As Henny Youngman would have said, “Take Rand Paul, please…”

Stan Dubinsky, the linguist, shared with me this piece that drew me because of the headline, “Take My Metadata.” And not because I pictured Henny Youngman saying that and adding “please.” (I’ve always thought that was a terrible joke, I want to go on the record as saying.) As you know, the headline reflects my attitude regarding what the NSA has been doing the last few years.

But when I read it, I appreciated it most for the definition it provided of metadata:

As a preliminary shot, one could say that in any domain where data has to be recorded, there has to be a scheme of some kind for recording it, and any description of that scheme–data about the way the data is organized–can be called metadata.

Examples will help. The metadata for a book will be the information on the reverse of the title page or in the library-catalog entry: title, author, year, publisher, place of publication, ISBN, and so on (you could add all sorts of other facts). Book metadata is what Google Books has been struggling to correct since its spectacular metadata errors started being publicized by people like Geoff Nunberg and Mark Liberman on Language Log (see here and here and here, for example).

For a phone call the typical metadata would be calling number, called number, time of connection, length of call, and so on. And for an email or a text message, sender’s address, recipient’s address, sending machine, recipient’s machine, date, subject line, and so on.

Crucially, “Call me Ishmael” is not part of the metadata for Moby Dick; that’s the first three words of the content. And “Hi, honey. Are you still at the office?” (or “Lou? Tell Enzo the hit is going down tonight”) is not part of the metadata for a phone call.

It is not clear to me whether Senator Rand Paul truly believes that important freedoms are being stripped away from Americans by the actions of the National Security Agency, which up until midnight on Sunday, May 31, was systematically recording telephone-call metadata for large numbers of mostly innocent Americans. The alternative would be that he is being disingenuous: He simply thinks his status as a possible Republican presidential nominee will be enhanced if he argues against the trustworthiness of government agencies.

But it would demean him to assume that. I think it is more charitable to assume he truly believes what he says. Though that means attributing to him what I take to be a rather stupid belief….

Yes, the examples do help. Thanks.

Oh, and to the critical issue that the writer addressed parenthetically just before that passage: “(And let me warn the purists up front that in this post I am going to be treating data not as the plural of the Latin word datum, but as an English singular noncount noun like air, fun, furniture, information, or water: I will say the data is stored, not the data are stored.)”

Normally, I would harrumph. But when one is speaking of data in the aggregate, as a massive amount of something, rather than number of things — which is definitely what we’re talking about where the NSA is concerned — perhaps I see his point, and grudgingly decline to protest.

And… I’ll even admit that when most people say “data,” they are speaking of it similarly. But Sarah T. Kinney, my Latin teacher at Bennettsville High School, would rise up and haunt me forever were I to forget for a moment that, by all the gods on Olympus, “data” is a plural, second-declension, neuter noun.

The double-naught spy, in the popular imagination…

There’s a little confusion over terms going on in the news the last day or so.

First, Edward Snowden says he wasn’t some “low-level analyst,” but a sure-enough, double-naught spy.

Susan Rice denies it, saying he was no such thing.

Not that she’s necessarily a reliable witness on such things, but she must be in the right of it.

That’s because, even if Snowden actually was, as he claims, an American sent abroad under a cover to collect intelligence, he wasn’t a spy, and certainly not an agent.

“Spies” and “agents” are the people recruited by CIA intelligence officers to collect intelligence, usually regarding their own country. A spy, generally speaking, isn’t someone like James Bond or George Smiley. A spy tends to be someone who is working for someone other than who he claims to be working for.

Kim Philby was a spy — not because he worked for Britain’s MI6, but because while pretending to work for MI6, he was actually working for the Soviets. Burgess and McLean, Jonathan Pollard, Aldrich Ames and Whittaker Chambers were spies.

Yes, it’s a malleable term. When Snowden says, “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word,” I think what he means is “in the popular sense of the word,” as opposed to the technical one.

Of course, my impression of what the word means is based mostly on spy fiction, so I could be wrong, too. (And occasionally, even in le Carre, the word is used loosely to mean “someone engaged in the intelligence world”). But I don’t think I am.

I’m also a bit puzzled that he believes being a field officer is automatically higher-ranking than an analyst. True, there’s more cachet to being a field man than a desk man; it’s way cooler. (As Jethro Bodine knows, or thinks he knows, they get to do all that “fightin’ and lovin’.”) And Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson held desk men in contempt. And sure, there are certainly analysts who are lower in the organization than senior field people, particularly when they are contractors rather than career officers. But who is higher-ranking, Jim Prideaux, a.k.a. Jim Ellis, out in the cold in Czechoslovakia or George Smiley back at the office in London? Obviously, Smiley. (Not that George didn’t still have some great tradecraft if forced into the field himself, as in Smiley’s People.) It’s sort of like with newspapers. Reporters may have the fun, but editors decide what goes into the paper. Field officers may be posted to romantic, exotic places, but the analysts more directly affect the policies that result from intel-gathering.

Anyway, if Snowden had ambitions of being a spy, he should rejoice, because that’s what he is now. He took American secrets with which he was entrusted and revealed them to the nation’s enemies. Of course, he revealed them to everybody else as well, which kind of blows the whole secrecy thing that we associate with spies. But he should comfort himself that he’s now as close to being a spy as he’ll ever be.