>Gibbs later said he had spoken "inartfully."
William Safire says (said) inartful is the first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/magazine/20wwln-safire-t.html
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About 15 years later, a new and strikingly different antonym for artful appeared. Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York had received a barrage of vitriolic letters from opponents of a bill he supported to require motorists to wear seat belts. He lashed back by comparing his tormentors to “hunters who drink beer, don’t vote and lie to their wives.” That triggered a new barrage, this time from the gun lobby, many of whose members do vote, causing the governor to shift into reverse: “My response was inartful,” he admitted, “and could leave a false impression of disrespect for the National Rifle Association and its many members. I regret that.”
As I then reported gleefully in a language column headlined “Inartful Dodger,” the lobby’s top gun continued to snipe at the apologetic Cuomo: “He uses the word ‘inartful,’ ” said Alonzo Garcelon, the association’s irate president. “In other words, he meant what he said, only wishes he had said it differently. Look up inartful in the dictionary. If you find it, let me know. I couldn’t.”
Twenty-three years fly by. Try to look it up today. Still no inartful in the great repositories of the language. Nobody in the wide world of lexicography listened to the eloquent Cuomo or noted my headline in The Times Magazine. Fortunately, the Web-site-nik running www.wideawakecafe.com/p=2002 recently rattled my cage.
Now, at last, thanks to Senator Barack Obama, inartful may get the recognition it deserves. When retired Gen. Wesley Clark, whose hopes for the Democratic nomination never got traction but who is now an Obama surrogate, said, “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” that was taken by McCainiacs to be a slur on the Republican’s heroic military service. Obama’s response was to minimize his supporter’s tasteless remark: “The fact that . . . General Clark said something that was inartful about John McCain, I don’t think is what is keeping Ohioans up at night.”
The lexicographically unrecognized word was mantracized by the Obama staff that is, made the campaign’s favorite locution in ameliorating awkward statements. Last November, a spokesman said Obama believed the D.C. gun ban to be constitutional, but when the Supreme Court decided otherwise, the senator then said he agreed with the decision; the earlier statement was described by spokesman Bill Burton as “inartful.” Charles Krauthammer, the media’s foremost serious critic of the Obama campaign, wrote that this attempt to “explain the inexplicable . . . suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary ‘Inartful’: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial.”
That was a devilish definition in the Ambrose Bierce tradition. (In a fit of postpartisanship, the columnist chose the neutral Obamaworld rather than the dismissive Obamarama or the savage Obamanation.) However, as a service to fellow harmless drudges now updating online dictionaries, here is my take on today’s artsmanship:
Artful primarily means “sly, manipulative, guileful.” Only secondarily does it mean “skillful” and is not a substitute for artistic.
Artless means “naïve,” sometimes shaded toward “natural” as in “natural charm,” and “without artifice” (not to be confused with “artificial”); a second, pejorative sense is “crude, uncultured.”
Inartful means “awkwardly expressed but not necessarily untrue; impolitic; ill-phrased; inexpedient; clumsy.” Welcome, lexical orphan parented by political usage, to the delights of definition!
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