Footprint

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“The word footprint has taken on meaning,” writes Michel Berger of Oakland, Calif., responding to a recent query in this space, “beyond that of simple circumstantial evidence that someone has walked by, as in Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ Where are those footprints headed?”

Computers, which usually don’t have any feet, take up room on a desk; they used to lie flat, leaving little room for a telephone, a spouse’s picture, souvenir coasters and other desktop doodads. But a generation ago, spaced-in designers thought of turning the machine on its side, making a “mini-tower.” When the University of British Columbia issued one of these space savers in 1992 to William Rees, that regional planning professor — working on a paper about “regional capsules” — recalls telling a doctoral student that he especially liked its “smaller footprint” on his desk. Then the idea hit him: “It took just a few seconds to replace every reference to ‘regional capsule’ in the paper with ‘ecological footprint.’ ”

This gave impetus to the March of the Metaphoric Footprints. Rees’s young colleague Dr. Mathis Wackernagel is now the executive director of the Global Footprint Network. Linguistic ichnologists track the trope back to 1965, as “the proposed landing area for a spacecraft.” In 1979, a Senate committee on energy described a proposal that would consolidate service, reduce the number of employees and buildings, and thereby “remove environmental footprint from Yosemite Valley.” In 2000, after global warming heated up the issue stove, a spokesman for a Texas electricity marketer told The Seattle Times, “It’s essential to reduce our environmental footprint, and at this point in our world’s history, reduce our carbon footprint.” Dr. Wackernagel informs me that the phrase received “its biggest boost in 2005 through an enormous BP media campaign on the carbon footprint.” The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year for 2006 was the footprint-obliterating carbon-neutral. A few months ago, The New York Times reported California researchers asking “provocative questions about the carbon footprint of food.”

Meanwhile, the military stepped smartly into the footprint parade: the Department of Defense Dictionary defines the word as “(1) the area on the surface of the earth with a satellite’s transmitter or sensor field of view; (2) the amount of personnel, spares, resources and capabilities physically present and occupying space at a deployed location.” As soldiers spoke of a security footprint, politicians fell into footstep: a euphemism for withdrawal was given a Pentagonian flavor by Senator Jack Reed in his suggestion for “reducing our force footprint” in Iraq.

But ecology will not abandon the footstep field. “Diapers Go Green” was the headline of a Time magazine article a few weeks ago, its subhead “Eco-friendly and cost-conscious parents are returning to cloth to cover their babies’ bottoms.” Natalie Brown, a Maryland mother of three, is quoted saying, “I’m not a huge green fan, but I love that I’m leaving less of a footprint.”

Perhaps Mrs. Brown will one day read to her children the novel of adventurous loneliness by Defoe, or at least this verse from an 1838 Longfellow psalm: “Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/And, departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time. . . .”

Combining Form Wanna Cracker?

The good nuptial news is that Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, has tied the marital knot with Carla Bruni, the knockout Italian pop singer and model with whom he has been keeping unabashed company. Only last month, Time magazine joined the tut-tutters by prissily labeling her “presidential arm candy” and recalling her famous comment, “I’m monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.”

These are wedding words that require differentiation. Monogamous is simply “one in marriage,” from the Greek mono, “one,” and gamos, “marriage.” But in what follows the combining form polys, “many,” the lexicon of the mating game trips many into misusage.

Polygamy is a marriage of a man or a woman to more than one spouse. It is sex-neutral; the word can denote the marriage of one man to two or more women, or one woman to two or more men, or any other combination that really free-spirited or easily confused people can come up with.

Polyandry is the marital state of one woman to more than one andros, “man.” That’s what the new bride of France’s president once listed as one of her preferences but is not the state that she chose recently.

Polygyny is “the practice of a male having more than one female mate at the same time.” That’s the rarely used word for which most people mistakenly substitute polygamy.

Remember this, mates: polygamy is the general term for plural marriage; polyandry means one woman with more than one male mate, while polygyny specifies one man with more than one female mate.

Glad to clear that up, Mrs. Sarkozy, a semantic distinction conveyed with best wishes for a long and blissful monogamy. And as other mating combinations present themselves in the future, the world’s languages — especially those rooted in Greek — stand ready to meet the lexical challenge with fresh coinages.