compressed garble such as “havuseendah?”

“Speak so I can understand you,” I’ll say. I’m not being exacting, I’m just confused.

“Have you seen the dog?” they’ll say slowly, with effort. Given the hurtling nature of society, maybe it’s time to get off the ox cart. Maybe rather than trying to prod other people to slow down, I need to speed up. Thetimeschangeandwechangewiththem.