Why funny, in the sense of odd? “Because, of course, in politics nothing is irreversible. . . . In using this word, we should assume that we don’t really quite mean it.” When Mr. Muravchik used the word, he limited his meaning to “the sense that I don’t believe that conservative forces within those Communist Parties have it in their power any longer to effect a reversal and a re-establishment of their authority by means of force.”
The closest synonym to irreversible is unrecallable, but that is rarely used; the more familiar irrevocable is available, but connotes specific laws rather than a movement or tide; unstoppable does not have the backward-turning sense; unalterable and unchangeable also miss the point of continuing change.
The word was carefully chosen, both by Mr. Gorbachev and by his translators, but has been used by different politicians in other circumstances. Delaware Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in April 1987 told an audience that, in the 1988 election, “the country will be set on an irreversible course, and once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no way to put her back in.”
That brings us to the figures of speech used to illustrate irreversibility. Mr. Biden’s genie out of the bottle is a reference to Aladdin and his Magic Lamp, from an ancient Persian folk tale. My copy of the Aladdin story in Richard F. Burton’s translation of “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments” does not have a passage showing the reluctance of the genie to go back into the lamp. (I am now rubbing my word processor in the hope that an expert in Persian folk tales will magically materialize, but it doesn’t work.) A 20th-century trope for the same idea is there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube, which was used sometime after 1895, when that dentifrice was first put into the container.
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