THE >SUMMIT USED to be 'way up there, at the top, the peak, the zenith. From the Latin >summus, ''highest,'' the word offered a view that was breathtaking.
Winston Churchill was displeased in 1950 at what his friend Bernard Baruch called >the Cold War (coinage claimed by Walter Lippmann but actually made by the Baruch speechwriter Herbert Bayard Swope). The British statesman recalled the cordial wartime meetings he had with Roosevelt and Stalin, and called for a ''parley at the summit.'' Such a top-level meeting of a few leaders, he said, would better bridge the international gap than a gathering of ''hordes of experts and officials drawn up in a vast cumbrous array.''
So started >summit in diplolingo, followed in the late 1950's by >summitry (on the analogy of >telemetry) and >summiteer (on the analogy of >pamphleteer and >profiteer). For more than a generation, this coinage and its derivatives held the definition to a meeting at the very top; with currency, however, the Churchillian coin has been debased.
President Bush has just met with the nation's governors for what was billed as an >education summit; schoolchildren from Gorky held what Tass designated a >youth summit; last year, President Reagan and Congressional leaders held hands at what was labeled an >economic summit to reduce the deficit; then delegations from New York and New Jersey met at the World Trade Center in Manhattan for what they insisted was a >regional economic summit.
If a bunch of guys from neighboring states can call their subway series a >summit, anything goes: conservationists in conclave call their motel brunch an >environmental summit, and in the competition between Sony and Philips, Newsday reported: ''Both the hardware and software people have discussed a possible 'summit' meeting later this winter to talk about alternatives to the Copycode technology.''
We are reaching the point where you can hold a summit of nobodies in the basement.
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