Blog Language a la Safire

On Language
Moon Bats & Wing Nuts
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Time magazine, which advanced its publication day in order to compete with the Friday-night fights, carried an unusually combative Joe Klein column recently jabbing at “left-wing blognuts and conservative wingnuts.” He popped Eli Pariser, executive director of the liberal MoveOn.org, as “the nation’s blognut in chief” and Vice President Cheney as “the nation’s wingnut in chief.” Just before the bell, the newsmagazine pugilist in chief landed a right cross to “The Wall Street Journal’s quasi-wingnut editorial page” and strode to his corner with a Parthian cavil at “the chest thumping of the various blognut extremists.”

(Quasi, Latin for “as if,” when used as a prefix means “seemingly”; I presume the columnist used the qualifier in this case as a form of journalistic courtesy. However, “blognut extremists” will be derided by members of the Squad Squad as redundant.)

Earlier this year, the following etymological fishhook appeared in this space: “The prevailing put-down of right-wing bloggers is wingnuts; this has recently been countered by the vilification of left-wing partisans who use the Web as moonbats, the origin of which I currently seek.”

There was enough of an e-maelstrom about the coinage of moonbat to lead to the origin. This included the entry in Wikipedia, a free online cooperative encyclopedia that was recently the subject of a New Yorker article and is giving the professionally edited Britannica fits. (Curiously, Eric Raymond, described in the magazine as “the open-source pioneer,” is quoted accusing Wikipedia of being “infested with moonbats.”)

The online source reports that “the phrase was popularized in 2002 by Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net, a libertarian blog. . .originally rendered as ‘Barking Moonbat,’ suggesting that certain issues seem to trigger a reflexive response from some people much like wolves howl at the moon.”

Reached at the blog he founded, de Havilland says he began using the term in 1999, during his “preblogging days.” He holds that it is nonideological: “Although the term has become beloved by conservatives to describe people on the left, and certainly I think the quintessential moonbat is Noam Chomsky, it is really quite an ‘ecumenical’ term of abuse for dogmatists of any ilk — left, right or libertarian.”

But coiners can’t be choosers; when it comes to political Americanisms, usage determines meaning, and the overwhelming use of moonbat is in derogation of what used to be called “the loony left.” Loony comes from luna, Latin for “moon,” root of lunatic, one supposedly influenced by the moon. Theodore Roosevelt said in 1913 that he had to “fight the silly reactionaries. . .and on the other hand to try to exercise some control over the lunatic fringe among the reformers.”

The association of the left with the moon was advanced by the Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, who asked in 1979, “What about your Governor Moonbeam?” When the subject of his gibe, Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, considered a run for president in 1991, Royko confessed that it was no “unorthodox lifestyle” that had earned Brown that nickname, but it was “because a guy in Chicago was stringing some words together to earn his day’s pay and tossed in what he thought was an amusing phrase. And if he had it to do over again, he sure as hell wouldn’t.”

From the foregoing, the casual reader might assume that we have the origin of the word moonbat. But not from the Websightful alone, or from the blogging community exclusively, comes the data-mining of the Phrasedick Brigade. The above-mentioned fishhook here, in The Times Magazine, produced readers eager to share details beyond the ken of cyberspacesuits.

The e-maelstrom contained a tip that led to a talk with Lawrence Merritt, archivist for Boeing, whose specialty is the heritage of McDonnell aircraft. “The XP-67 bomber destroyer was an experimental fighter plane that had its first flights in February of 1944,” he informs me. “We wanted a nighttime fighter to attack German bombers if they were to attack New York or some other American target. By the time it was ready to go, it was obvious that the future of aviation was in jet planes, not propeller planes, so they never went into production.

“It was never officially named the Moonbat,” Merritt insists. “Airplane enthusiasts called me up all the time in the early 1970’s asking about the Moonbat, and I told them this is not the name of the plane. But in that community, it stuck. Some folks thought it looked like a bat and was supposed to fly at night, and that’s where they dreamed up moonbat.”

Is there a written citation somewhere? “The first use I have in our archives,” the aircraft historian says, “is from a December 1973 Wings magazine in an article about the XP-67 entitled ‘It Might Have Been Moonbat.”’ (That was a play on the lyric to the song “Moonglow.”)

So that was the coinage, right? Wait — a late entry comes in from Matt Rudary of the Heinlein Society, which has a concordance of the works of the pioneering sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein. In his 1947 short story “Space Jockey,” he named the third stage of a rocket to the moon the Moonbat, and in another story a year later, “The Black Pits of Luna,” one Heinlein character was the scoutmaster of the Moonbat Patrol.

Today’s linguistic space odyssey shows how mainstream readers can tangle with the weaving Web. A last word: Don’t knock yourself out looking for the origin of e-maelstrom, “a storm of electronic communications.” It was minted today, right here, and if it does not die in the nonce, a dispute will arise over capitalization. Merriam-Webster and American Heritage use lowercase maelstrom, but Webster’s New World, steeped in the Dutch etymology of “whirling stream” and the name of a specific, swirling tidal current off the west coast of Norway, both lowercases and capitalizes. I prefer the initial cap, but — as we see today — coiners can’t be choosers.