Posts in December, 2009
I like the whooshing sound
December 9, 2009 2 comments
Hillary Clinton said, of the July 2011 deadline set by Obama for US troops to begin pulling out of Afghanistan:
We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop-dead deadline.
It’s unfortunate, perhaps, to bring up the subject of yet more people dropping dead in Afghanistan on one date or another. But there seems indeed to be a massive internal battle of metaphors to describe this deadline: the White House said it was set in stone; but then the national security adviser said it was a guide slope, and a ramp, not a cliff. ((The Guardian, confusingly, got this the wrong way round, quoting Jones as saying it’s “a cliff, not a ramp”. Well, do I pack a base-jumping parachute or a BMX bike, or what? Someone might also have called it a signal of urgency, which phrase appears in quotes in the Guardian standfirst, but I can’t find this sourced anywhere as a direct quote from an individual.))
More importantly, though, is Clinton’s drop-dead deadline overegging it? On the one hand, I feel drop-deadline would be more elegantly compact; on the other hand, there’s something satisfying about biting down on the three initial dentals of drop-dead deadline (compare “Drop the Dead Donkey”).
As it happens, deadline derives from something that meant literally a drop-dead-line:
Dead-line.
2. Mil. A line drawn around a military prison, beyond which a prisoner is liable to be shot down.
1864 […] The ‘dead line’, beyond which the prisoners are not allowed to pass.
1868 […] Seventeen feet from the inner stockade was the ‘dead-line’, over which no man could pass and live. ((OED. In fishing (1860) and engineering, a dead-line is also “a line that does not move”; but the modern use to mean “time-limit” (Chicago newspapermen c.1920) seems to have come via a combination of the military meaning with a use of the term in printing (1917), where the dead-line was “a guide-line marked on the bed of a printing-press”, beyond which the type was not allowed to protrude.))
“Hitting a deadline”, as we say, is therefore a rather riskier kind of brinkmanship than I had imagined.
Curiously, then, Clinton’s drop-dead deadline is an example of unveiling and restressing the original meaning of a word in order to disavow it. Perhaps, after all, it would be better not to speak of deadlines in this case at all?
2 comments
Run with Total Intelligence
December 8, 2009 9 comments
I had missed the news that Blackwater ((Mentioned in this previous post: shortly afterwards, Blackwater left the International Peace Operations Association, presumably because it wanted to concentrate on war operations.)) had changed its name to Xe Services, hoping to put all that bad press from Iraq behind them, though everyone still refers to them as Blackwater. Xe, of course, is the chemical symbol for xenon, a “noble” gas that can be used as an anaesthetic. Maybe Blackwater is about to unveil its new slogan: “We can anaesthetize people for you — PERMANENTLY.” ((Then again, maybe not: according to one former employee, even the new name Xe already has “such a stain” on it that the Pakistan gig is run under the moniker of Total Intelligence Systems. That’s totally intelligent.))
Anyway, according to Jeremy Scahill ((Author of the fine Blackwater.)) in the Nation, Blackwater mercenaries are active in Pakistan, where they are involved in
sensitive counterterrorism operations
If sensitivity is crucial to the mission, who better to call?
9 comments
Misfiring snoot, redux
December 7, 2009 11 comments
Language Log links to a bizarre “grammar” quiz ((I think it was dubbed a Grammar Challenge! by the former student rather than by DFW himself, which is just as well, since, by my count, a maximum of four out of the 10 questions relate to grammar?)) that David Foster Wallace set his students. ((LL also links to this entertaining takedown of DFW’s notorious essay on language, which was subsequently reprinted in a DFW collection that I reviewed.)) I think the funniest example is the claim that “I only spent six weeks in Napa” is dangerously ambiguous, and likely to be read as something like “I only spent six weeks in Napa; I didn’t employ my time there to its full advantage” unless you move the “only” one word rightwards. But many of the others are silly too. What’s your favourite?
11 comments
Muddying the issue
December 4, 2009 13 comments
The French minister for immigration and “national identity”, Eric Besson, has denounced a phenomenon he calls by the new term mariage gris (“grey marriage”). ((Thanks to Carole.)) He defines it as d’escroquerie sentimentale à but migratoire (“an emotional swindle with the aim of migration”). Le Monde explains further, in exactly whose voice is unclear:
Ces “mariages gris” désignent des mariages conclus entre un étranger et une personne de nationalité française en situation de faiblesse, au détriment de cette dernière, considérée comme abusée par l’autre partenaire de ce contrat. [These “grey marriages” are marriages between a foreigner and a vulnerable French person, and are harmful to the latter, who is considered abused by the other partner in the deal.]
Of course, plenty of marriages between French people and other French people, as between human beings in general, end up in tears and considerations of abusiveness, but Besson does not seem so exercised by this long-familiar phenomenon. ((Found in the HTOED: the English word “marriage” dates from 1297; before that we had wedlock (1225), and before that, the rather-too-revealing bridelock (from Old English till around 1230). Update: checking in the OED reveals that the -lock of bridelock (and subsequently wedlock) is from OE lác meaning “play”, which is nice?)) He was careful to say that mariages mixtes (“mixed marriages”) were a source of “enrichment” to French society, but that their defence must go hand in hand with a lutte (“struggle”) against the other kind of marriage, in which cunning foreigners prey on the weakened French in order to enter France.
In French, a mariage blanc (“white marriage”) is a purely business transaction (something like our “marriage of convenience”). A mariage gris sounds somehow dirtier, more polluted. Of course, grey is also what you get when you mix white and black: too much of that, perhaps, is considered threatening to the “national identity” as it is presently constructed by the French government. ((Talking of fears of miscegenation, the only use of “grey marriage” in English I could find (where grey is not a proper name) is in this innocent forum question about the desirability of intermarriage with extraterrestrials.))
What colour of marriage do you prefer, readers?
13 comments
The neverending struggle
December 3, 2009 9 comments
From Barack Obama’s much-bruited speech on AfPak policy:
I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies[.]
Thus do three alliterative verbs aspirationally applied to an unquantified nimbus of immoderate enemies amount to a narrowly defined goal. Let’s hope that the President never feels the urge to define his task broadly?
9 comments
A world falling to bits
December 2, 2009 6 comments
What’s in a job title?
[T]he library at the University of Illinois is one of the largest in the country, a vast storehouse with more than ten million volumes and twenty-two million items and materials in all formats […] But the university’s Chief Information Officer manages not the books and journals of this massive library, but the school’s computers and networks. ((Dennis Baron, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (Oxford, 2009), p236.))
As the author gently points out, it is a surprising taxonomy whereby ten million books do not count as information, but intrafaculty email does. Yet it seems possible that this was a deliberate and clever rhetorical decision by the university. I have written elsewhere about the contemporary rhetorical cyber-philistinism according to which all the value of the best that has been thought and said in the arts and sciences is supposed to reside in its information. ((Between 1387 and 1813, says the HTOED, information could mean education; no longer.)) Maybe the university is quietly arguing, too, that its vast storehouse of books is something else — learning? knowledge? — and that mere information is the domain of technicians. ((There is, in fact, a warlike heritage to the title “Information Officer”, as it is first recorded by OED in a 1918 Dictionary of Military Terms — but it would be hopeless to try to demilitarize our entire language now (if it ever would not have been).))
A distinction between information and knowledge can be drawn polemically widely, or it can be a subtler matter, of tone and nuance. An interesting case is the comparison in political speech between the terms the information economy (apparently dating from the early 1960s) ((This OECD paper [pdf] offers the unimprovably barbarous opening line: “Human capital is a key policy area in the information economy, as it is required for innovation and growth.”)) and the knowledge economy (first seen by Google in 1989). ((My second edition of OED records only its precursors “knowledge factory” (1928) and “knowledge industry” (1962). Interestingly, it defines the latter, knowledge industry, as a “term applied fancifully or pejoratively to the development and use of knowledge, spec. in universities, polytechnics, etc.” What once seemed fanciful grows to seem normal and even noble.)) They have often been used simply interchangeably; but according to Google’s timelines (1, 2), use of information economy peaked in 2000 and has been declining ever since, while knowledge economy saw a strong upsurge around the same time and is still going strong. Perhaps it began to be felt, in the early 2000s, that information economy carried unfortunate echoes of the dotcom crash, and so people chose instead to speak of the knowledge economy, a phrase that conveniently Unspeaks the unreliable history of information technology, while conveying a comforting sense of human certainty in the face of intractable or unpredictable forces.
6 comments
Imaginary numbers
December 1, 2009 15 comments
The Financial Times reports that many CEOs of oil and gas companies got paid even more in 2008 despite “missing performance targets or other measures of investor value”. In general, as the FT puts it:
Almost all oil and gas companies generated negative returns to shareholders last year and many did not meet their internal targets.
This is something on which I will be happy to be educated by readers who know more than I about finance, but generated negative returns seems to be not just mealy-mouthed but almost oxymoronic. Negative returns, I take it firstly, is straightforwardly euphemismistic for losses, ((It is odd, by the way, that a return can denote either money gained, or some article of goods (or a cheque) that is sent back (the latter sense recorded in OED from 1875). It seems as though the financial sense of return grew out of an agricultural sense of “yield” first recorded as used by Bacon in 1626:
In some Grounds which are strong, you shall haue a Raddish, etc., come in a month; That in other grounds will not come in two; And so make double Returnes.
)) but the combination with generated adds a spice of paradox. After all, to generate (from Latin generare, to beget) means “to bring into existence” or “to produce” (OED). Yet if the oil companies generated negative returns to shareholders, that means (I assume) that the shareholders lost (putative or actual) money because the market price of their shareholdings went down in the period in question.
In which case, surely nothing was generated at all; rather, (putative or actual) money was lost, or value destroyed?
15 comments
