The New York Times, it seems, does not know what the word “endorsement” means. The paper conducted a series of interviews that were recorded and then transcribed, published under the heading “The Choice.” It then heralded its process for choosing whom to endorse as the most transparent ever — as transparent as, say, the confession booths on a reality show. In service of said transparency, and not mere marketing, the editorial board of the Gray Lady televised an endorsement special in which it announced that it is not choosing at all. It endorses both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
Never to be outclowned when something silly is happening in politics or culture, the writer Lauren Duca opined that she thinks “using feminine pronouns for the most powerful person in the world could help correct our overriding tendency toward the toxic masculine.” As if language determines cultural attitudes and not the other way around. Yet it’s evident the New York Times’s board is saying something similar: Any female Democrat will do. “May the best woman win,” as the “endorsement” closes. It is the gender identity and not the political, intellectual, or personal characteristics of the endorsees that won them the editorial board’s backing. Tokenism is apparently good now.
Anyway, put aside all this, and just focus on this more practical question: If I am a New Yorker and New York Times subscriber who is registered to vote in the Democratic primaries, and I want to heed the paper’s endorsement, how do I do that?
This question is not answered because the “endorsement” at the end of “The Choice” feature is no endorsement at all. Let me be at my William Safire-iest for a moment: According to the great lexicographer and overseer of the Dictionary of Word Origins, John Ayto, the word “endorse” comes to us via the now-dead French verb “endosser,” literally meaning to write on the back. It retains this meaning in handling checks and other documents. That word, in turn, “comes from the medieval Latin indorsare, a compound formed from the prefix in- ‘in’ and dorsum ‘back’ (source of English dorsal, doss, and dossier).”
Eric Partridge’s otherwise venerable and witty 1942 style dictionary, Usage and Abusage, says that it is not interchangeable with “approve.” But Partridge is also outmoded and so British that he suggests the spelling “indorse.” So I think he can be safely waved off for any contemporary purposes stateside. Perhaps the most common context in which “endorsement” shows up these days other than a political endorsement is in a usage meaning exactly “agreement.” Think of the legalese disclaimer that some sort of statement “does not imply or constitute endorsement” that you can find on any website or speaking contract or before a TV show. We take pains to say something is not an endorsement specifically because we understand endorsement to carry some sort of official stamp of agreeing with it. Time magazine’s stock defense for decades when it named someone morally gross as a person of the year because he or she was influential is that the title is “not an endorsement.”
In this sense, perhaps the most etymologically direct way to understand an act of endorsement is as backing something, or putting your seal on it, or being behind it. If you endorse it, you’re for it, anyway. And if you’re for it, well, you can’t also be against it. Unless, depressingly, we keep letting the intrusion of politics into the way we use words make common meanings ever more wishy-washy.
