Something fierce

The departure of presidential adviser Karl Rove, said Britain's daily Independent last week, was also a farewell to Rove's "unlikely alliance" of Christian evangelicals, American imperialists, and "red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists."

That bloody language brought to mind a recent inquiry from reader James Maiewski, who had noticed, he said, that he sometimes finds the phrase "tooth and claw" where he's expecting "tooth and nail." The claw version, he observed, was less common but more feral-sounding; was the fiercer idiom gaining on "tooth and nail," like a cheetah running down a gazelle?

Maiewski hadn't recorded his citations, but it was simple enough to find examples of the usage. A few weeks ago, when Congress was negotiating the latest warrantless wiretapping authorization, the news blog TPMmuckraker noted that the proposal "doesn't include a reporting requirement for NSA surveillance collection....Expect the administration to fight such a requirement tooth and claw."

And in a radio discussion last May, NPR congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook remarked that though the president and Senate Democrats were cooperating on immigration, they were "tooth and claw at each other" over Iraq. A few websites, too -- including Freedictionary.com and UsingEnglish.com -- tell readers that tooth and claw is interchangeable with tooth and nail.

Most writers, however, have kept a firm grip on the distinction: Claws are for animals; nails are for people (or primates, anyway). When tooth and claw is applied to human conflict, it's usually not an innocent substitution for tooth and nail but a purposeful choice of the bloodier, beastlier weapon.

Which came first? Tooth and nail shows up in the written record well ahead of its rival, first as "with tooth and nail" (1534) and soon in the shorter form. Then as now, says the Oxford English Dictionary, tooth and nail was almost always figurative. (It would sound strange, I think, to report that the victim of a physical attack fought "tooth and nail," unless you were mentioning evidentiary scratches and bite marks; even then, you'd probably say "literally tooth and nail.")

Tooth and claw is an obvious enough variation -- it might have sprung up anywhere -- but it isn't listed as a phrase in the OED. Google Books, however, turns up several early-19th-century uses: In an 1817 playlet by Maria Edgeworth, for example, a character says of a woman called Catty, "Let any man throw her from him, which way he will, she's on her legs, and at him again, tooth and claw."

Our acquaintance with the phrase, though, comes from Tennyson's 1850 poem "In Memoriam," where "Nature, red in tooth and claw" is a realm of impersonal violence, indifferent to man's search for meaning. (The poem is a mine of familiar quotations: "Ring out the old," "so near and yet so far," "'Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all".)

In contemporary use, tooth and claw isn't always so dispassionate. Depending on your political philosophy, that "tooth-and-claw capitalism" can signify the natural economic order, its "creative destruction" as inevitable as death on the savanna, or an infernal scheme for magnifying man's inhumanity to man.

Tooth and claw is also used for punning fun, as in a recent headline on a story about Barbie vs. Bratz dolls: "Category catfight sees icon, young challengers fighting tooth and claw."

But is it getting a significant workout, in these polarized times, as a more accusatory version of tooth and nail? I don't see it. Tooth and nail may sound a bit more like defense than tooth and claw, and it's certainly gentler and jokier. (How did the dentist and the manicurist fight? Tooth and nail, of course.)

Tooth and claw may yet make a move on its less ferocious sibling. But for now, thanks to poetry and biology, the two phrases are pretty well corralled in their own domains.

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BODY LANGUAGE: It's bold to give a word book the lip-smacking title "Carnal Knowledge," and indeed, Charles Hodgson's new book is more accurately described by its subtitle: "A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia."

But there is ample pleasure, if not titillation, in the lexicographer's approach to human anatomy. In 1300, for instance, blink wasn't "to close an eyelid" but "flinch" or "escape" -- "the sense blink still has when we say that a soldier or cop doesn't blink when facing danger." Wisdom teeth have roots in Rome's dentes sapientiae. The leading edge of your nose is the dorsum, or "back."

Not that Hodgson ignores the naughty bits. Between the infraclavicular fossa and the jugular notch is jugs, 20th-century slang with a past that may involve a milk pitcher. Tail and tush get their historical due. But their tales don't always top the ones about meldrop (think runny nose), calf (think pregnant cow), or Senator Ambrose Burnside's gift to the language, sideburns.

E-mail Jan Freeman at freeman@globe.com. For the Word blog, go to boston.com/ideas/brainiac/word.