Posts in October, 2007
For those in peril in the air
October 31, 2007 2 comments
What do you call birds smashing into planes, or aircraft nearly hitting each other on the runway or in the air, or in general any moments of peril in the aviation industry? What else but safety events? NASA is refusing to publish the results of an American safety survey conducted among pilots and other aviation workers:
Two people involved in the survey, called the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service, said that they had been ordered by NASA not to talk about what it found but they said that it indicated that the aviation administration had underestimated the rate of safety events.
The language constitutes such an unashamed inversion that I am not sure it is even worthy of the name Unspeak. Evidently the survey was asking about what normal people might call dangerous events, events that posed a risk to people’s lives. Recasting these as safety events, events in which some safety happily occurred, in which people were saved from death by a shining interjection of pure safety, is nothing if not a wonderfully optimistic angle.
This reminded me of a very short list I had been keeping of other euphemisms used in the world of flying machines. Initially I had been very alarmed by NASA’s own use of the phrase involuntary separations, picturing bits accidentally falling off spacecraft, or undesired decouplings of shuttles from space stations, and so on. Thankfully, “involuntary separations” at NASA are just those melancholic moments when NASA employees are fired – you know, without wanting to be.
Meanwhile, in the book Super-Crunchers, I learned of a cousin to the aviation industry’s “safety events”. When safety does not miraculously occur but a plane actually crashes, this is sometimes known as a transportation event. I for one am glad that my recent flight back to Paris, though it was in a very real sense an event that transported me, was not a transportation event.
What other fun names can you think of for peril or disasters, readers?
2 comments
‘Search’ = destroy
October 12, 2007 40 comments
The US has killed 19 “terrorists”, and 15 civilians — six women and nine children — in an “operation” near Lake Thar Thar in Iraq. I now let the official CENTCOM news release take up the story:
Upon assault, Coalition forces were engaged by small arms fire from the target building. Responding in self-defense, supporting aircraft engaged the enemy threat.
It’s a strange way to put it, that the aircraft specifically responded in “self-defense”. It seems doubtful that the aircraft were at risk from small-arms fire.
After securing the area, the ground force assessed 15 terrorists, six women and nine children were killed, two suspects, one woman and three children were wounded, and one suspected terrorist was detained.
Interesting. The killed included “terrorists”, but the wounded included merely “suspects” and there was one “suspected terrorist” left alive. If the live guy was only “suspected” to be a terrorist, how is it known that the dead were definitely terrorists? Perhaps it’s just because they were killed. (From another war: “If it’s dead, it’s VC.”)
“We regret that civilians are hurt or killed while Coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism,” said Maj. Brad Leighton, MNF-I spokesman.
Mmm, but they weren’t just searching, were they? In other words:
We reget that civilians are hurt or killed while we accidentally blow them up.
40 comments
More of me
October 9, 2007 37 comments
Much as I consider blogging here about various ways to kill large and small animals to be my main internet gig, I have also been posting at other places. Here is my CiF post today about a new law banning the incitement of hatred against gay people:
It’s a strange concept, this idea of banning the incitement of hatred. What offends us is the hatred itself, but what we seek to police is its expression, as though hatred is a virus against which innocent ears are defenceless and so must be protected. Perhaps it is so. In which case there is no reason to stop at banning hate speech on the grounds of parentage or religion or sexuality. Straw must proceed logically and ban hate speech against the old, and the fat, those who do not conform to current industrial criteria of beauty, writers of bad books, the bald, fast-food magnates, and the plain indolent.
Meanwhile, I have also been committing more emergent literature from the wonderfully varied referral logs at stevenpoole.net:
How to stop a hippo charging:
verbal slogans.
Become a full time martial arts apprentice:
joy in repetition.
Follow the links to read and comment on the full things, if you like.
Update: published in the New Statesman today is my long review on Douglas Coupland and his school of “Sentimental Hipsterism”:
It is perhaps no coincidence that in Douglas Coupland novels, the sense of feeling like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel is elevated to a universal existential condition.
37 comments
Pernicious paraphrase
October 7, 2007 24 comments
Inspired by WIIIAI’s merciless documentation of George W. Bush’s use of the phrase “in other words”, I’ve begun to take notice of it elsewhere. Bush usually says “in other words” in order to rephrase a policy in terms a five-year-old or idiot could understand (whether for the benefit of an audience to which he is condescending, or for his own benefit, is not always clear). But “in other words” can be used in more creative ways. And when you see the word “creative” you will, like me, immediately think of “Melanie Phillips”. One of the things that excited “her” last week was an article by Daniel Pipes, describing a book by Timur Kuran which argues that “Islamic economics” was invented so as to:
minimize relations with non-Muslims, strengthen the collective sense of Muslim identity, extend Islam into a new area of human activity, and modernize without Westernizing.
“Melanie” cites this passage with glee and immediately glosses it thus:
In other words, Islamic finance is a political and ideological weapon which was devised as a means of subjugating the west to Islam. [emphasis added]
Probably “Melanie” just read “extend Islam into a new area” and shut off what remains of “her” brain, intepreting it according to her apocalyptic obsession with Islam invading the west. Of course the passage in Pipes’s article clearly means extending Islam into the area of finance, not into the area where “Melanie” lives. As to how anything could really work as “a means of subjugating the west to Islam” while at the same time hoping to “minimize relations with non-Muslims”, we are in the dark. Perhaps they will use robots as intermediaries?
In any case, it’s a useful illustration of the fact that in other words can often mean in other words, which mean something completely different.
Meanwhile, I have been reading Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0, an update to his 2001 book about how the internet might hurt democracy, which now contains, excitingly, a chapter about blogs. (I wrote a short review of the book for the Guardian.) Therein we find a subtler example of “in other words”, used to cover up the author’s own gaping logical hole:
Some of the elite or “focal point” bloggers have their own biases. Many of them are primarily interested in cherry-picking items of opinion or information that reinforce their preexisting views. In other words, we lack a blog that succeeds in correcting errors and assembling truths. [pp142-3, emphasis added]
Let us stand back and admire the structure of this argument:
1 “Some” blogs are biased.
2 “Many” blogs are selective.
3 ???
4 “In other words”, no blog corrects errors and assembles truths.
That is an excellent “in other words”. It adopts the air of a logical conclusion, almost like a therefore, and yet a) the fact that “many” blogs are biased or selective does not mean that all are, which is what Sunstein is trying to insinuate; but anyway b) the subject has quietly been changed from being biased or selective to the ability to correct errors and “assemble” truths, which is not the same thing at all. It would be perfectly possible to be dedicated to the project of correcting Democratic Party errors while never criticising Republicans, thus being biased while still having a commitment to truths.
Really, Sunstein appears to be disappointed that no blog he has yet seen is a magical truth machine, which corrects all errors and “assembles” all truths wherever they may be found. The small problem that such a blog would perforce need to be infinitely large and thus make the entire internet if not the whole universe explode is inconvenient, but apparently not insuperable.
Isn’t it also rather odd, this glib talk of “assembling” truths, as though from spare bits of Meccano found under the sofa? Well, Sunstein’s formula only needs a little tweaking to serve as the slogan of this blog from now on. In other words, I dedicate unspeak.net to the cause of assembling errors and correcting truths. Join me!
24 comments
Speak softly, carry a big stick
October 4, 2007 Leave a comment
Via the Foreign Policy blog, I learn of a new “policy initiative” from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It’s called smart power, defined thus:
smart power (n) the effective integration of ‘hard power’ — our military might — and ’soft power’ — our ability to wield influence by attraction and persuasion.
As FP’s Blake Hounshell aptly comments:
“Soft power,” unfortunately, sounds to many like weakness. Nobody wants to be weak. People do, however, want to be smart. Smart move, CSIS.
It reminds me of that Douglas Coupland riff about the name Microsoft - shouldn’t it be Macro-Hard? But what Hounshell is perhaps too polite to point out is the further implication — that hitherto the US has been engaged in wielding stupid power.
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Primate suspect
October 1, 2007 21 comments
Today at Whipsnade Zoo, England, two chimpanzees escaped from their “compound”. (Have you noticed how the vocabulary of animal captivity is rather like that of alleged-terrorist captivity?) One chimp, Coco, was recaptured. The other, Jonnie, “could not immediately be caught and had to be killed”.
“Had to be killed”? Well, to ascribe agency where it is due, some people thought it necessary to call in the zoo’s own “specially trained firearms squad”, who shot Jonnie to death. Now, chimps are immensely strong and can be very aggressive to humans (as well as to each other). Still, the reporter did ask why Jonnie couldn’t have been shot with a tranquilizer dart. Well, apparently a tranquilizer “doesn’t work quickly enough”. Call me a bleeding-heart ape-lover, but if tranquilizer darts are good enough for most of the American ape-escape zoo incidents compiled in this handy list, why not for Whipsnade? Perhaps the British just can’t afford the good tranquilizer guns.
But what prompted me to post this here was the explanation offered by the Zoological Society of London:
“It’s just standard procedure, if the animal cannot be quickly and safely recaptured it will be shot.”
It’s just standard procedure - as though the mere fact that it is written down in some bureaucratic rule-sheet ought to satisfy any complaints. If you had some questions about the morality of the incident, the spokeswoman chose to answer a different question altogether. “Is it right that you should do this?” “Oh, don’t worry, we always do this.” The reassuring appeal to standard procedure tries to fog one’s mind sufficiently to head off any awkward question about how it came to be standard procedure, or whether it should remain so.
It’s rather classical Unspeak in construction, too. A “procedure” might make us think of a medical intervention, or some other well-defined set of actions to solve a problem, when here it it means simply killing; and “standard” carries the sense of, well, a standard, something to live up to or to aspire to, as well as performing the bogus substitution of ubiquity, or mere having-been-decided, for ethical desirability.
In all, it would make a good line, perhaps, to use next time the police shoot an innocent man on the London Underground. Just standard procedure, move along now, nothing to see.
21 comments
