Today’s word of the day, thanks to Words Coach (https://www.wordscoach.com/dictionary) is dither. It’s pronounced / ˈdɪð ər /, and it means “a trembling; vibration” or “a state of flustered excitement or fear” as a noun, and it means “to act irresolutely; vacillate.” In Northern England, it can also mean “to tremble with excitement or fear” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/dither).

The word first appears in English in the “1640s, ‘to quake, tremble,’ phonetic variant of Middle English didderen (late 14c.), which is of uncertain origin. The sense of ‘vacillate in opinion, be indecisive’ is from 1908” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/dither). But the Middle English Compendium, sponsored by the University of Michigan (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED11561/track?counter=1&search_id=2139936) has it as dideren “To tremble, shiver, quake.” For instance, in The Life of St. Cuthbert in English verse, it says, “Þe horse..began to whake and didir, And of his lyf haue drede” (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED11561/track?counter=1&search_id=2139936).

The ð letter is called “eth.” It “has been adopted to represent a voiced dental fricative (IPA: [ð]) in the International Phonetic Alphabet”; a voiced dental fricative is the th sound that begins the words then or there, as opposed to a voiceless dental fricative, which is the th sound that begins the word Thor or ends the word bath. This letter was or is “used in Old English [in which it was called ðæt], Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian alphabets” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth). “Övdalian or Elfdalian (Elfdalian: övdalsk or övdalską, pronounced [ˈœvdɐlskãː]; Swedish: älvdalska or älvdalsmål) is a North Germanic language spoken by around 3,000 people who live or have grown up in the locality of Älvdalen (Övdaln), in the south east of Älvdalen Municipality in northern Dalarna, Sweden” (Övdalian – Wikipedia).

According to On This Day, on this date in 1966 “US airplanes bomb the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam” (https://www.onthisday.com/events/july/30).

A demilitarized zone is an area between two countries or between two warring factions where no military activity is supposed to take place. In Vietnam, the demilitarized zone was established “at the 17th parallel in Quang Tri province that was the dividing line between North Vietnam and South Vietnam from 21 July 1954 to 2 July 1976, when Vietnam was officially divided into two de facto countries” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_Demilitarized_Zone). The division occurred after the Vietnamese won the French Indochina War.

The agreement that followed that war was made at the Geneva Conference of 1954, and it divided Vietnam into the two halves, north and south, and created the demilitarized zone. North Vietnam was ruled by Ho Chi Minh and supported by China and the Soviet Union. South Vietnam was supported by the West, particularly by the United States. But the communists were determined to take over South Vietnam and make one, unified, communist Vietnam, so full-scale war broke out between the two halves in 1955. And to further that end they supported a communist guerrilla group in the South.

U. S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was fairly limited through the 1950s and early 1960s. That involvement became a key campaign issue in the 1964 presidential election, between the incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater. Johnson had succeeded to the White House after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Goldwater represented the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which at that time had a conservative and a moderate wing.

Then, in the summer of 1964, there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a the North Vietnamese supposedly attacked a US Navy vessel. That incident led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, “giving the president the power to do effectively whatever they felt necessary in Vietnam and began major US involvement in the Vietnam War” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_electionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_election).

Goldwater was blunt about participating in Vietnam’s war, and even refused to rule out using nuclear weapons if necessary. Johnson attacked Goldwater in one of the most famous political ads in American history, the Daisy Girl ad. The ad depicts a young girl pulling petals off a daisy, counting, and then moves to a NASA-style countdown, ending with Johnson’s voice saying, “We must love each other, or we must die.” The implication was clear—electing Goldwater would lead to more war, and electing Johnson would not.

But in March of 1965, “two battalions of U.S. Marines waded ashore on the beaches at Danang. Those 3,500 soldiers were the first combat troops the United States had dispatched to South Vietnam to support the Saigon government in its effort to defeat an increasingly lethal Communist insurgency. Their mission was to protect an air base the Americans were using for a series of bombing raids they had recently conducted on North Vietnam, which had been supplying the insurgents with ever larger amounts of military aid. The raids were the first in what would become a three-year program of sustained bombing targeting sites north of the seventeenth parallel; the troops were the first in what would become a three-year escalation of U.S. military personnel fighting a counterinsurgency below the seventeenth parallel. Together, they Americanized a war the Vietnamese had been fighting for a generation” (https://prde.upress.virginia.edu/content/Vietnam).

The Viet Minh, the guerrillas, would “hide out” in the DMZ and then make raids into the South. That is what prompted the bombing of the DMZ which began on this date 59 years ago. Johnson, in addition to the increased bombing of the North and the DMZ, also continued to add more and more troops to the American support of South Vietnam. But unlike Barry Goldwater, Johnson never really committed to winning the war—it was always a war of containment, a war designed to reach a ceasefire and an eventual peace agreement.

And a ceasefire and peace agreement were finally reached, but not until 1974, years after Johnson was no longer president. And despite the North Vietnamese pledge, in the treaty, to leave the South alone, within a year or so of the signing of the peace agreement, the armies of Ho Chi Minh had invaded and conquered the South, with American personnel being evacuated by helicopter from the embassy in Saigon. One wonders if the result might have been different if Johnson had not dithered.

The image today is from the famous Daisy Girl Ad (https://thebulletin.org/virtual-tour/president-lyndon-b-johnson-and-the-daisy-girl-nuclear-war-commercial/).