G.C. Merriam walked into his boss's office and sighed. "Sir," he said, "we've got a problem. There's pressure coming from all over the darn place, especially from the...Orange House." Merriam chuckled briefly to himself at his witty witticism before continuing. "They want us to revise our definitions of terror, terrorism and terrorist." He looked down at the piece of paper he was holding and added, "And the UN even wants us to change our definition of terrible."
Noah Webster, editor in chief of Everybody's Dictionary, the perennial source of information concerning the form, pronunciation, function, etymology, meaning, and syntactical and idiomatic use of words in the English language, narrowed his eyes to mere slits. Palms pressed together, he formed a steeple with his two index fingers. This development worried him, as it had become an almost everyday occurrence since 9/11 <ALSO: see September 11, 2001; Cognizance of Islam in North America; The Death of a 7-11 Society>. Before that fateful day, governments did not show a modicum of interest in Everybody's Dictionary, Webster thought. Now these hypocrites, whose penchant for hyperbole is only outdone by contemporary media moguls, are all of a sudden concerned about the most recondite definitions? Well, they should have known better than to meddle in the affairs of the world's authority on the English lexicon!
In the years since people <READ: America and its Coalition of the Willing; ALSO: see Moldova, Kazakhstan, Macedonia & Armenia> had watched with horror as commercial airliners were hijacked and subsequently used as civilian missiles, politicians, NGOs, and other assorted public interest groups could not stop taking an interest in the propagation of the English language. Today, there were requests sent to the offices of Everybody's Dictionary asking for revisions to traditionally thorny words like rebel, patriot, freedom and violence. However, there were now also pleas from people to update the meaning of words such as evidence (to "alternative facts") and WMD (to "Warmonger of Mass Destruction").
Initially, Noah Webster had believed the definition of terror as "a state of intense fear; a frightening aspect; a cause of anxiety; or violence committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands" to be more than sufficient. Though he still found that definition adequate, even in today's post-post-Cold War era <MORE at Freezing War era>, there was mounting pressure to review it.
"Specifically, what pariah of society is coming after us now?" Webster asked in a calculated tone of voice that sent shivers of fear up Merriam's spine.
"It's the White House Director of Communications, sir," Webster replied through a dry cough. "They want 'terror' to include 'any unpatriotic act against a Republican government, member of Congress, or relative—deceased or living—of the füh...er...of the President'." He looked down at his notes once more. "Oh, and any Supreme Court Justice that writes with their left hand or favours the left side over the right."
"And what about those donkeys that call themselves Democrats?"
"They were excluded. In addition, we received a telex from the junta in Burma."
"Mr. Merriam, how many times have I told you that we removed the word 'junta' from our dictionary ever since Pinochet switched teams in Chile!"
"Sorry, sir. The legitimate ruling party in Myanmar," Merriam corrected himself, "says that 'terrorist' should include 'any foreign national that despises, aggravates or otherwise laughs at overweight generals in shoddy military attire'."
"Stinking politicians and their mercurial tempers," Webster muttered. He lifted his chin and adjusted his bifocals. "Where do they get off being so contemptuous about our linguistic forays into the darkest corners of the English language!"
"There's also a fax from the Principality of Lichtenstein."
"What do those ruddy land-locked bastards want from us?"
G.C. Merriam frowned. "They want an amendment written in about tax havens not being supportive of terrorists or terrorist regimes."
Noah Webster went cross-eyed.
It had not always been this way. For twenty-nine of the thirty-five years he had worked as an editor, Noah Webster had been at Everybody's Dictionary, a sub-division of All Mighty Books, which was a division of Reality Bites books, whose holding company, Truth Serum Productions, was owned by a multinational company operating out of the Cayman Islands, and which was traded publicly on the Belgian Stock Exchange (and known by its acronym, FEDUP).
Noah Webster had a sterling resume. Born and raised in Bath, England, he attended Cambridge University, then went on to Harvard for his master's and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Linguistics. His doctoral thesis, titled "The Language of Colour: How Black Became the New White in the Era of Post-Civil Rights Marches," managed to cause quite a sensation in the Ivory Towers of higher learning, no small feat in a time marked by constant social turmoil. From there he had moved on to work at several major publishing houses in New York and London before being offered his present job.
Although people in the industry had speculated that he left his previous position for nothing more than money, Noah Webster could never—and would never—admit to anyone that the real reason had to do with chocolate. He loved chocolate. More to the point, Noah Webster had a chocolate fetish. He ate it every day, sometimes on its own, sometimes sprinkled over his meals. He would even periodically hire a Lady of the Night, drench her in melted chocolate, and proceed to lick it off. It should come as no surprise, then, that Noah Webster loved his job, or, to be more precise, he loved working in Geneva, where the head office of Everybody's Dictionary was located.
Early on, things had been quiet. There was the demise of communism and the Soviet Union to contend with, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EEC-turned-EC-turned-EU, and the death of Deng Xiaoping. Yet all that had little impact on people's vernacular, and, therefore, an inconsequential impact on his job. The Gulf War had been a little trickier to work around (when sand became part of a racial slur and the pronunciation of Iraq somehow turned into EYE-rak), but not impossible to deal with.
All that changed on 9/11. Since then Noah Webster's work had been put under a microscope, specifically by those who jockeyed for position in the hierarchy of public opinion formulation <ALSO: see media/fake news terrorists; cultural terrorists; linguistic terrorists>. People were always at him to "update and revise words so that they reflect the current state of the world." It was a task he had come to loathe. Now the only thing he feared more than where the world was heading with its use of the English language was relinquishing his post to somebody else—someone who would not be as vigilant in his or her approach to the semantics of the language he loved as dearly as a block of the most exquisite almond-filled dark chocolate.
"Sodding politicians and obtuse generals," Webster lamented. He stood up and looked out his window onto the city below. "What other scandalous news have you brought for me, Mr. Merriam?"
"You're not going to like it, sir. Twenty-four Sussex Drive emailed me, asking us to change our definition of 'terrific'."
Noah Webster smiled to himself. He never tired of the Canadians' flippant requests.
"Apparently they're unhappy with how they're constantly used in our dictionary's examples that include the use of 'terrific'. They cited the following sentences: 'Keiko the hemophiliac had a terrific time at Vancouver's shark pool'; 'The man gave the woman a terrific elbow to the solar plexus by mistake and paid a terrific price'; and, 'If she were any more terrific, she'd have a hockey stick in her hands, moose antlers on her head, and a case of beer in the fridge'. What should we do, sir?"
"Those pratts don't know I'm doing them a favour by keeping it light!"
Just then Shirley Tempest walked in with a stack of books. A short woman with fire-engine red hair, she cowered under the frothing mouth of Noah Webster, the most feared—yet respected—person at the publishing house. "Where should Shirley put the books down, Mr. Webster?" she asked from the door. Her face was barely visible from behind the books, and her glasses had been knocked off center.
Noah Webster looked at Shirley Tempest with devouring eyes. Her use of the third person excited him to no end, and the fact that she split her infinitives was most certainly her way of teasing him, like she was dressing her sentences in morphological lingerie. It made Noah Webster think that his 22-year-old intern was native to another land, a place replete with chocolate-covered sirens.
"Ah, just, ah, over there," Webster stammered, his voice quivering. Damn it, why can't every red-blooded nymph refer to themselves in the third person? Now, if only I could get her to dangle her participles in front of me!
"Sir?" G.C. Merriam asked, still waiting for an answer.
"Oh, yes, yes, yes. Just send them all a standard, alliterative response: We hope to rectify the situation with a dose of sensible semantics sometime soon."
"Got it!"
When G.C. Merriam left, Noah Webster focused his attention on Shirley Tempest. "Ms. Tempest," he beckoned from behind his desk.
Shirley placed the books on a table. Odd, she considered as she quickly scanned the spines on the shelves beside her. Each title has the word chocolate in it, she considered.
"Ms. Tempest?" Noah Webster started once again. "What's your take on terror?"
"Terror?" Shirley said the word in a shrill cry, afraid that the question was a test. "Oh, Shirley wouldn't take terror well and say that it's illegal."
"Yes, yes, excellent. But how would you define it?"
"Hmm...Shirley would have to say that terror, for lack of a better word, is anything that terrorizes us."
Webster shrugged in his chair and nearly collapsed on top of his totem pole. "Let me put it to you this way: What constitutes terror?"
"Well, Shirley would probably say terror is anything that excites the public to the point of being so excited that they lose their ability to focus on what's really important."
Noah Webster groaned. "And?"
"And Shirley would also say that terror is something that has been used to malign any number of peoples and events throughout the course of history."
Webster had to put a hand on his throbbing, pulsating head. "Ms. Tempest," he said cautiously, "would you be an angel and send Mr. Düsseldorf into my office?"
Shirley grinned from ear to ear. Noah Webster saw nothing but chocolate.
Günter Düsseldorf was the senior proofreader at Everybody's Dictionary, the man responsible for catching the colons where they had no place congregating, the hyphens that should be at home in bed, the spelling mistakes that had slipped through the cracks, and the commas that needed to be made comatose.
"Ja, boss?"
"If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, Mr. Düsseldorf—take off that bloody eye patch!"
Günter consented, revealing his glass eye.
"Where are we with our galley proofs for the next edition?" Webster asked, outwardly calm but inwardly falling to pieces.
"Almost done, ja?"
"Well, get your arse to the computer and put a stop to it! Webster paused. "The terror bug has reared its ugly head again."
"Nein!" Günter screamed.
"Nein's right!" Webster proclaimed. "We've got to put off publication of the next edition by a week or two. We need time to work around this trite but terrible turn of events." Webster scratched his groin area and lit a cigarette. Günter sashayed over to his boss's desk, lifted a leg and sat provocatively on the edge of it.
Webster felt his one-eyed monk becoming invigorated. It pained him to think that he had two lithe human beings at his beck and call whom he wanted to smear in dark chocolate and sprinkle with nuts.
"Mr. Düsseldorf, I have to get back to work," he said plainly. It took every ounce of his strength to suppress the hunger, the burning inside of him. When he stood up, the two embraced, kissing each other on both cheeks. "Now, get Mr. Merriam back in here, please. There's something I forgot to tell him."
G.C. Merriam flew into the room, three-ring binder open and pencil in hand.
Noah Webster squinted so hard his eyes were barely perceptible. "We're going to make some changes to the definition of 'terror'," he said as he walked over to his liquor cabinet and mixed himself a whiskey and soda. He drained the glass, recited the changes he wanted made, and then asked, "Have you got all that?"
G.C. Merriam shook his head up and down at a furious pace. "All of it, sir."
"Good. Now get Shirley Tempest back in here before I launch an ICBM!"
"Yes, sir!"
______________________________
Two months later, when the 13th edition of Everybody's Dictionary was published, there were 299 additional entries. More than the extraordinary number of new words, what drew the most attention was the revised definition of terror. Some praised Noah Webster's strength to take a chance with his "high-handed semantics," while others swore like sailors, claiming it was just "pedantic pedagoguery at its plainest." There were those who said the English language had reached new heights and those who said it had sunk to new lows. In the end, though, the final judge was the reader, who could now form their own opinion of the word that had come under such scrutiny ever since that disastrous day when the world went mad.
Main Entry: ter·ror
Pronunciation: 'ter-er'
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French terreur, from Latin terror, from terrEre to frighten; akin to Greek trein to be afraid, flee, tremein to tremble—more at TREMBLE
1: a state of fear (ALSO: see horrible work of fiction by deceased author)
2 a: one that inspires fear (ALSO: see narcissists, habitual liars, lobotomy/corpus callosotomy patients): SCOURGE b: a frightening aspect <the terrors of Sweden after that "thing" occurred> c: a cause of anxiety <My anxiety was heightened on January 20, 2017>: WORRY d: an appalling person or thing; especially: BRAT <That terror-monger ruined everything for the world during his time in office>
3: REIGN OF TERROR (ALSO: see (1) French Revolution, Russian Revolution, 9/11 Revolution [neo-American Revolution]; (2) Reign of Outta' Sync's Donnie T.)
4: violence (as invasion) committed by government(s) in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands <Insurrection and revolutionary terror led to deeper pockets for the wealthiest 1%> synonym see FEAR
- ter·ror·less /-l&s/ adjective <He didn't invade Syria, Iran, Scandinavia or Australia, and was therefore seen as terrorless>