F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre Allegedly Explains:
“What’s a ‘clintonym’?”

COPYRIGHTED © F. GWYNPLAINE MacINTYRE and GWYNPLAINE ENDEAVOURS, LLC.

The English language has been very good to me, so I try to give something back to her. In the decades that I’ve been a professional author, usually writing in English, I’ve tried to enrich the English language in several ways:

• by creating new usages for existing words;
• by resurrecting obscure but useful words that have unfairly fallen into neglect; and
• (best of all!) by inventing new words.

Among the words I’ve invented are “glutcorp” — which means just what you probably guessed it means — and “yesterwards”. That’s my word to describe travel uptime: against the conventional current of time, into the past. It can also apply to other concepts besides time travel: for instance, memories also travel yesterwards. Other words which I’ve invented and used in my writing include “robutler” — an artificial or android servant — and “nanobot”. The latter word identifies a robot of microscopic size, designed to function in the human bloodstream or in some other very small environment. I predict that nanobots — both my word and the device which it describes — will become reality, very possibly in your lifetime.

My novel The Woman Between the Worlds, originally published in 1994 (now back in print from iUniverse) contains the earliest appearance in print of “Yahooligans”, a word which I invented. A few years later, the Yahoo!® search engine rolled out a web portal just for kids, called “Yahooligans”. Did they steal this name from me? More likely somebody else just had the same original idea that I had, only I had it more originally than they originally had it. (The Yahooligans portal is now renamed Yahoo!® Kids.)

Another word I invented is (drum roll, please) “clintonym”. A very proud moment in my life occurred on 2 December, 2001, when language authority William Safire — in his “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine — credited none other than (shrimp roll, please) ME as the inventor of the very useful word “clintonym”. Mr Safire also credited me by name as this term’s originator on page 48 of his highly entertaining and informative book The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time.

Unfortunately, Mr Safire made a couple of errors. Firstly, he capitalised the word. My term “clintonym” should never be capitalised unless it starts a sentence . . . and, unfortunately, there aren’t as many Clintons starting sentences as there ought to be. Some day soon, I expect to pick up a newspaper and read the headline “CLINTON STARTS SENTENCE”. Until then, I can only hope.

More fatally, Mr Safire did not share with his readers my definition of the word “clintonym”. So, here it is:

A clintonym is any statement which is technically truthful but which achieves the purpose of A DELIBERATE LIE, by intentionally misdirecting the listener (or reader).

For example: a mother asks her 8-year-old son “Did you wash your hands?” He knows perfectly well what she means: did he wash his hands JUST NOW? The truthful answer is “no”, but he doesn’t want to admit this. Yet he doesn’t want to tell a direct lie, either. So, he deliberately casts his mind yesterwards to an occasion several months ago (or years ago) when he actually DID wash his hands, while telling his mother “Yes, I washed my hands.” This is a clintonym: the 8-year-old boy is truthfully referring to a past occasion, fully aware that his mother will misperceive this (to his advantage) as referring to the current situation.

Cast your mind back to 17 August 1998, when Slick Willie Clinton — referring to his relationship with government employee Monica Lewinsky — stated unequivocally “There is not a sexual relationship”. Slick Willie intentionally used the present tense to conceal the fact that there HAD been just such a sexual relationship, now finished and therefore existing in the past tense. When confronted with his own bafflegab, Slick Willie replied “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” So that’s sorted, then.

For an even better clintonym, watch and listen carefully to the videotape of Slick Willie Clinton uttering the immoral immortal words “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”. Reading this statement on the page (or the computer screen), with no vocal inflections to enhance it, most people would punctuate Slick Willie’s utterance as follows: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman [comma, begin new clause of same sentence] Miss Lewinsky”. But if you watch and listen closely to this Zapruder film of fornicational forensics, Slick Willie is actually saying something quite different: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman [period. End of sentence. Begin entirely new sentence on an unrelated subject:] Miss Lewinsky”.

I would wager any amount of money that, when Slick Willie spoke the words “that woman”, he was intentionally concentrating his thoughts on a mental image of some OTHER woman: not Monica Lewinsky (whom Slick Willie definitely DID have sex with), but some entirely unrelated woman, whom Slick Willie has never had sex with recently. (Perhaps Hillary.)

By visualising that other (non-Lewinsky) woman while speaking the words “I did not have sexual relations”, and fully aware that his words would be MISinterpreted as a reference to Miss Lewinsky, Slick Willie spoke a clintonym: a technically truthful statement which achieved the purposes of a lie.

Ordinary crooks lie. Big crooks use clintonyms.

In my one and only personal encounter (so far) with Slick Willie, I got the last word. On 30 June, 2003, I went to Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre to attend a memorial commemoration for the brilliant author Peter Stone, who’d died a few weeks earlier. Stone, the recipient of the Oscar, Emmy, Edgar and several Tony Awards, had also been very active in fund-raising for the Democratic Party. Among the scheduled speakers at the event were Peter Stone’s friends Lauren Bacall and Stanley Donen.

However, the event led off with a NON-scheduled speaker. The lights at the podium came up to reveal Slick Willie Clinton, smirking and preening. He proceeded to give a long self-congratulatory speech which was allegedly about his good buddy Peter Stone, but which actually consisted of complimentary plaudits for Bonnie and Clyde Slick Willie and Hillary. All round me in the seats of the theatre, blue-haired old ladies were swooning at the honeyed words of this rapist and snake-oil salesman.

Suddenly, Slick Willie’s self-fellation was interrupted by a shout from the third row of the stalls: “How’s Monica?” Yep, ‘twas I who spoke. I saw the look of annoyance on Slick Willie’s face, and it brought rapture to my heart. I also saw two burly dark-suited men who looked suspiciously like Secret Service agents heading in my direction. Fortunately, I know the layout of the Rodgers Theatre better than they do, so I ducked to the lower level, scarpered across, and came up on the other side just when Slick Willie was approaching the punchline of a long anecdote with himself as the hero. “You better put some ice on that!” I shouted at the Rapist-in-Chief, ruining his punchline. Then, like some anarchic version of Whack-a-Mole, as the Fedsters closed in on me, once again I vanished into the depths and popped up somewhere else, this time in the upper dress circle, another jeering taunt at the ready. The look of dismay on Slick Willie’s face will always remain fresh in my memory.

Oddly, the next day’s media coverage of the Peter Stone memorial made no mention of Slick Willie’s unscheduled participation . . . probably because the reporters didn’t want to describe how he’d been embarrassed by an unidentified heckler. Unidentified? Reader, ‘twas I.

Score so far: F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, 1; Slick Willie, nowt. Watch this space for news of a rematch.

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