

Lexicographic Javerts have homed in on the South Midland regionalism. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have throw off in the Clintonian sense, but the English Dialect Dictionary, by Joseph Wright, published in 1905, has this Dorsetshire usage from before the turn of the century: "Volks be throwen off 'bout it. Vather made vun 'bout it at tea-time." The contextual meaning: "to make fun of."

Mark Twain used it in his 1876 novel, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," when Tom tells Huckleberry Finn in Chapter 25, "But I bet you I ain't going to throw off on di'monds."

The phrase is in steady current use; Joan Hall at the Dictionary of American Regional English notes that DARE defines it as "to say uncomplimentary things about somebody," as in a tape of a Georgian: "Some of 'em thought I was throwin' off on the bus driver, but I didn't mean that."

The standard English synonyms are "disparage, denigrate, belittle"; a slang variation is "dump on." Mr. Clinton's usage was colorful, appropriate and timely; he can expect political partisans, as well as those goo-goos hung up on ethical standards, to be throwin' off on him for years.

To lovers of political discourse, the Watergate era was the Golden Age of Political Coinage. Never have so many memorable phrases been enshrined in our language in such a short period: The Big Enchilada at CREEP led the cover-up, as the hardball and dirty tricks played on those on the enemies list created a firestorm after the Saturday Night Massacre; the trail of the plumbers led to a smoking gun that no stonewalling or limited modified hangout or claim of executive privilege or deep-sixing of evidence could contain, and the Administration was left twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.

Ah, those were the days of Jill Wine and roses, at least to deep-throated sources and those of us who managed to stay out of jail. Will Whitewatergate be able to rise to such heights of original metaphor? I don't want to throw off on the new crowd, but most of the terminology today is derivative. Some usages bear watching.

Mr. Clinton rejected any Watergate analogy, "except any hysteria that they can gin up around it." This is no reference to gin, the alcoholic beverage, but is a shortening of ginger up, which Farmer and Henley reported a century ago meant "to make things lively or hum."

Few words have root as a root, but ginger is from the Sanskrit word for "antler-shaped root." Some engineers dispute this etymology of gin up, claiming its origin was a locution of workers at Eli Whitney's 19th-century cotton-picking engine, or cotton gin, but the ginger origin is reinforced by the memories of some of my correspondents who recall placing a piece of the root under a horse's tail to make the animal more sprightly at shows.

Cover-up: Mr. Clinton bridles at that word. (I bridle, too, at its hyphenation; can't we gin up some hysteria to drop the hyphen?) To dissociate himself from Watergate memories, Mr. Clinton said, "We're not covering up or anything; we are opening up." Used loosely, the noun cover-up means "an action to conceal a mistake"; used with more intensity, the word means "obstruction of justice," a Federal crime. The word appeared in a Raymond Chandler story in a 1935 Black Mask mystery magazine; it entered the lexicon of political scandal in a 1968 recording made by the financier Louis Wolfson of a conversation with Abe Fortas, in which the Supreme Court Justice said, "Your giving me and my accepting the foundation post was nothing but a cover-up."

When the President heard cover-up in a question, he cautioned, "Be careful how you use language." In this matter, close listeners can tell how careful he is being. He uses credible as a modifier in protestations of no wrongdoing: "There is no credible evidence and no credible charge that I violated any criminal or civil Federal law eight or nine years ago when most of these facts that are being bandied around are discussed." Note, also, the use of Federal in that sentence.

Firewall: in his New York Times column, Frank Rich wryly asked, "Firestorm meets stonewall?" No. "We have literally erected a firewall," the President said after the firestorm about tip-offs to White House aides from regulatory officials caused initial stonewalling at the White House, "between the White House and other regulatory agencies." The "wall of separation" has long been a trope to describe the American relationship between church and state, and the metaphor gains emphasis by being able to resist fire. (The Clinton use of literally in this case was mistaken, unless carpenters and plasterers have been brought in; he meant figuratively.)

Modernity in language was displayed by the White House deputy counsel, Joel I. Klein, in his memo to White House staff about gathering subpoenaed documents: "memoranda, records, reports, notes, books, files, summaries or records of conversations, meetings or interviews, summaries or records of telephone conversations, diaries, calendars, date books, telegrams, [ now here we boldly go where no White House counsel has gone before ] facsimiles, telexes, telefaxes, electronic mail . . . Bernoulli boxes . . . WORM disks . . . floptical disks." Can you imagine the metaphoric uproar if credible evidence of Federal (not state) wrongdoing were found on a WORM disk? (It stands for "Write Once, Read Many." You can write on a WORM, unlike a CD-ROM; you cannot erase, the way you can a hard disk.) A floptical disk, I presume, is your ordinary optical disk in the shape of a floppy.

And what of whitewater itself? The unsuccessful real-estate company adopted as its name a term first used in 1586 by William Harrison, an English topographer, in describing the swollen torrents of a river denied its direct course: "The water must of necessitie swell with the white waters which run downe from the land."

The picture of a couple in a raft or canoe that runs perilously through breakers and rapids, nearing precipitous falls, has been seized on by cartoonists and illustrators of magazine covers. "White Water is also the name of a man's cologne and after-shave from Revlon," James Conroy, a senior vice president at Revlon, points out. "Its name, crafted more than a year ago, had nothing to do with the political situation, but reflects its refreshing, casual, outdoor scent." Perfect Father's Day gift for a sweating White House aide.

Whitewatergate, a natural coinage, is too long to fit in a headline; the Whitewater scandal seems excessively critical, at least for now. That leaves us with a neutral borrowing from the French, who last century dealt with l'affaire Dreyfus, and most reporters are now calling the Clintons' latest time of troubles the Whitewater affair.