By William Safire

Sunday, June 3, 2007
Cerberus Capital Management, described as a "private equity firm," is plunking down some $7.4 billion and change to take over Chrysler from its German owners and take on its health and pension obligations to workers.

That may be catnip to investors and a brow-furrower to unions and car buyers, but the big news in the language dodge is that a bunch of obviously successful investors has taken up the challenge of rehabilitating the name of the most monstrous mythical dog that never lived.

"Hence, loathed Melancholy," wrote John Milton in his poem "L'Allegro," published in 1645, "Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born/in Stygian cave forlorn,/'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy." The poet may have been trying to cheer himself up, but the thought of Cerberus - a three-headed mutt with a serpent's tail and a mane of snakes, assigned to prevent ghosts of the dead from leaving Hell - was surely a scary paradise-loser to Milton's readers.

If you wanted to pay a short visit to Hades Greek mythology, reported by Homer and others, held that you had to take a barge across the river Styx, run by a surly boatman and guarded by this fearsome beast with three sets of eyes and teeth. The ancient Greeks suggested that you take a small bag of honey cakes along - as a "sop," or cake dipped in honey - to assuage the appetite of the snarling monster. Cerberus would gobble up the sop and let you climb aboard the boat to the underworld.

That led to the famous expression a sop to Cerberus, metaphorically meaning "an insignificant price to pay for averting much discomfort," or in political terms, "appeasement." In Sir Ernest Gowers's 1965 revision of Henry Fowler's "Modern English Usage," he included appeasement as one of the "worsened words" whose meaning had gained a new stigma in the past generation, among them collaborator, colonialism and academic. Of appeasement, Gowers wrote: "There is no hint in the OED definitions of anything discreditable or humiliating about the word. No one thought any the worse of Aeneas for letting Cerberus have his usual sop."

Poking around uncovered this headline over a 1966 Time magazine book review: "A Sop to Cerberus." Its lead was: "Russia is a Cerberus that grows more than 3,000,000 heads a year, many of them hungry for truth. The Soviet leaders appease this appetite with huge helpings of technological and scientific fact, but when it comes to political truth, they either stonily ignore the demand or cynically toss a sop to Cerberus."

Now to the mystery: What moved the private-equity-cum-hedge-fund colossus to name itself so hellishly?

"I suppose I could give you the official spin," says Tim Price, a managing director of the firm formed 15 years ago, "that Cerberus was the name of the fine guard dog that kept people from the underworld who didn't belong there and that's the business we're in now. And the dog always had one eye open. But you wouldn't buy that."

Right. Price then leveled with me: "There were six guys when we started, and the name sounded pretty cool, but nobody really researched it. Now, frankly, we're torn. It's a terrible brand name, but we have a ton of equity in it. What to do?"

I say stick with the soppy name. Money barks.

'Rudy's people are more like old-style New Yorkers," wrote the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan about supporters of Rudy Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination. "They are pugnacious, and if you express reservations about their guy, they give you the chin."

What does that expression express? It is not the chin flick or chin flip, in which you hold the fingers of one hand, palm inward, under the chin and flick them outward toward a person dismissively. That nonverbal gesture, not generally taken to be offensive except to those eager to take offense, drew some flak when used by Justice Antonin Scalia last year. He explained it was a Sicilian gesture meaning: "I couldn't care less. It's no business of mine. Count me out."

Giving the chin does not involve the hands. I went to the term's originator for an explanation.

"I remembered Giuliani supporters literally tilting their chins up as they told me he would win," Noonan reports. "I was just trying to capture a certain spirit by remembering its physical expression." She then sent me a chin-chin, a Chinese phrase of salutation first cited in the OED in 1795 and now used as a drinking toast.

safireonlanguage@nytimes.com