Clyde Haberman

In the churning over the refusal of some parents to immunize their children against certain diseases, a venerable Latin phrase may prove useful: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It means, “After this, therefore because of this.” In plainer language: Event B follows Event A, so B must be the direct result of A. It is […]

The notion that a person might embody several personalities, each of them distinct, is hardly new. The ancient Romans had a sense of this and came up with Janus, a two-faced god. In the 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a novella that provided us with an enduring […]

As clichés go, the one about “the long arm of the law” is moth-eaten. But the law does in fact have a reach, and it can extend far. In recent years, it has stretched out to grab foreign nationals who found refuge in the United States after committing or sanctioning political murder, torture and other […]

Beyond its durable imprint on American civic life, the Watergate scandal of four decades ago left its mark on political language. For one thing, that suffix will not go away. Commit a major folly, and you can count on some headline writer describing it as Whatever-gate. Forty years later, investigations into wrongdoing by public officials […]

Posse comitatus is not a phrase that trips lightly off every tongue. It is typically translated from Latin as “force of the county.” Anyone who has ever watched an old Western movie will instantly recognize the first word as referring to men deputized by the sheriff to chase down some varmints who went thataway. (Rappers […]

They died as they slipped the surly bonds of Earth. The last words of that sentence, haunting words, were written by John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American airman and poet who enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940, before the United States entered World War II. He was killed the following year in […]

Britain was the first to use defoliants as a war tactic in Southeast Asia. That was in the early 1950s in Malaya, then a British colony, before it became the independent Malaysia. British planes sprayed Malayan jungles with chemicals to strip trees bare and deprive communist guerrillas of cover. They also destroyed crops that the […]

There is a certain irony in the shorthand that experts commonly use when discussing this country’s closest brush with nuclear cataclysm: TMI. Today, those letters are widely understood to mean “too much information.” But well before the advent of social media, TMI referred principally to the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, a power plant […]