Joe Lieberman asks: What is the chair worth?

In an article relating to the status of Independent/Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the headline for Andrew Taylor's piece on Yahoo! News read:

McCain backer Lieberman may keep committee chair

Does Taylor mean chairmanship, Lieberman acting as chairman, or chairperson?

No, the journalist meant to say "chair," a term that has been applied over the past few decades to mean "position of authority." The word is a metaphor, a form of metonymy, a kind of figure of speech, "in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept" (Wikipedia).

Chairmanship is archaic, as is, I suppose chairman, chairwoman, or chairperson. Chair is gender neutral, particularly if you are thinking of a conventional place upon which to place your own seat.

Still, to say that Senator Lieberman may keep (in fact, he has kept it) the committee chair makes one think, at least fleetingly, of a stool or a pew, a seat upon which to sit. It might even suggest an image of the senator's own stately behind, which has been in "hot water" lately because of Lieberman's support of Republican Senator John McCain in the recent National Election for the highest office.

Chair may also be used as a verb. Senator Lieberman chairs each meeting of his committee. That is, Lieberman presides over each meeting, he directs each meeting--even if he has only two legs himself.

Apt metaphor for an assassin

(Yet more on Larry King's innocuous word "passed" to describe the murder of John Lennon. See 4/3/08, "Larry King, Inept Euphemism")

Writer Michael Phillips' Los Angeles Times movie review of "Chapter 27," a study of John Lennon's killer in the three days leading up to the murder is appropriately titled:

"Leto adds unsettling weight to study of Lennon's killer"

"Leto" refers to actor Jared Leto who purposely gained 67 pounds to match the body stature of Mark David Chapman, the young man who killed John Lennon. The "unsettling" aspect of Leto's performance, however, lay in his ability to "portray bland dementia," a phrase which reminds of Hannah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil, that is, that "the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths (like Chapman) but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal." (Wikipedia).

Arendt was not describing the Mark David Chapmans of the world, particularly the world as we have experienced it in America these past twenty-five years. Although Chapman might have looked to be a banal individual to his neighbors in most of his daily routines, what stirred beneath proved fatally energetic enough to result in a fanatical, murderous act. Hannah Arendt's thesis is reserved for epic acts, unconcernedly approved by many in society and executed on a grand scale. (Dare we think of the 50% +/- of Americans who have consented to the United States' military exercise in Iraq?). Reuters reports that one million Iraquis have died since the war began.

But back to Phillips' metaphor. It proves a legitimate play on words ultimately pointing to the profound nature of Chapman's act, associated with an individual whose fleshy appearance wouldn't make you think of a killer but whose "internals" enabled an individual to do more than simply "take a life." John Lennon did not merely "pass on," he was "taken out."