Magazine|ON LANGUAGE
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By William Safire
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''HERE IS A MAN WHO would fudge when it suits his purpose.'' So said Australian Justice Philip Powell, with scorn, of the Secretary to Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet, in connection with the trial concerning the attempted suppression of a book about ''the fifth man'' who may have infiltrated Britain's spy service.
''Kinnock Fudge Over Nuclear Pull-Out Date'' was the headline in The Times of London, over a story about the way Neil Kinnock of the Labor Party had backed away from naming the day he would toss American nuclear weaponry out of Britain.
''The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory'' was the title of a 1971 book about the United States State Department by John Franklin Campbell. It popularized a term that has identified that building in Washington much as ''Puzzle Palace'' has become the informal moniker for the Pentagon, although it also signifies the National Security Agency (previously known as ''No Such Agency'').
Around the English-speaking world, the use of the word fudge is evidently on the rise. The word is ascendant because it is used to describe three actions of government officials: 1) hemming and hawing (a single action); 2) hedging with such qualifiers as to make a position meaningless, and 3) shading truth in a way that approaches deception but cannot be called outright lying.
Fudge was a word beloved by the American poet James Russell Lowell. In 1848, he wrote of Edgar Allan Poe: ''There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge/ Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.'' Almost four decades later, Lowell provided the motto of the American Copyright League: ''In vain we call old notions fudge,/ And bend our conscience to our dealing;/ The Ten Commandments will not budge,/ And stealing will continue stealing.''
Fudge is one of those words (like bother and fiddle) that can be used as three different parts of speech: interjection, verb and noun. The interjection was first provided by Oliver Goldsmith in 1766, describing a character in ''The Vicar of Wakefield'' who ''at the conclusion of every sentence would cry out Fudge!''
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