By Sridhar Pappu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 27, 2007

We used to have goals. Remember goals? Sending a man to the moon? Or how about ending poverty or balancing the budget?

Now we have "benchmarks." Like "surge" or "insurgents," it's become part of our everyday language when we're talking about Iraq. Just last Thursday, Congress passed a bill that included more than a dozen "benchmarks" the Iraqi government must meet to get continued funding for the reconstruction of the country. That same day, during a news conference in the Rose Garden, President Bush threw the word around like he was David Letterman flinging index cards around the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan.

The Iraq Study Group, Bush said, "recommended that we hold the Iraqi government to the series of benchmarks for improved security, political reconciliation and governance that the Iraqis have set for themselves. I agree, so does the Congress, and the bill reflects that recommendation.

"These benchmarks provide both the Iraqi government and the American people with a clear road map on the way forward," he continued. "Meeting these benchmarks will be difficult; it's going to be hard work for this young government."

He could have stopped there, but later in his news conference, Bush pulled it out again, this time in reference to immigration legislation:

"The bill essentially says that before any other reforms take place, certain benchmarks will be met when it comes to securing the border."

Benchmarks have been with us since the start of the war. Back in July 2003, Bush proudly said that L. Paul Bremer, then the presidential envoy to Iraq, had presented him with a plan with "ambitious timetables and clear benchmarks to measure progress." The word is now as closely identified with the Bush administration as "malaise" is with the Jimmy Carter years, or "triangulation" with the Clinton presidency.

So what now? Having been saddled with "benchmark," we should probably know what kind of word we're dealing with.

Peter Sokolowski, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, says the word has its origins in the mapping of the English countryside in the mid-1800s.

"The reason it's called a benchmark is because surveyors would make a groove or a vertical cut into stone and stick a staff in there so they would know they were measuring from the same point every time," Sokolowski says.

By 1884, says lexicographer Grant Barrett, one sees the word used within industry as a "touchstone" by which other things were measured. Merriam-Webster introduced the wider definition of the word in its 1934 unabridged edition.

"You don't see the word widely used in politics in the 1930s or even in the 1950s," says Barrett, co-host of the radio program "A Way With Words" and editor of the "Double-Tongued Dictionary." "What you have here is the rise of the word with the rise of the wonks -- people who went to school to study politics, who were not just gentleman politicians. It's during this period that jargon like 'benchmark' became more apparent."

Now it's a word that litters the national sections of newspapers and is used ad nauseam during the Sunday morning shows. But should we really be surprised? The overuse of "benchmark," according to Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University, simply reflects what we do with words. We use them over and over and over again in a multitude of contexts so they become the word of the week, or the month or the year.

"Take the word 'prioritize,' " Baron says. "About 10 to 15 years ago we were prioritizing everything. It's fallen out of favor the same way a popular restaurant does. Nothing's changed about the restaurant. The food hasn't gotten worse. It just stops being the place to be. The same thing happens with words.

"We'll have another election or some other speechwriter will come up with another word," Baron adds. "The word's being used correctly, but it's getting pretty boring."