WORDS Toll, fare, or road payment

WORDS

Toll, fare, or road payment

The name International Bridge Tunnel and Turnpike Association is quite a mouthful. The acronymn IBTTA doesn’t work very well either. It doesn’t make a word. It’s too long and the BTT in the middle is hard to say. Answering phones there requires an exceptionally well tuned tongue. Exec Director Neil Schuster has suggested changing the name of the tollsters trade association to World Toll Association, and has asked for comments before the board makes a decision early next year.

Names are not to be meddled with lightly. There’s a certain capital stock in a name. The accountants call it goodwill. There’s a quick efficient association between the word and the institution. Recognition. You’ve gotten known to your constituency, associates, and the public by your current name and even if the new name is a bit better you might lose more in the changeover than you gain by the slightly better name. It’s a difficult call.

But I like World Toll Association. It is a sharper more accurate characterization. It’s got a nice roll to it. A certain elegance. It says it all, and it says it much more snappily than International Bridge Tunnel and Turnpik... The WTA works as an acronymn. It’s sufficiently better to be worth the changeover. I think they should go for it. But you may have a better name, or other ideas. IBTTA(comeWTA) wants everyone’s views so send ‘em: tel 202 659 4620 fax 202 659 0500 schuster@ibtta.org (Incidentally for the record since we are sometimes asked we have no financial or organizational connection whatever to them at all —quite independent, but we think they are good guys, doing a good job, generally, for now...)

We’re fine-tuning our own name. Making clearer it is TOLL ROADS NEWSLETTER with the abbrev TRnl. Our bank has been very kind, accepting checks written for TOLL ROADS, TOLLROADS, and surprisingly often for THE NEWSLETTER OF TOLLING etc, the long subtitle we use on the masthead but nowehere else. Still we are sticking with the tollroads as the Internet name to save people some keystrokes. (But of course if there’s someone out there who really wants tollroads.com we’re always ready to talk terms.)

Some toll outfits try to avoid the word toll. I guess they think it has a negative association. The Penna pike in its annual accounts calls tolls fares and some Europeans often use the term road payment. This is a mistake. Toll is a great old word which the etymologists say goes back in its English version to the Old Norse tollr and beyond that to the Latin tolonium and the Greek tolonion. A toll is understood to be a charge levied on a conveyance whether a horse, bullock, motorcycle, truck, car or other vehicle — the price for it making use of a certain bridge, tunnel or road. Its ancient roots in our language and the continuity of its meaning through history are a reminder that tolls have been used to finance roads and bridges from the beginning of civilization. The toll is an honorable and productive institution and we shouldn’t resile from it.

Road payment is a monstrosity, a bland compound, part of the bureaucratic effort to detract from the richness and roots of our language by substituting longwinded obfuscatory mush for sharp simple, well-known words. Like the use of correctional institution for jail (US) gaol (Br), or educational establishment for school.

Now a fare is quite different from a toll. The etymology says fare is an abbreviation or derivative of the Latin portare, to carry. So a portage charge or fare is a charge levied on each of the persons carried on or in a passenger vehicle, not a charge on the vehicle itself. The airlines, bus companies, transit agencies and ferries which charge per passenger they carry in their vehicles charge fares. Common usage endorses those per person-carried prices as fares. The last time I checked the Penna pike was charging per vehicle which is a toll, guys, so get it right next annual report, please.

It is an illusion to think that negative associations can be exorcised with a name change, though many suffer that illusion. The adjective poor was deemed by UN bureaucrats in its early days to carry a stigma, so we had undeveloped countries instead of poor countries. But because the stigma arose from the conditions of those countries and not from the word, the new word soon got stigmatized and it was changed to underdeveloped in anothe futile effort to change perception through newwordmongering. That underdeveloped in turn became unusuable, the imagemakers said, and we got developing...

Once we change a name for image reasons alone we are headed down a slippery path of evasive euphemisms, and we say implictly to the world: “We really don’t feel right about what we do, so we are going to call it something else.”

The communists made a strategic political blunder when they started this. They became socialist instead of communist. Then peoples democracies, then democratic republics etc etc. Their propaganda people thought they could package over the evil nature of their regimes and ideology through progressively applied layers of new packaging, each time the old got soiled by the inner mess seeping through. Their semantic slickness and verbal thievery fooled a few perhaps, for a while, but in the end it just earned them deep contempt. Deserved contempt.

If we cannot defend a toll as a toll and need to call it something else, we won’t be able to defend it in its new name either and all we will do is contaminate the new word and find ourselves looking for another name. We’ll be constantly looking evasive and on the defensive. Toll is the right word.