»In which we keep a stiff upper lip

Reading through a short piece by Thomas Vinciguerra (great name!) in the Week in Review, I remember what a great piece of resedarch the Oxford English Dictionary is, and how awesome a tool the online edition (command-line access!) is.

Londoners have largely refused to be cowed by terrorists. Our phlegmatic cousins across the pond, admirers say, are "keeping a stiff upper lip." The expression is synonymous with resolution in the face of adversity. But where did it come from?

The phrase sounds quintessentially British, and the British-born writer P. G. Wodehouse is often credited with popularizing it in his Jeeves and Wooster stories. But it is actually American; the Oxford English Dictionary traces it to an 1815 issue of The Massachusetts Spy: "I kept a stiff upper lip, and bought [a] license to sell my goods."

In 1833, the American author John Neal offered this line in his novel "The Down-Easters": "What's the use o' boo-hooin? ... Keep a stiff upper lip; no bones broke."

And in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe had a character say, "Good-by, Uncle Tom; keep a stiff upper lip."

The upper lip tends to quiver under emotional pressure. There are, however, more colorful explanations for how its immobility came to signal self-control.

According to one legend, when a sailor was sewn into his burial shroud at sea, a stitch would be passed through his upper lip. This was done not only to ensure that he was really dead, but also to trip up would-be deserters, who obviously needed stiff upper lips to avoid crying out in pain.

Another story holds that in the Napoleonic era, European military officers shaped their mustaches with tar. Any soldier brave enough to sit still while his mustache was smeared with hot pitch and molded into shape obviously kept a stiff - you know.

Whatever its origins, the phrase has begun to grate.

"If I read one more story about Londoners' 'stiff upper lip' I'm going to scream," wrote Kevin Drum in the "Political Animal" blog of The Washington Monthly on July 8.

One reader responded, "Personally I think the phrase 'stiff upper unibrow' needs to be added to the lexicon."

Least Likely Ladder to the Presidency

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is moving on up. The Senate approved a bill on Tuesday that would alter his place in the presidential line of succession from last (No. 18) to No. 8, after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

You'd think that with his job description, Mr. Chertoff, right, would already be higher on the list, ahead of people like Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns (No. 9) and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings (No. 16). But the presidential chain of command has never been that logical.

It has been fraught with anachronistic oddities since Congress passed the Presidential Succession Act of 1792. Back then, the Federalists controlled the White House, and they wanted to block their archrival, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, from possibly succeeding their second-in-command, Vice President John Adams.

So under a compromise, the largely ceremonial post of president pro tempore of the Senate was made second in line, the speaker of the House third and secretary of state fourth. (The speaker and president pro tem were bumped altogether in 1886; when they were restored in 1947, their positions were switched.)

This has made for some improbabilities. From 1995 to 2001, the president pro tem was Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Though well into his 90's, he was only three heartbeats away from the Oval Office.

Moreover, the Presidential Succession Act of 1886 dictated that cabinet officers would succeed the president in the order in which their departments were created. That rule holds. Hence, the secretary of transportation (No. 14) comes before the secretary of energy (No. 15), but not because the former is better qualified.

Last year, Senate Republicans introduced a bill that would again remove members of Congress from the line of succession. The rationale was that the presidency could go to someone from the opposition party with vastly different notions of how to run the country.

This might well have happened during two months of the Watergate crisis in 1973. The Republican president, Richard Nixon, was under intense pressure to resign, but he had not yet replaced the vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, who already had resigned. So House Speaker Carl Albert, a Democrat, was next in line. Mr. Albert said that if Mr. Nixon resigned, he would serve only as acting president because he had no popular mandate. He pledged to step down as soon as Congress appointed a Republican vice president.

There are other wrinkles. The Constitution requires that the president be born in the United States. Thus, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez (No. 10), who was born in Cuba, and Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao (No. 11), a native of Taiwan, would be ineligible. That is also why the second female secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice (No. 4), is also the first woman to be so close to the Oval Office. The first female secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright, was born in Czechoslovakia.

If you are confused, you are not alone. In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan was shot, Secretary of State Alexander Haig famously declared that he was "in control" at the White House. "Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order," he told reporters.

He was only off by two.

Thomas Vinciguerra is an editor of The Week magazine.

Correction: Aug. 3, 2005:
An article on July 31 about on the presidential line of succession referred imprecisely to the citizenship requirement. The Constitution says only that the president must be "a natural-born citizen," not that the president must have been born in the United States. The provision is generally regarded as barring naturalized citizens, not those born elsewhere to American parents.