Edition: U.S. / Global

On Language; Who's in Those Details?

By William Safire
Published: July 30, 1989

THERE IS AN OLD German saying,'' a source in Bremen told The Washington Post's Hobart Rowen in 1978, ''that >the Devil is in the details.''

Max M. Kampelman, the United States arms negotiator, told Reuters in 1987 that agreement was close on intrusive verification, but ''you know >the Devil is in the details.''

''The old arms-negotiation maxim, '>the Devil is in the details,' rarely seemed as apt as it did last week,'' wrote Tamar Jacoby in Newsweek later that year, as ''an excuse for voting against the President: the Devil in the details made them do it.''

Gennadi I. Gerasimov, the dashingly handsome Soviet spokesman, spoke in 1987 of the ''three problematical D's: Devil, diplomats and details. The diplomats must now chase the Devil out of the details.''

From these citations, one may assume that the details are occupied by the Devil. But wait: ''Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German Bauhaus architect,'' wrote Sarah Booth Conroy in The Washington Post in 1979, ''said, '>God is in the details.' ''

''This is definitely not an art,'' wrote Hilton Kramer in 1981 in The New York Times, ''in which >God is in the details.''

'' '>God is in the details,' Friedrich Nietzsche once said,'' wrote Harvey D. Shapiro in the financial pages of The New York Times in 1983.

Roone Arledge of ABC was described last year in U.S. News & World Report as a ''hands-on executive'' who ''operates on the theory that >God is in the details.''

Somebody is definitely in those details; is the force malign (the Devil) or benign (God)? And who said it first?

Let's turn to the man who is culling and updating the next edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: Justin D. Kaplan, biographer of Mark Twain and a world-class scholar.

''We've had little success with >God (or >the Devil)> is in the details,'' says Mr. Kaplan. ''We know that Mies van der Rohe used it in discussing architecture; Flaubert has been suggested, but nobody can find it in his writings. I think it may come from John Ruskin, because it sounds like him on the subject of workmanship, but we need the specific citation.''

I tossed in Nietzsche and tried to disengage, but Mr. Kaplan is also on the hunt for the coiner of ''No woman can be too rich or too thin'' (Babe Paley? I dunno) and ''No good deed goes unpunished.'' I hung up before he could ask about ''The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings,'' which I happen to know was a 1975 comment from Dan Cook, a sports editor for The San Antonio Express-News.

Now to the details of the word >details, the preferred pronunciation dih-TAILS. The root is the Old French >detaillier, ''to cut in pieces,'' related to our >tailor, and the tailor's cuttings were >details, the tiny bits and pieces in which God or the Devil is found. It first appeared in English in 1603 as >in detail as opposed to >in gross, from the French >en gros for ''wholesale.''

The noun was snapped up by the military as ''the distribution in detail of the Daily Orders first given in general''; a >detail soon became a group assigned to a task.

Edward Bleier, president of Warner Bros. (don't write it as ''Brothers''; he likes it their trademarked way) Domestic Pay-TV, Animation and Network Features, points out that >detailing, in California, is more than a carwash: ''It's a comprehensive, painstaking cleaning, waxing and polishing of every surface inside and outside a car.''

Further evidence of the rise of the word is its use in a magazine, published in New York City, aimed at a younger rich audience than Vanity Fair or Town & Country. The editor of Details, Annie Flanders, explains the choice of the word: ''The name occurred to me about 10 years ago. When I'd ask my daughter Rosie about, say, her friends and their families, she'd answer generally, but I wanted >details.''

In the pharmaceutical world, >detail man is a 1920's term for a salesman who introduces new products to pharmacists and doctors; in our nonsexist age, that term has changed to >detailer.

Why do we philologists, concerned with the broad sweep of the language and the rich veins of dialect, concern ourselves with the origin of a specific phrase or the development of one word's new senses and meanings? Because we know where God and the Devil meet. PRO-ANTI OR ANTI-PRO?

CONSIDER THE WORD >abortion. The root is poetic, from the Latin >oriri, ''to rise,'' as a sun rises. Prefixed by >ab-, which turns the word into its opposite, >abortion has the meaning of ''to set, or cause to fade away.'' Two generations ago, this noun, primarily meaning ''removal of a fetus,'' was rarely spoken above a whisper in polite company; one generation ago, it surfaced in debate but was treated as an ugly and offensive term.

Advocates of making abortion legal chose not to call themselves ''pro-abortion'' for two reasons: (1) the word had a negative connotation, and it was unwise to try to persuade people to assert support of what seemed like a ''dirty'' word, and (2) the decision was made not to encourage abortion itself, but the right of a woman to choose it without breaking the law. They came up with the term >pro-choice, an inspired selection because most people are in favor of >choice, a word associated with >freedom. People surveyed by pollsters identified themselves as being ''in favor of a woman's right to choose'' more than ''in favor of legal abortion.''

Anti-abortion advocates then made a linguistic mistake, in my opinion. In an effort to appear positive, and not only >anti-, as well as to put themselves on the side of the fetus, they followed the format of their opponents and chose the term >pro-life.

Thus we had >pro-choice versus >pro-life, rather than >pro-abortion versus >anti-abortion. The word >abortion was shunned by the disputants, which better suited the persuasive purpose of the side that was in favor of legal abortions. In their effort to be positive, >pro- something, the anti-abortion advocates gave away their advantage of the public's aversion to the word >abortion.

That is apparently now changing. The news media have been writing and saying >anti-abortion activists and the pro-life forces have not been correcting them, because they are now willing to be labeled >anti- something widely perceived as wrong or at least distasteful. Contrariwise, whenever a reporter says >pro-abortion forces, pro-choice advocates must make a defensive point that they are not >pro-abortion, only >pro-choice.

In the coming political struggles in state legislatures, watch the anti-abortion forces belatedly try to change the terms of the debate from >pro-choice v. pro-life to the starker >pro-abortion v. anti-abortion. Watch the pro-choice forces resist this mightily. Words count.