Junior Has Learned A New Word.

Going Over The Edge With 'Precipitous'

By Henry Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 13, 2007; C01

Just as the '70s were quagmire years, our era could be The Precipice Years, thanks to President George W. Bush in a news conference yesterday.

In a strategic and linguistic coup, the president seemed to be saying that in our fight in Iraq we can forget about the shopworn old Vietnam menace called the quagmire. Now it's time to bravely face its equal and opposite menace, the precipice, as in the dread "precipitous withdrawal."

"Extremist groups would be emboldened by a precipitous American withdrawal," he said.

And: "A precipitous withdrawal would embolden al-Qaeda."

The word became a theme of the occasion, a mantra, even seducing the media, which have been looking for a fuzzy, buzzy word of this sort ever since "granularity," Bush's "shock and awe" and Bill Clinton's "triangulation" faded.

A reporter asked if it were possible to "not withdraw precipitously, but begin some sort of gradual withdrawal that prevents ethnic cleansing."

Nice try, but we all know that "gradual," like "escalate," is one of those words people associate with a quagmire, and we are so over that. (Also, "ethnic cleansing" is so '90s, when it blew genocide off the page -- that was back when we were all working to "read from the same page," as it happens.)

Anyway, our precipitous president is not a quagmire guy, so he doesn't do gradual anything. Instead of escalations, he does surges. He wants us to worry about precipitousness, not the quagmire: the fall, not the stall; the brink, not the sink; the steep, not the creep; the plunge, not the grunge; the edge, not the dredge.

Granted, the Iraq Study Group used it in December in the form of "precipitate," and the National Intelligence Estimate used it in January. Bush has used it at least since 2005, one student of the presidency said.

But yesterday may well have been one of those "benchmark" moments when "the facts on the ground" change and we need to acquire "new skill sets" to handle things, as we say nowadays.

It's like one of those moments when we've listened to some piquant Britishism for years, never daring to use it ourselves, and suddenly we're all saying "at the end of the day" instead of "when all is said and done," and things that vanish "go missing."

(Saying "Happy Christmas" instead of "Merry Christmas" stubbornly remains an affectation, however.)

Back to the precipice: People even know what "precipitous" means. They sense the steep, headlong dangerousness it has implied for centuries. It rarely means anything good, unless we're in a drought and we get precipitation, or in chemistry class and a super-saturated solution precipitates some gunk to the bottom of the test tube.

Pages of the Oxford English Dictionary warn of the threat signaled by this word: "headlong fall . . . perilous . . . thrown down . . . violent hurry . . . excessive suddenness . . . descent."

F. Scott Fitzgerald said in his notebooks: "Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story," which is just what the president did yesterday.

The story he told was about the American people: "When they really think about the consequences if we were to precipitously withdraw, they begin to say to themselves, maybe we ought to win this, maybe we ought to have a stable Iraq." Unless it precipitously turns into a quagmire.

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