Free The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time by William Safire Page A

says Frank Renzulli, co-executive producer and a writer of the show. “Southern Italians tend to make the c a g, so compare becomes gompare . Dropping the last letter is very Neapolitan, so it becomes goompar and then goombah .” Robin Green, another executive producer (it’s hard to figure from the titles who is the show’s capo di tutti capi ), contrasts the “godfather” meaning of that word with goomah, which she defines as “mistress.” She adds, “The language we’re using is from the neighborhood, a street language that’s bastardized Italian—American forms of Italian words.”
    I ran goomah past Jimmy Breslin, the Newsday columnist who wrote The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and he confirms the “alternative wife” sense. While I had him on the phone, I tried come heavy, which Jimmy defined as either “bring money” or “come armed”; the show’s legion of executive producers prefer the latter.
    Agita means “acid indigestion.” In that regard, skeevy comes from schifare, “to disgust.” The name of the mob leader’s boat is Stugots, which Entertainment Weekly defined as “idiot,” but which has a meaning closer to the Spanish cojones, “the courage symbolized by primary male sex characteristics.”
    That should be enough to get you through a couple of episodes, unless the other endless, unoriginal obscenities get you down. HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, had a useful glossary of what the executive producers call their mobspeak on its Web site, but the understandably offended National Italian American Foundation all but mock-whacked the corporate brass who—suddenly afflicted with agita —removed the offensive page.

    Compassion. In the case of PGA Tour v. Martin, the Supreme Court held (7-2) that the game of golf would not be fundamentally altered if a handicapped contestant in a tournament was allowed to ride in a golf cart. Because the game was played in a place of public accommodation, the Americans With Disabilities Act applied, and the court upheld judges who directed the Professional Golfers Association to let the golfer Casey Martin ride.
    Justice Antonin Scalia began his dissent with this sentence: “In my view today’s opinion exercises a benevolent compassion that the law does not place it within our power to impose.”
    The term benevolent compassion puzzled Noam Cohen, executive editor of Inside.com and a former copy editor at the New York Times . Like many who assume that I am one to whom the high court’s decisions about language can be appealed, he wrote to me: “I was wondering what you made of Justice Scalia’s use of the term benevolent compassion . Isn’t that redundant? Can there be a ‘malevolent compassion’?”
    My appellant—a member of an elite group of tautology-spotters that calls itself the Squad Squad—noted that Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” Writes Cohen: “That would seem to have benevolence tied to its very nature. What’s weird is that the offending sentence was the first in Scalia’s particularly stinging dissent—he must have thought about it.”
    I agreed; he must have. A judge noted for his pungently precise prose doesn’t modify a noun with a closely related adjective without thinking it through. What was his original intent? So I put it to Justice Scalia directly: “Was it, as the members of the Squad Squad suggest, redundant? Or were you differentiating from some other kind of compassion?”
    “I am shocked and dismayed (shocked and dismayed!),” Scalia tonguein cheekily replies, “by the suggestion in your note of June 10 that my reference to ‘benevolent compassion’ can be absolved of redundancy only if I was ‘differentiating [that] from some other kind of compassion.’”
    Note his bracketed that, which is a correction of the English in my note. By inserting that, he indicates