Is "notorious" about to flip?

That was the question that went through my mind the other day as I looked over an article that referred to someone as being a "notoriously light eater."

Hmm, is this the right word? Notoriety means "the state of being known for some unfavorable act or quality," doesn't it? Unless we're talking about eating disorders - and in this case, trust me, we're not - I'm not sure that being a light eater is exactly an "unfavorable" situation.

On the other hand, the light eater in question was the host of a TV food show, so maybe this was meant semi-seriously: After all, who wants restaurant recommendations from someone who doesn't like to eat? So in a little bit of editorial diplomacy, I suggested we say that the man in question is "well known as a light eater" and leave it at that.

This little encounter did make me wonder whether the distinction between fame – being known for something good – and notoriety is being lost. Or in other words, has the "wrong" usage overtaken the "right" one to the point that the meaning has "flipped," and we can now simply say that "notorious" means "famous," period?

In our celebrity-obsessed pop culture, it may be that there truly is no such thing as bad publicity, and so the distinction is meaningless. For a careful writer or editor trying to connect with a mass audience, the language is full of ambiguous usages that need to be avoided or so carefully packaged with contextual clues so that the chance of misunderstanding is held to a minimum.

For instance, "table," as a verb, is a common term in legislative and similar official circles: One tables a motion, or a new report. It originally meant to present something for discussion, but in American usage, that "tabling" is a stalling technique; it often means to postpone indefinitely. Any publication trying to reach an international audience should try to avoid it.

Similarly, some style guides advise against using "biweekly" in favor of "every two weeks" (or twice a week instead of "semiweekly"). The new hire who hears from the human resources office that he's to be paid "biweekly" and thinks that means a check on both Wednesday and Friday afternoon is headed for trouble.

As for "notorious," a little quick Googling suggests that the two most salient appearances of the word on the pop-cultural horizon are as the title of a 1946 Alfred Hitchcock movie and as the name of a hip-hop superstar mysteriously murdered in Los Angeles in 1997, Notorious B.I.G.

The latter, in particular, this suggests that the idea that "notoriety" = "bad fame" is pretty well fixed, but I may be bringing a lot of middle-class hang-ups to the discussion. The late Notorious B.I.G. lives on in his music.

And as for the Hitchcock flick: It's about how government agents try to get Ingrid Bergman, who has taken to drink after her father's conviction for treason against the United States, to spy on his Nazi friends in South America. It's a classic favorite, and it may have left whole generations thinking that if Ingrid Bergman was “notorious,” it wasn't a bad thing to be, especially if Cary Grant was involved.

A quick look at "notoriety" on Onelook.com suggests that the "bad fame" sense is the accepted usage. And it has been that way since the 17th century. But the original meaning of "notorious" was not negative. It simply meant "well known."

Sometimes two forks of a river flow together again downstream. Sometimes a distinction in meaning, often somewhat arbitrary anyway, gets lost and nobody misses it.

We aren't there yet with "notorious." But we may get there.

Clarity and simplicity are such important values in the public discourse that any journalist, whether writer or editor, must be always alert for blather, obfuscation, or new words introduced to camouflage bad deeds.

Forgive me if I state the obvious. Or sound hopelessly idealistic.

The Bible records the Lord urging the prophet Habakkuk, "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it." At least one commentary I've looked at to interpret this passage left me with a mental image of robed figures (in running sandals?) jogging through the desert past a series of billboards with the prophetic message in ALL CAPS. But I think that may not be quite what the writer, or the Lord, for that matter, had in mind.

Rather, the idea is that a writer's words should be clear and smooth enough that the reader's eyes should be able to run over the page (table). Euphemism and obfuscation are like potholes or tree roots in a runner's path.

In his essay in the current National Geographic on the world's national parks under threat, David Quammen has alerted me to a significant new pothole in the path of public discourse: the term "de-gazetting." It refers to the process by which a park is "disestablished," so to speak, or "de-listed" – downgraded to a lesser level of protection. It happened to the Amboseli National Park in Kenya last year.

De-gazetting, Quammen writes, is "a word with which we should all acquaint ourselves; it's a word, unfortunately, of the future. How so? Because other efforts to de-gazette national parks are likely to arise soon, as we citizens of various countries find our short-term appetites more compelling than our long-term ideals."

And where does this curious word come from? From "gazette" in the sense of "official journal," roughly analogous to the Congressional Record in the United States. In the case of the Amboseli National Park, the minister of wildlife and tourism announced that it would be downgraded to a national reserve and control of it returned to the Maasai people, its original owners.

This change was effected, without any consultation, by way of a published notice in the Kenya Gazette. "De-gazetting" made me think of "deaccessioning," which is how museums refer to "selling" or perhaps "unloading" the less significant works in their collections, or those less clearly related to their mission.

"Deaccessioning" popped onto the public radar during the tenure (1967-1977) of Thomas Hoving as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The American Association of Museums has lots to say about "deaccessioning" and why it's often the best way to deal with a particular object.

But it's a controversial concept – as reflected even in the example sentence offered by my online dictionary:

He also denied that... friends of the museum were permitted to buy... pieces that were deaccessioned (New York Times).

But back to "gazette." Does it have anything to do with "gazing"? Short answer: apparently not. "Gazette" has been used in English to mean a newspaper since 1605. It goes back through French and proper Italian to a bit of Venetian dialect – "gazeta," meaning originally a small copper coin and, by the mid-1500s, the monthly government newspaper this little coin could buy. The coin itself was literally a "little magpie" ("gazza," plus a diminutive ending).

Lexicographers seem uncertain whether "gazette" in its various forms as a name for a publication derives strictly from the coin or perhaps reflects an association with magpies and "false chatter," as my Online Etymology Dictionary suggests.

Whatever, "gazette" lives on both in the names of official publications, such as the Kenya Gazette, and a range of ordinary independent newspapers – two honorable strains of public discourse through which the reader should be able to "run."

I don't like to see the word morphed into a term for official subterfuge, or government management by stealth. And I don't think the magpies would approve either.

"Why can't they just call it 'fundraising'?" I grumbled to a friend, many, many moons ago, after she had just taken a job in the "development office" of one of New England's many fine private colleges.

It was my first exposure to the usage and I hadn't yet registered how widespread it was – and is. But it smacks of unnecessary euphemism.

"Development" in this sense is a term you're likely to have heard if you find yourself anywhere downwind from an institution of higher learning, especially, but by no means only, a private one; any cultural or arts organization, such as a library or museum; or a charitable or nonprofit agency such as a healthcare facility.

It's not as if raising money for one's alma mater or any other valuable institution is a sordid activity that has to be hidden under some other name. The American tendency to organize into, and generously support, voluntary associations for all sorts of purposes has been observed and celebrated at least since Tocqueville.

Development, the noun, derives, obviously, from develop, the verb, which comes from French words meaning to unwrap, unroll, or unfold. "Develop" is etymologically a counterpart of the verb "envelop."

Both the verb and the noun are used in different ways in different fields, but with some underlying commonalities: an opening or manifesting of some sort, and some sense of stages or phases, generally gradual but occasionally fast-moving.

Thus we have the development of buds and blossoms on a tree; the development of photographic film, in which the image appears; real estate development ("Phase II opening this spring!"); and, in the world of journalism, late-breaking developments on the big story.

But when I turn to OneLook.com, which lets me look up a word in several online dictionaries simultaneously, and glance at the "quick definitions" for "development," I see that there are eight of them, and none refer to fundraising.

This is not a good sign.

Let us beware the disconnect that arises when the practitioners of an activity call it something else than the term by which it's generally known.

("And what does Sally's new boyfriend do?" Uncle Ralph asks with avuncular concern. "He's the new development officer at Springback Junior College," Mom replies, as Sally has coached her. To which Uncle Ralph, who's no fool, shoots back, "You mean he hits people up for money?")

It gets all the more complicated when you consider that the kind of institutions that call their fundraisers "development officers" generally do a lot of things that really should be described as "development," e.g., "developmental studies" designed to refresh the skills or fill in the knowledge gaps of those wanting to continue their education, perhaps later in life, or after a hard-knocks childhood.

Thus when I ran across mention of some borderline students as "development cases" in the context of admissions to megabucks private institutions, I thought it referred to those students on whom the college has compassion, seeing unrealized potential that only needs to be brought out.

But no.

The term refers to borderline students, all right, but those whom the institution sees as potential donors down the line. It's development in that other sense. And the practice has at least one reporter fairly cranked up - Daniel Golden, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has just published a book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates."

As The Washington Post noted in its review of Golden's book,

That virtually all elite private colleges give preference to the sons and daughters of alumni will come as a surprise to no one. But preference also extends to wealthy applicants whose families have been identified as potential donors – "development cases" in the parlance of the trade.

Now that is a dubious development indeed.

The other day, while looking over a review of an Asian restaurant for a lifestyle magazine I work on, I ran across a reference to "Tuna Tar Tar."

Hmm??

Is this a specialty they serve in Pago Pago? Or among the Mau Mau rebels?

Is there such a thing as Mahi-Mahi Tar Tar?

Finally it dawned on me that what was meant was "tuna tartare," a sort of raw seafood equivalent to "steak tartare," which is essentially raw ground beef dressed up for a party. (It may be that both dishes are popular because, being uncooked, they can be served chop-chop.)

According to one recipe website, "The legend goes that Tartare tribes when fighting in the past didn't even have time to stop and cook their food. They are said to have kept the meat underneath their saddles and mince it in this way."

Well, if they didn't have time to cook their beef, they surely didn't have time to ride from the steppes of Central Asia all the way to the fishing grounds of Japan to catch their tuna. Did Tartars really make their way that far east?

On the other hand, Le Bernardin, in New York, the source of the tuna recipe I found online, is a very highly regarded restaurant where they presumably know whereof they speak.

I did have to check the spelling of "tartar" in my dictionary, though, and when I found no relevant entry for tuna, I decided to follow the analogy of its beefy counterpart and add the "e."

But "steak tartare," I note, is a locution my dictionary calls "pseudo-French."

Pseudo-French it may be, but a Google search for the phrase on French-language pages has just scored 60,000-plus hits. That suggests that pseudo-French must have a lot of native speakers (pseudo-Francophones?).

At least one of these recipe pages suggests that "true" steak tartare is made with horseflesh, which made its appearance in butcher shops around Paris in the latter half of the 19th century. That would seem to put a dent in the Genghis Khan theory of chopped beef.

Other sources trace the odyssey of ground beef from Russian to Germany (specifically, Hamburg) to New York, specifically to places like Delmonico's Restaurant, where steak tartare was evidently on the menu a century or more before Le Bernardin opened in the city.

All this demonstrates the "legs" a good bit of euphemism can have – "tartare" has caught on as a chi-chi way to say "raw" across a variety of cuisines around the world.

This little round of research has also reminded me of the fixative power of print – of dictionaries, in particular. I suspect that the writer of the restaurant review mentioned earlier may have simply taken the phrase "tuna tar tar" from a menu, written perhaps by someone not a native speaker of English, or even of pseudo-French. And the writer may have had the echo of "mahi-mahi" in the back of her mind.

But in my dictionary, I had authoritative guidance.

Words go into dictionaries in forms that may reflect who knows what ideas about Mongol hordes or Pacific fishermen or Parisian butchers. Once a word is officially "in," though, its evolution tends to slow down considerably.

To continue our culinary theme, you might say a dictionary can put a phrase into aspic. (I would Americanize that as "Jell-o," but somehow "put into Jell-o" lacks the metaphorical meaning that "put into aspic" has.)

Sometimes spelling changes reflect incorrect ideas of where a word comes from. Our English word "cutlet" came into French from "côtelette," a diminutive of "côte," meaning "rib." It has nothing to do with cutting. But people thought it did, and the spelling morphed – and the word was accepted into dictionaries that way, and it's likely to stay that way.

"Highfalutin" is another example of the fixative power of a dictionary. It's an adjective, generally tagged "informal," and it means "pretentious" or "pompous," or "affectedly genteel." Its origin isn't clear but it's generally described as coming from "high" plus "floating," or more often "fluting."

Just what "high-fluting" would mean is open to speculation, so I'll speculate that it's similar to the idea of "tooting one's own horn" or maybe "having too many bells and whistles."

The final "ing" has long since become "in," in the manner of easygoin', slow-talkin' Americans everywhere – but oddly, the apostrophe customary in such constructions has disappeared. This faux folksiness has been frozen into the spelling of the word in about a dozen popular dictionaries I've just consulted.

Isn't this great – a dictionary standard way of spelling an informal term used to put down pretentiousness?