Semantics. I spent most of my college years dealing with the semantics of language, both in class and on stage. It’s an interest that has remained with me, an observation that I can’t shut off. Sure, I hear what you’re saying, but what do you really mean? Do you even know yourself? And when I reply, did I even hear the question? It keeps language from being dull and static. We communicate through so much text these days, but even the most inventive emoticon can fail to invoke meaning. That requires nuance, intonation and inflection. And context always helps, though soundbitten newsbots would convince us otherwise.
“We’ve got to stay the course, and we will stay the course.”
So sayeth our President. Again. Just yesterday. He loves that phrase. It invokes determination, gives an impression of leadership. I believe he’s shooting for historical quotability, kind of like Churchill’s “Never Surrender.” But where the late Prime Minister was giving his people hope, imploring them indisputably to maintain and fight against an incursive threat, President Bush’s call to continue is far more nebulous in meaning.
Stay the course, he says. Keep going, he means. Carry on.
His phrase has an interesting, if elusive, history. William Safire delved into it’s origins back in January, finding curiously that “staying” once actually meant “stopping” rathing than “going.”
“When Faustus had with pleasure ta’en the view
Of rarest things, and royal courts of kings,
He stayed his course, and so returned home…“
– Christopher Marlowe, The Tragickal History of Dr Faustus, 1588
Faustus. Now he was a deal-maker. Had a pact with the devil himself, yet still knew enough to turn back from time to time.
Staying the course. If you take it in way it is most widely understood, he means for the US to stay in Iraq, to shepherd her into the impending independence of June 30. Afterwards, we can start to scaledown and step back. Or perhaps not.
“There’s not going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what it is on June 30th, except that we will be there then at invitation of a sovereign Iraqi government…”
– Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, April 2, 2004
The line between the rebuilding of Iraq and the on-going War on Terrorism is going grainy like sand in a storm. So it’s likely that he is always referring instead to that War, his modern crusade, implying that the course has a long, long, long way to go before we will see the end.
It’s all semantics, anyway.
