At a friend’s recommendation, I have been thinking about the intriguing verbal echoes associated with the cost-cutting activities of DOGE.
Out of respect for this column’s focus on language I will pass over the question of the authority under which DOGE was created, and stay in my verbal lane by focusing on the acronym. Acronyms are formed by taking the first letter of a string of words to produce a shorthand signifier of an organization, such as NCAA for the National Collegiate Athletic Associations or NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and so for DOGE, we get the “Department Of Government Efficiency.”
DOGE as an acronym has the unusual advantage as opposed to something like NCAA of forming what sounds like an actual one syllable word that can slide easily off one’s tongue. That word-like quality is an important aid to elevating the status of the acronym as though it were an actual thing rather than what it Is, which is a created political entity.
However, in this case, that word-like power comes with a rather unfortunate literary and historical background. For starters, in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” there is a character literally named the “Doge” of Venice. There is no need here to get into what this character does in the play, which could be the subject of another column, more than to explain that “doge” in this context refers to an elected official like “president” or “senator” with considerable power in the city-state of Venice.
Shakespeare wrote his play about 1600. Here’s where things get interesting. Some 350 years later, Benito Mussolini ,the Hitler-like dictator of Italy, took for himself the title of “Il Duce,” an Italian word like the English “duke.” But both “duce” and “doge” share an etymological root of “dux” meaning leader. I have no idea if Mussolini, who was a journalist before becoming a dictator, was aware of Shakespeare’s play and its character of the “doge” of Venice. Maybe he knew, or maybe he didn’t, and in either case he likely did not care.
What can be said is that the Shakespeare character plays a mediator role far different from the actions of the self-styled “il Duce,” who at the end of the war was executed by the enraged victims of his cruelty and then his dead body was hanged by its heels to punctuate his citizenry’s rage at the brutality of his reign.
I will leave it to my readers as to whether this echo going from Shakespeare’s play to Mussolini to the present is anything more than a perhaps interesting window into today’s political environment as both “il Duce” and “DOGE” both signify the raw exercise of unchecked power with predictably unpleasant consequences.
What can be said is that had I been advising those creating DOGE, as hugely unlikely as that is, I would have suggested a small but useful change to the department’s title. Just drop the “o,” producing DGE, still an acronym, like USA, where each letter signifies a word without the acronym itself becoming a word. Fans cheering for American athletes in international competitions have no problem ignoring the absence of “of” in USA, instead just chanting the capitalized letters.
Cheerleaders for DOGE, could just as easily chant DGE, as sports fan roar USA. At the very least then, DOGE supporters, now DGE supporters, would not have to be concerned about pesky literary and language scholars highlighting the unfortunate word history at play in the title of a politically motivated “department” that is the subject of serious concern by the citizens whose interests it is designed to serve.