The Washington Post's Style section takes note of one of my favorite buzzwords: granular (rendered more absurd when transformed into "granularity"). Sample usage, by hypothetical Pentagon briefer: "I'm just giving you the summary. The document itself is much more granular" -- i.e., goes into more detail.
Usually I snicker when I hear it; sometimes I get mad, in which case, in the future, I will remember this essay, from Language Log, on the ridiculousness -- even the camp quality -- of getting angry over word-usage issues.
They date back to 1914, and in fact nearly all of them were made before 1960, so think again if you thought your childhood burned through the entire genre. What City Rags deserves congratulations for is that he has found online video for 49 out of the 50 cartoons. Some of the links are now inoperative because the lawyers have gone after YouTube, but there is still enough to keep you occupied and steeped in nostalgia for some time.
Point-counterpoint exchanges on many Web sites tend to get awfully windy and digressive. This debate between Brad DeLong, the Berkeley economist and blogger, and Arnold Kling, of the Cato Institute, on the pros and cons of the New Deal, is more like a brisk tennis match.
(DeLong stresses the pros. Kling says something resembling the New Deal was inevitable -- or economically desparate Americans might have turned to extremism -- but says 1. its effects were smaller than often asserted and 2. over the long term FDR's programs deformed Americans' view of the role of government.)
The Harvard Crimson says Harvard's new president will be Drew Gilpin Faust; the Globe, a bit more cautiously, suggests the same thing.
But the Crimson might want to rethink the lede of its story:
Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War scholar, will tackle a "reconstruction" of her own as the new president of Harvard -- bringing the University back together after the tumultuous tenure of Lawrence H. Summers.
Let's see. If you've read a book on Reconstruction written since 1985 or so, that analogy might suggest to you that the new regime will make some noble attempts at achieving justice, after Summers's foul depredations, but will ultimately be driven back by the forces of reaction, leaving progress at Harvard stalled, or worse, for a century.
If your knowledge of Reconstruction derives, however, from a high-school U.S. history class any time up to about 1990, you might think the Crimson is insinuating that Faust will employ shifty-eyed traitors and collaborators -- carpetbaggers from lesser universities like Bryn Mawr or Penn, her almae matres -- to stab honorable Harvardians like Harvey Mansfield in the back. But the forces of righteousness will, after a brief, humiliating spell, redeem fair Harvard -- and female scientists will, once again, be hired and tenured at the rate nature intended.
Either way, Reconstruction is a more potent metaphor than the editors may have grasped.
A new short film apparently sanctioned (or even produced?) by the Irish Film Board is making the rounds online. It depicts a day at the pitch 'n' putt (a golf course of only short holes) with local heroes Joyce and Beckett.
Joyce unleashes a stream of sometimes nonsensical naughty talk, and gives lip to the shop girl who gives out tees, scorecards, and chocolate bars: "No, not a Milky Way, you arse, a Topic. All fecund in its nuttiness."
Beckett looks impassively at the golf ball in his hands waits for an unnamed third player, as only he can do, further enraging the nattily dressed Beckett. "Well I don't f______ care where he is, I'm teeing off. Into the f_____ sapphire of the day...." It's good stuff.
[Update: REVISED Feb. 12. As two readers have pointed out, Joyce actually seems to say "fecund in its nuttiness," not "thickened in its nuttiness," as my post originally said.]
On Tuesday I wrote here about John Edwards' hiring of a "blogmaster" for his 2008 presidential campaign. The blogmaster was Amanda Marcotte, of pandagon.net. I saw it as another step in the trend of co-opting bloggers to serve not only as public relations hired hands but also as a kind of alternative to media coverage. When you're out on the trail, you will always have major media with you if you're a major candidate like Edwards. But you can't control what they say. Enter the blogger, who writes diaries that look like journalism but don't have the same odor.
It turns out that on the very day I wrote about Marcotte, she and another Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, came under fire from the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which demanded they be fired for messages they wrote before working on the campaign. (The New York Times today described the old posts as "long cybertrails of incendiary comments on sex, religion and politics.")
Edwards reviewed the old blog posts, some of which were disparaging about powerful Catholics, and took his time responding. Then he decided to keep them on staff. Another instance, perhaps, of the blog genre bumping against the professional and political world's expectations. (That's how Wonkette makes her daily bread.)
In my column on the soon-to-be late, lamented, Darth Vaderesque Stealth fighter this week, I said the plane was retired partly to deal with budget pressures. Since President Bush has just proposed a military budget that some analysts are comparing to the massive ones of the late Cold War, that claim needs a bit of context.
Basically, the Air Force says it's being asked to do too much -- from deploying spy satellites to maintaining the fleet of older planes to designing new ones to rescuing people during Katrina -- given its budget. ($128.8 billion last year.) Air Force spokespeople stress that the service is the only truly global one -- wherever the conflict is, Baghdad or the Taiwan Straits, we'll need planes. Without an additional $20 billion more a year, for the next several years, the Air Force will be forced to fly dangerously old aircraft. (The Government Accountability Office, for its part, mostly blames poor planning on the part of the Air Force.)
All of which is to say: The Air Force generals probably aren't happy with the military budget released Monday. The Air Force got about $8 billion more for 2008, but inflation will chip away at some of that. And the Air Force's proportion of the budget actually dropped relative to the Army's and Marine Corps. Some observers say this may rekindle the old inter-service rivalries.
The F-117 "Stealth" fighter
Today, the Globe's Bryan Bender points out that some military goodies not related to the current war were slipped into the President's Iraq-war budget -- including some pricey planes. Still, the Air Force probably feels disrespected.
At Sign and Sight (tagline: "Let's talk European"), quite a storm has been documented since late January over Ian Buruma and his book "Murder in Amsterdam," about the killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.
French philosopher Pascal Bruckner kicked it off, writing in an article originally written for a German magazine. I find his critique more heat than light, but it raised an interesting point -- that Buruma's book (and the sympathetic review of it in the NYRB by Timothy Garton Ash) treated all sides of the Van Gogh story with respect and an attempt at understanding but gave something like short shrift to the Somali member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who in their eyes has all but renounced Islam, thereby perhaps throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (TGA seems to have been especially critical of this, despite paying her other compliments: "[Her book] 'The Caged Virgin' is subtitled, in its American edition, 'An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.' It would be more accurate to call it a manifesto for the emancipation of women from Islam.")
Bruckner writes, with some throat clearing:
It is time to extend our solidarity to all the rebels of the Islamic world, non-believers, atheist libertines, dissenters, sentinels of liberty, as we supported Eastern European dissidents in former times.
Buruma gets in a few licks here: "Mr Bruckner is an important French intellectual, so I'm sure he doesn't have to be told this, just as I don't need to be lectured by him on the perils of cultural relativism."
Sea Launch has been a fairly low-profile government project since its debut in 1999. Developed by a consortium of companies from four nations --the US (Boeing), Russia, Ukraine, and Norway -- it supplies a technique for launching rockets into geosynchronous orbit. The payloads on these rockets are generally satellites for use by "such customers as EchoStar, DirecTV, XM Satellite Radio, and PanAmSat," so naturally the Feds aren't wasting their money on this, or not much anyway.
Nevertheless, it is discouraging to see abject failure. Now presumably Boeing will need to charge more for their planes, and we'll end up paying for that.
Speaking of the Kennedys, I have just met Rory Kennedy, youngest daughter of RFK (she was born after her father's death). She has a new film, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," which was at Sundance and will be on HBO first on Feb. 22 and thereafter for about a month.
The film is a powerful piece of journalism that begins with a psychological inquiry into the American military police who perpetrated the torture and photographed it at the notorious prison, and becomes a more investigative work about where responsibility for the abuses ultimately lies.
Errol Morris has a film in production on the same subject, which is slated for a 2008 release. See them both.
The Times takes up the issue of Romney's religion on A1 today. The piece concerns itself largely with how Romney's faith will affect his chances of winning his party's nomination.
(In an Ideas piece in late December, Drake Bennett looked at where the Church of Latter Day Saints stands on various issues -- and found that "Romney's stances on key issues dear to the religious right may actually make him more conservative than his own church.")
The Times also reports that Romney is "giving strong consideration to a public address about his faith and political views, modeled after the one John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 in the face of a wave of concern about his being a Roman Catholic."
The Kennedy Library has the text of that speech, and the audio too. It's well worth a read or listen. Here's a taste:
If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.
Adam Reilly, like many other Maldenites, was displeased with my crack about the inhabitants of Paris on the Mystic, and emailed last week to say so. But this week, the Boston Phoenix's media critic gives Brainiac top honors for our coverage of what he calls Mooninite-gate. It's a fine article excoriating the Herald, WBZ-TV, WGBH's Emily Rooney, and the Globe's Jeff Jacoby for what Reilly sees as their abject failures in our time of crisis. Here's an excerpt:
BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FORMERLY OBSCURE MAJOR-MEDIA OUTLET: At about 3:30 pm Wednesday, a story written by two Globe reporters and posted at Boston.com still termed the Mooninites "suspicious objects" -- or, alternatively, "electronic circuit boards with LED lights attached." Over at the Globe's Brainiac blog, however, Joshua Glenn was calling the "suspicious objects" Mooninites, identifying them as part of a guerilla ad campaign, and crediting the local bloggers who figured things out first. Then, on Thursday, Brainiac attributed the over-the-top behavior of local law enforcement to embarrassment; suggested, provocatively, that Bostonians have a kind of terror-envy of New York; critiqued the media's awkward descriptions of the objects, and provided the technically correct phrase ("LED throwy"). Plus, he tied what happened in Boston to the inexorable metastasis of non-traditional advertising. Kudos.
Despite a few (richly deserved) left-handed compliments, I'm tickled. I should point out, though, that it was Evan and John, not me, who posted about non-traditional advertising. Also, if you read Reilly's essay to the end, you'll see that what he likes most of all is when I take a break from bashing Malden to bash my own hometown of Boston.
Bostonians, I have a public safety message for you:
Please, please do not buy the "Danger Bomb Clock," even though it will be available in March from Hobby Link Japan and elsewhere. And even though the Danger Bomb Clock seems fun.
When the alarm goes off, the clock makes an exploding noise that you can only stop if you guess correctly which of the three colored wires to yank out (it looks like they're attached by magnets in the middle). The correct wire is different from one morning to the next.
Let me second Chris Shea's praise for Seth Lobis's essay on "self-reliance," in which the BU professor uncovers the word's sinful 18th-century career. The Oxford English Dictionary has the 19th-century self-reliant -- the favorable Emersonian sense we know today -- but Lobis found the word used differently in much earlier texts, where self-reliance was denounced as a form of un-Christian pride.
Fascinating stuff -- but I have to take issue with one of Chris's characterizations. Because it has no citations of "self-reliance" before 1833, he says, "the OED seems to have gotten this one wrong."
But "wrong" is inappropriate here. No historical dictionary would claim that its first citation is the first-ever use of a word; it's only the earliest found to date. "Lexicographers are always delighted to discover evidence (called a citation) of early usage," noted a Merriam-Webster "Word for the Wise" broadcast last month:
Between the 10th and 11th editions of the Collegiate Dictionary . . . the first known print appearance of the term bona fides (meaning "evidence of one’s good faith, genuiness, achievements, or qualifications;" or simply "good faith; sincerity; the act of being genuine") shifted -- for real -- from 1798 to 1665.
And the OED's editors regularly beg the public for help in antedating words. A year ago, in fact, they took their quest on the air with a BBC TV show, "Balderdash & Piffle." The series is heading for a second season, and the new "Wordhunt" appeal list seeks earlier dates for hoodie (1990), marital aid (1976), identity theft (1991), and sick puppy (1985), among others.
Antedating gets easier by the day, as reams of text are moved to Internet archives; even amateurs can play. So go ahead, correct the OED on the dating of loo or scrunchie or one-trick pony. They'll be more than happy to hear from you.
A mouthy blog called Bitch Ph.D. alerts me to a news story about a rape victim who was "arrested on an outstanding warrant when she reported the rape, and then denied the second dose of Plan B because the prison nurse had 'religious' objections to birth control." Th blogger, whose name is not apparent, doesn't just gloss the article. She points out the other problem here, beyond the harsh punishment of this woman: "the woman is in prison. She has no recourse if she gets bad health care."
More interestingly, she posits the real answer behind the difficulty in publicizing awful cases like these.
So even in jail--perhaps especially in jail--women need reliable, safe reproductive health care. But we tend not to think about this problem much--probably because, just as in the comments to this post, people tend to feel that "bad" women are "bad heroes" for reproductive rights activists, so we're better off focusing our money, stories, and efforts on the needs of women who are above reproach.
That's a bit like only debating the proper treatment of drug abuse primarily among law-abiding citizens.
New uses of the Internet--do they still make those? Here to tell you they do. Check this out. It's a site where you can upload a clear face picture of yourself (or a friend) and get a whole bunch of celebrity matches to your facial structure, including an accuracy rating. I did it, naturally; who can resist? (It requires free registration. I suspect spam is a possibility so give them that out-of-work Yahoo account.)
The surprise for me is that women are included in my results, which is fun. In fact, my number one was Greta Garbo (dead and alive!) and my number three or so was Mary Louise Parker. This last one is actually not a bad call. If my sister had taken a slightly different physical tack from childhood, bam, you'd have MLP. I wouldn't have said it, but Great Garbo actually does look like Mary Louise Parker. Behold below. I'm the first guy. The rest you can guess:
This year's Super Bowl, buoyed by strong viewership from the Chicago market, was the second most-viewed Super Bowl of all time (behind the '96 Pittsburgh-Dallas match-up), and the third most viewed telecast of all time.
The #1 most-watched show ever? That would be the MASH finale, which aired in 1983. That episode pulled in some 106 million viewers and had an astonishing 77 share, meaning that 77 percent of televisions that were turned on were tuned into MASH. Super Bowl XLI, by way of contrast, attracted 93 million viewers and had a 64 share. The finale of Seinfeld, in 1998, pulled in 76 million viewers and had a 58 share -- not even really in the same league as MASH.
Can you imagine a single program that three-quarters of Americans watching TV would tune in for today? Given the proliferation of channels since the early '80s, our increasingly divided attention, and our growing power to watch TV on our own schedule, I wonder if the MASH finale -- which was a 2.5 hour feature, by the way -- will ever be dethroned.
Interesting MASH finale trivia: Though a spinoff ("AfterMASH" -- not kidding) failed, the original series, all eleven seasons worth, lived on for years in reruns, which is how I came to meet Hawkeye, Hot Lips, Radar, and the gang. Yet the finale seems only to have aired a few times in its original form (i.e. not cut up into 20 minute episodes). According to the Wikipedia entry on the episode, CBS did release the final episode -- called "Goodbye, Farewell, Amen" -- on video back in 1983, which I have to imagine was pretty novel at the time. Of course now it's got its very own disc in the MASH Season 11 set of DVDs. Just put it in my queue.
In a Brainiac post back in December, I tried to convey my admiration for Danny Postel's new pamphlet "Reading 'Legitimation Crisis' in Tehran," from Prickly Paradigm Press. Alas, a side comment of mine about Cold War liberals who became neocons led Danny to tell me I had my historical facts wrong. Then Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, chimed in to support Danny.
If any of that interested you, check out McLemee's column today. In it, he interviews Postel about the failings of American scholars and activists who see themselves as progressives. Some of these progressive scholars and activists fight back, in the comments section of McLemee's column. This is a great debate.
"What I am asking for is a revolution in reading," proclaims ourfriend Lindsay Waters, executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press.
In a Chronicle Review essay this week, Waters argues that the way reading is now taught -- at all levels, from elementary school to grad school -- is all wrong. The "whole language" movement, which eschews teaching 1st graders to read methodically (phonics, diagramming sentences, etc.) in favor of allowing 1st graders to teach themselves to read in their own way might work "in a rich school district like Wellesley, Mass., but it sure isn't true in the poorer parts of Roslindale and Roxbury, Mass.," Waters says, because middle-class kids often enter first grade already knowing how to read.
And it only gets worse after 1st grade, he continues:
Thematic approaches to literature have triumphed, emphasizing the moral of the story over formal and aesthetic analyses. At the college level, earnestly moral or political readings have pushed aside the pleasure of waywardness in plot and rhyme.
Waters has been stubbornly defending the "aesthetic experience" in recent years, and it's fun to watch him at work. Here, he eloquently describes the profound difference between first reading a work of literature when one is young and re-reading it when one is older; and he begs us to wander in the vineyards of the text once in a while. "Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don't even muss up our hair," he writes, "we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words."
Sad and significant news reported in the British Fleet St. tabloid The Sun and elsewhere: a full transcript of a cockpit video recording from American pilots who destroyed two Scimitar armored vehicles, killing a British Lance Corporal, two days into the Iraq war. From the transcript, it seems that the pilots were less at fault than the sources of their information, who clearly were not coordinating with other Coalition commanders or analysts familiar with troop locations. (Is this common?) This is pointed out in a reader comment on the Sun site. It sounds to me from the dialog that many Coalition military vehicles often have orange panels. (Googling confirms this somewhat.)
As explained in this news story, the Pentagon kept the video classified until it leaked to news media in the last two days and was widely broadcast in the last few days. The lawyer for the killed soldier has been angry at the US Defense Department and looks forward to a planned inquest by British civilian officials:
"The inquest is my one and only chance to hear how and why Matty died," she said in a statement released by her lawyers. "I would have preferred to hear the evidence from the U.S. pilots themselves. However, they cannot be compelled to come and they have not come voluntarily. The video is therefore vital evidence and must be shown. I do not relish hearing it in open court, but after years of being told that it did not exist or was secret I feel that it was right not to give up hope."
Harrowing transcript excerpts:
1338.38 POPOV36:
OK. Right underneath you. Right now, there’s a canal that runs north/south. There’s a small village, and there are vehicles that are spaced evenly there.
1338.49 POPOV36:
They look like they have orange panels on though.
1338.51 POPOV35:
He told me, he told me there’s nobody north of here.
----
1340.13 POPOV36:
OK, well they got orange rockets on them.
1340.17 POPOV35:
Orange rockets?
1340.17 POPOV36:
Yeah, I think so.
----
1340.35 POPOV36:
I think killing these damn rocket launchers, it would be great.
----
1342.04 POPOV35:
Get it.
[Sun's analysis of cockpit video:] POPOV36 “rolls in” for an attack and turns his A-10 into a vertical dive to strafe the British column, destroying two Scimitar armoured vehicles and killing L/Cpl of Horse Matty Hull.
1342.09 - GUNFIRE -
---
1344.21 LIGHTNING 34 [presumably an on-the-ground source]:
Hey, POPOV34, abort your mission. You got a, looks we might have a blue on blue situation.
----
1344.47 POPOV35:
Confirm those are friendlies on that side of the canal.
1344.51 POPOV35:
S***.
[Updated 10:59 a.m. An earlier version of this post mistakenly referred to the soldier who was killed as female. Thanks to a reader for the correction.]
In the latest issue of In Character, the so-called "self-reliance issue" of this aggressively virtuous little magazine, Seth Lobis, an English professor at B.U., offers an etymological history of the phrase "self-reliance" itself.
It's forever associated with Emerson, but the O.E.D. credits John Stuart Mill with the first use, in a letter dated November 25, 1833. There Mill uses the adjective to describe a French journalist, who he says was "singularly free ... from self-consciousness; simple, graceful, almost infantilely playful ..." Later, Emerson would pick up on the connection with childhood, drawing comparisons between self-reliance, or unconcern with the opinions of others, and "the nonchalance of boys."
1833 seems a strikingly recent first usage -- and, in fact, the O.E.D. seems to have gotten this one wrong. Lobis himself tracked down several earlier ones and cites them in the course of making the point that self-reliance, to Americans today an obvious-seeming virtue -- students read Emerson and think, of course -- long had a thoroughly unpleasant connotation in Christian theology. One theological tract from 1709 linked self-reliance to these other traits and sensations: self-conceit, self-love, self-confidence, and self-delight. The self-reliant, the author asserted, are too busy "warming themselves in the sparks of their own Fire" to heed the Gospel.
The Web has always been a comfy home for those with plenty of time on their hands, even before the age of personal blogs. I remember emailing every high school friend I could think of when I got my first email account, in college, just to see if a message could really get from one school to another in no time. I also recall trying to help develop a site (back when writing in HTML was the only real option) devoted to the short-lived career of New York Met Keith Miller and his outsize performance in Strat-o-Matic Baseball. (Check out his rookie stats in '87!)
Now a couple of time-wasters of impressive proportions have created music videos in which strung-together clips of George W. Bush and Tony Blair combine to make an entire real pop song, their spoken tones imparting a certain rap-hip hop air. Blair's rendition of The Clash's big hit, below, is especially awesome. Something about the English accent makes it feel like The Clash. Or someone like Oasis.
Bloggers began pledging allegiances and even becoming hired guns in force in 2004, and they had a generally accepted effect on public opinion. They are also probably a lot cheaper to hire than a professional mainstream journalist or PR consultant. Whether their impact in 2008 is even more widely felt may be another important measure in the ever-hot debate about how much -- whether is no longer a question -- bloggers in pajamas or suits are cutting in on the journalist's turf.
A reader and Yankee fan writes in to predict that "the Mooninites will be on display by the many thousands on t-shirts, placards, and various other IED's when the Sox come to the Stadium this spring. They probably will detonate the scoreboard." The serious part is not a bad guess, and is part and parcel with the new theme of Boston-as-whipping-boy in this story. I would add, however, that nowhere is terror paranoia, if that's what the accusation is, more apparent than in New York City, where unattended briefcases in the subway are routinely detonated by robots able to pick them up and climb the stairs to a safe location. How much do those machines cost? No wonder New York kvetches about Federal terror funding going to St. Louis in proportion to NYC.
The Yankee Stadium prediction brings to mind the chants and t-shirts in Ruth's House after Pedro Martinez called the Yankees, who seemed to always have his number, "my daddy." Revenge was at hand, however, in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 slaying of the Yankee albatross. The very next day, a mock application for Yankee fans wishing to switch allegiance to the Sox made the Internet rounds--limited number of applications accepted, according to the instructions. First few questions:
The new issue of the New York Review of Books carries a typically fascinating review by former Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee writes on Norman Mailer's new novel based on the early life of Adolph Hitler, "The Castle in the Forest," the first of a planned trilogy, which has been reviewed widely and in widely varying ways. (Lee Siegel's cover review in the Times Book Review was exemplary.)
Coetzee says Mailer's prose is "no longer ... as electrically vivid as it was forty years ago, but he has lost none of his immoralist daring," and calls the book a "very considerable contribution to historical fiction." His most interesting point is that Mailer, in this book and elsewhere in his oeuvre, argues against Hannah Arendt's famous formulation in "Eichmann in Jerusalem," "the banality of evil." As Coetzee writes, Mailer has said outright, "'If Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic' -- worse in the sense that there is no struggle between god and evil and therefore no meaning to existence."
Coetzee posits that Mailer mischaracterizes Arendt's argument, but more interesting is his contention that Mailer's devil-driven notion of evil robs this novel of some of his moral force. Great sentences ahead:
"The Devil made him do it" appeals not to the understanding, only to a certain kind of faith. If one takes seriously Mailer's reading of world history as a war between good and evil in which human beings act as proxies for supernatural agents -- that is to say, if one takes this reading at face value rather than as an extended and not very original metaphor for unresolved and irresoluble conflict within individual human psyches -- then the principle that human beings are responsible for their actions is subverted, and with that the ambition of the novel to search out and speak the truth of our moral life.
The Wall Street Journal has a story today (subscription, $) about Beijing officials' push to revise the city's mangled English signs in time for the 2008 Olympics:
Teams of linguistic monitors will patrol the city's parks, museums, subway stations and other public places searching for gaffes to fix.
Signs like "Green Grass Dreading Your Feet" -- i.e., Keep Off the Grass -- have their fans, who collect themonline. But the locals aren't laughing.
"We cannot leave [these signs] up just for the amusement of foreigners," one Beijing businesswoman told the Journal.
A few years ago, when "all your base are belong to us" was the catchphrase of the moment, I wrote a column about such off-kilter translations. I can understand why they're funny, I said, when they produce a pun or an off-color joke: "The lift is being fixed -- we regret that you will be unbearable," or "Special cocktails for ladies with nuts."
It's not so obvious, though, why we're amused when the mistake is not a joke but a near miss -- when a non-native speaker says "I have a new for you" or "I like to go naked-foot." Are we feeling superior, or are we enjoying a small revelation about language, as we do when a toddler says "Where doggy go?" or "I haved it"?
There's no reason, after all, not to call one news item "a new" or use a regular past tense for "have"; we just don't. And when someone (accidentally) reveals that we could, it makes us smile. Do psycholinguists know why? And if so, could they please share the answer?
In an essay in the Guardian, probably one of many to come, Katherine Bucknell celebrates the centenary of W. H. Auden, perhaps my favorite poet. Bucknell notes that Auden became the hippest poet around after a minor character brought the house down in the 1994 Hugh Grant film "Four Weddings and a Funeral" by reading from the wonderful poem "Funeral Blues" at the movie's eponymous funeral. The scene nearly ruined the movie by being so far better than the rest. (Andie MacDowell nearly ruined the movie by being herself.)
Bucknell isolates Auden's significance and defeats some of the myths about him. Neatly capturing a lot of his biographical interest, she writes:
He possessed a technical virtuosity bordering on wizardry and a questing intellect that embraced and discarded, like a serial monogamist, some of the most challenging beliefs of the 20th century. In the end, he settled on his first faith, Christianity.
She also writes in opposition to his reputation as a traitor to England (for moving to the US and staying there, which Bucknell notes he did for love and felt he couldn't say so at the time) and a war dodger, a reputation probably fueled by his poem "September 1, 1939," often cited and read following September 11:
Auden was not a pacifist. He registered for the US draft and was called in September 1942. He was turned down for being a homosexual, a rejection that made him feel 'very much sunk'. Still, by the end of the war, he did manage to get into uniform, and he served on the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany. To criticism in the British press and poorly informed questions in the Commons, he made no public reply.
That seems to me to be an unlikely response from a well-known poet today.
A recent article in Psychology Today delves into the psychological basis of political sympathies -- how upbringing, personality, and emotion govern where we fall on the political spectrum. The majority of the studies cited point to favorable views of liberals -- open, tolerant, creative, educated -- and rather less favorable conclusions about conservatives. (In one, those who at age three were judged by their teachers to be "easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable" tended to lean rightward later on.) This raises the natural question -- which the writer, Jay Dixit, considers -- of whether the social science studies were themselves politically motivated (or even governed by emotion?).
One study I found more interesting than those in the general trend:
University of Arizona psychologist Jeff Greenberg argues that some ideological shifts can be explained by terror management theory (TMT), which holds that heightened fear of death motivates people to defend their world views. TMT predicts that images like the destruction of the World Trade Center should make liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative.
It's interesting to square this with two observations about the world as it appeared to change shortly after Sep. 11. One was the rush on books about Islam and the Arab world in American bookstores. Perhaps US citizens thirsted not only for knowledge for its own sake but a confirmation or substantiation of their own political views. ("I think Islame is a tolerant and peaceful belief system ... but I need more examples.")
Also, although politics in this country were polarized in the wake of the contested 2000 election, they became dramatically more so after the attacks, and especially once the Administration linked terror with Iraq and began the run-up to war -- normally a time when countries pull together. These events brought emotion to the fore and motivated a great deal of cohesion: cohesion at the two political poles.
