Talknophical Assumnancy

THE NEW LANGUAGE OF POLITICS (An Anecdotal Dictionary of Catchwords, Slogans and Political Usage) by William Safire. 528 pages. Random House. $10.

This useful thesaurus confirms the suspicion that today's political phrasemakers are members of an eminent brotherhood devoted to the preservation of the hoary phrase--curators of the cliche. Even more pertinent is the discovery by Author Safire, a public-relations executive and former campaign aide of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, that there are many misconceptions about the pedigrees of political bromides. The new language of politics is actually old.

It was not Herbert Hoover who promised "a chicken in every pot," for example. The phrase was used in a 1928 G.O.P. campaign flyer, and was perpetuated as a Hooverism after Al Smith seized upon it for an ironic, scoffing attack. In any event, the term originated with France's King Henry IV (1553-1610), a champion phrasemaker of his day. He observed: "I wish there would not be a peasant so poor in all my realm who would not have a chicken in his pot every Sunday." Henry was also the three-centuries-removed ghostwriter for James G. Elaine's "plumed knight." He even coined the term le Grand Dessein, which was appropriated as F.D.R.'s Great Design and later as J.F.K.'s Grand Design.

New and Used Deals. Other phrases have also lain fallow for decades before being well turned again for a new generation of voters. F.D.R.'s "New Deal" was Prime Minister David Lloyd George's campaign slogan of 1919, and Robert La Follette used it in 1924. But both usages were antedated in writings by Carl Schurz in 1871 and Petroleum V. Nasby in 1866. Otherwise the phrase is probably as old as card games.

Other saws and their sources in a campaigner's glossary:

sb DIEHARD: Taken from the nickname of the Middlesex Regiment, the 57th Foot, acquired at the Battle of La Albuera in 1811, when the badly wounded commander exhorted his troops: "Die hard, men, die hard!" The term was later applied to a recalcitrant faction in the House of Lords.

sb HACK: The source is England's hackney horse, a creature that was let out for hire; it was usually mistreated, and became dull, broken down and exhausted. The word is particularly adaptable to politics, because political hacks are disciplined by a party whip.

sb HATCHETMAN: A literal derivation from the military vocabulary of coIonial America, when a hatchetman, or axman. chopped foliage in advance of troops operating in woods or swamp. On the political ladder, a henchman (etymologically, the Anglo-Saxon hengest-man, or horse groom) is one rung above a hanger-on but one rung below a hatchetman.

sb HECKLE: Essentially evolved from the Midd'e English word hekele (to comb flax or to tease or ruffle hemp). An 1808 Scottish dictionary added the second definition of heckle as "to tease with questions."

sb HUSTINGS: Derived from Old English for the place from which parliamentary candidates addressed the electorate, but originating in the Old Norse husthing, which translates literally as "house meeting."

sb I SEE . . . : A rosy-visioned device most recently revived by Richard Nixon at Miami Beach. An early halcyon-evoker was Robert G. Ingersoll, who orated in 1876 on behalf of James G. Blaine: "I see our country filled with happy homes . . . I see a world without a slave." F.D.R., in 1940: "I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime . . . I see an America of great cultural and educational opportunity for all its people." Adlai Stevenson, in 1952: "I see an America where no man fears to think as he pleases, or say what he thinks . . . I see an America as the horizon of human hopes."

sb KISS OF DEATH: Erroneously accepted as having originated with the Mafia custom in Sicily. It is Biblical, deriving from the kiss of Judas and his betrayal of Christ.

sb STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Coined in its present context by Connecticut Newspaper Editor Charles Dudley Warner in 1850, when he wrote: "True it is that politics makes strange bedfellows." He stole it from Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act II, Scene 2), in which Trinculo, forced by a storm to seek refuge under a sheet with the abhorrent Caliban, says: "There is no other shelter hereabout: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

If anything, these samples prove that today's politicians are much too polite, not to say unimaginative, in their terminology. Satire's best entry is, alas, hardly ever heard these days. It is snollygoster, a word that Harry Truman revived briefly in 1952. According to Truman, a snollygoster was a son of a bitch -- in other words, a politician. It is probably related to snallygaster, which is derived from the German schnelle Geister, or "quick spirits." In Maryland, the snallygaster is a mythical bird of prey that feeds on unwary poultry and children. In 1895, a Georgia editor described a snollygoster as "a fellow who wants office regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy." The word may be obsolete, but not the breed.

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