Ringers - 10 March 1995

From time to time in the history of every society, I suppose words, very dull pedestrian long words, float up out of the beds of jargon they've been snoozing in and suddenly everybody is using them. I imagine that most people in Britain under 50 would say if you tap them, that redundant and industrial action have always been in the common language. But they didn't exist in normal usage before the Second War, and I will remember the time when I had to explain to Americans what they meant.

An odd thing about those two words, they're both Latin words, and usually it's Americans who prefer the long Latin or Greek word to a simple Saxon word. Everybody jumps to the example of American elevator for the word lift. Here a schools speech day is commencement. The president doesn't jog everyday; he jogs on a daily basis. No American ever asks of an ailing person what's the treatment – a word that has vanished from American – it's always therapy. And when Britain was heaving with labour troubles and the words first came up, friends of mine here would say, what can it possibly mean, he's been made "redundant?" He's been fired, sacked, it used to be in England. And how about "industrial action?" What you call, I said, going on strike. Ah!

Lately, two words have been bedevilling us. One of them has been frightening every humble shareholder from Glasgow to Chicago to Hawaii to Singapore. we're all, I'm sure, learning or trying to learn, about derivatives. I used to use that word in the very long ago when I was busy working on etymology with a linguistic wizard at Harvard, learning fascinating things, like the alarmingly funny derivation of vanilla and why helicopter is pronounced helicopter and not heelicopter. A very old fact, my closest friend in California always used to say heelicopter. I would wince and do nothing about it, remembering Dr. Johnson's stern admonition when Boswell asked him what you did if somebody mispronounced a word in your presence. You did nothing. If the man is a social inferior it is cruel, if he's your equal it is impertinent.

Please don't write and ask me where that comes from, it's one of those little well worn tags that hang off your mind like threads on the sleeve of an old jacket. But you may ask about helicopter. The route is not Helios, the sun – as is in heliotrope, a plant that turns its flowers to the sun – but helix, a spiral. So a helicopter is a spiral machine or wing, not a sun machine.

Alright, so I said way back there, that there were two words that have been bedevilling us. The second one is a perfectly normal English word but in the past few months, it has taken on here, an exclusive and sinister American meaning. It is the word replacement, all due to the baseball strike, which last midsummer, seemed at the time, a merely passing item sensationalised by tabloid headlines. But it turned out to be about real things mainly money. For a time there was the threat that there would be no 1994 World Series – the baseball championship series. The strike went on and on and there was no World Series. And then people who are close to baseball predicted something even more sensational than abandoned World Series. There might very well be, said one of the team owners, no baseball season at all in 1995. Ridiculous.

Well, unless there's a sudden upheaval in the negotiations between the owners and the players – which have been creeping and crawling since last August – there could well be no baseball season with the regular players. There's the rub. The owners are recruiting replacements. But I better take these troubles in order, and first say a little on what the strike's about. It's at bottom, as I hinted, very simple. The players think that the owners are stowing away too much in profits, the owners say they work on a much smaller profit margin than you'd think, the popularity of baseball has been languishing for years, and it's nothing like as popular as a spectator sport – and therefore as a reaper of television commercial money – as basketball.

For a year or two now, the prices paid for buying star baseball players have been going up and up. The rough average has been a contract for say 4 years for 8, 9 million dollars plus more millions in bonuses. The average player in the two major leagues, and which, what we're talking about is just under half a million dollars a season, and there's a low limit however mediocre or anonymous or germinant you may be, you may not earn less than 150,000. That's the poverty line so to speak.

So all these months the owners have been trying and failing to put a cap on the collective salaries of a team: the most any team could pay its whole roster of players. The players turned this down. Now they're proposing that the owners of the rich clubs should pay a tax beyond a certain limit to the poorer clubs that can't afford the going price to buy new stars. So what do the clubs, the owners do? The exodus to Florida of the coaches, trainers, managers has already begun: it's called spring training. And, usually, there are in any winter resort town, hundreds, thousands of baseball fans, especially among the resident retired who pay good money to watch their favourite great men getting ready for the summer jousts. Well the owners, as I say, have recruited replacements from the minor leagues. From everywhere wherever the Scouts could discover a promising young man, they brought him into sunshine glory in Florida, more often I'm afraid, into sunshine ridicule. Imagine, you don't get both of them or best you get Joe Snucks or Fred Smith, a high school pitcher and a young ambitious truck driver. Needless to say, this stratagem has disgusted the fans and one team gave up the charade and went back north home to Baltimore.

The owners promised a replacement season while thousands boom and now the President of the United States has got into the act, not the baseball act, but the replacement idea. On Wednesday he signed a bill, more properly an executive order. Usually for such occasions, he alerts the media and the whole caboodle of cables and microphones and cameras come clattering up to the White House. Not on Wednesday. The President signed this order almost in secret because he well knew he was being a bad boy. How can I convey the gall, the breathtaking hot spur of the sentence with which the New York Times on Thursday announced his wicked act? President Clinton yesterday issued an order barring the federal government from doing business with companies that hire permanent replacement workers during a strike. Now the president has many powers, but ordering new laws is not one of them. Before the day was out, a famous lady Republican, and a liberal too, simply responded: "Congress makes the laws not the administration." Senator Dole the majority leader, used a football metaphor not a baseball one, in chinning the president for attempted an end run 'round Congress.

The president does have millions in funds he can disperse for some things, some foreign aid, floods, earthquake victims and so on. And he can squeeze some money out for purposes already enacted into law. And in a national emergency – or one he can proclaim as such – he can do by executive order what President Reagan did when he fired every air traffic controller and replaced them all with controllers who are training, stayed on.

Mr Clinton has tried to do the same thing to stop companies the government does business with from hiring replacements during a strike and keeping the new workers on. Of course, the protesting Senators are right, he cannot order a law. He's done it I think to show that he's aware of a growing rebellion, and of the growing strength among organised labour, which for 3 or 4 decades has been in the doldrums with less than one American worker in five belonging to a union. Anyway, to declare his solidarity with organised labour now, may secure him one vote in five next year and a few more from baseball fans who get the point. he's certainly going to need all the votes he can get.

The British Royal Family received an unusual waft of approval from American fans of the computer age, when it was reported this week that the Queen had had two of her dogs implanted with microchips, no bigger than a grain of rice, in order to keep tabs on the dogs' wanderings. The identification numbers printed – can you imagine on a grain of rice? – correspond with information kept in the kennel club of Britain's data or database.

I wonder, by the way, if they have stored up there, the name and number of every dog in Europe that has been around bats or might otherwise be susceptible to rabies. If so, it makes even more gloomy than usual, the prospect that Americans who love dogs and also love Britain, will ever be able to combine these affections into a personal trip. I have a friend – or had, he died very recently – a friend in North Carolina. He'd been in his time a very skilful trout fisherman, a fine shot and was at all times paced by his dogs, except when he went every year to Scotland. He hated having to leave them boxed up in France and on my last visit to him only three months ago, he asked me – as if I might have had some pull with the kennel club – when are they going to abolish this ridiculous ban? Incidentally, you know that Prince Charles lost a terrier at Balmoral, I ought to have mentioned that the Queen's recently encoded dogs are cocker spaniels, the chance of corgis slipping out of the palace and tearing off to Balmoral, is thought by experts in these parts, to be remote.

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