Flash Back!

A little way into the Korean Basic, once we had gotten to the point that we could manage more advanced grammar, we had a lesson in which "Dad" came home from work to find his sons brawling, and yelled "POK DONG AH! SSA-OOH JI MA!"; colloquially translated, "What is this riot?! Stop fighting!" 

Only we thought he was calling one of his sons "Pok Dong" -- riot or civil disturbance -- and did not quite grasp yet the nuances of Korean grammar; in this case, the imperative forms indicated by the "AH/MA" verbs endings.

(Confession digression: I are grammaring goodly in English, written or spoken, but if you require me to diagram a sentence, I'm heading for the door. I still have a hard time telling the difference between an adverb and an adjective, and I'm not clear on what a gerund is.)

So several years later I'm in Korea on my second tour, my first at the Second Infantry Division, and one weekend I scored a day pass to head down to Seoul. Maybe I was Christmas shopping, I don't recall, but I don't remember it as being particularly cold, so may not. 

Anyway, the bus route went by several universities, including Yeon Sei Dae Hak ("tae hak" = university; commonly referred to as "Yeon Dae", which, confusingly, is also the word for "regiment".)

The student body was participating in their favorite intramural activity, loudly proclaiming their opinions on various and sundry matters of great concern, featuring a variety of special effects and training aids by both said student body and their critics, to wit: bricks, rocks, fire bombs, and tear gas.

In other words, rioting.*

I caught a whiff of said tear gas, leaving me a bit hoarse for a day or two. When a Korean acquaintance asked if I was well, I explained that I had gotten too close to the "pok dong" near Yeon Dai.

And was promptly corrected: "Not a pok dong, it was a demo!"

And that, boys and girls was my first exposure to the concept that, if the cause is exalted enough, any amount of riotous, destructive, behavior can be excused by the simple process of designating it a "demonstration" or "peaceful protest."

*See P.J. O'Rourke's hilarious essay "Seoul Man" from Rolling Stone, reproduced in his collection Holidays in Hell.

 

a date which will live in infamy

“I Am An Adverb!”

So, there I was. 1980. Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, California. Basic Korean Course. (For “listeners”, AKA "geeks"; they had a separate course at the time for interrogators, AKA “rubber hosers.”)

Now, the recruiters had taken one look at my test scores and decided I should take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB. I had not done so well in Spanish classes in school, but they insisted, so I went ahead.

When I walked out of the room I felt like my brains were running out of my ears.

There were multiple portions to the test. One checked for general knowledge of foreign languages; I recall one where the sentence said “le poisson est sur la table”, and you had to select the correct drawing, which variously featured a fish and a bottle of poison on, under, and beside a table.

Another section used English vocabulary, but made-up grammar. As I recall, it actually was similar to what I would be learning in Korean: “The boy went to the store” might be rendered “’Boy-ga’ ‘store-ay’ ‘go-ed’”; The “ga” suffix attached to “boy” indicates the subject of the sentence, and the “ay” suffix on “store” indicates his destination. The verb comes at the end of the sentence, and instead of using “went” you use “go” with a past tense indicator. Both the test and the Korean language were/are a lot more complicated than that. As I recall, by the end of that section of the test we were reading paragraphs and answering (trying to answer) questions about who did what to whom.

"Darmok"

In my previous post, LOL of the Day, I shared a meme which, quite frankly, I knew a lot of people wouldn't get.

And that's OK. I even know some Star Trek fans who had forgotten the episode "Darmok".

Now, that particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation happens to be my favorite for several reasons.

A quick synopsis, for anyone not familiar with the episode:

• The Enterprise is dispatched to meet an alien race. 
• Picard is beamed off the ship as the aliens cast a "scattering field" which prevents Enterprises transporter from beaming Picard back up.
• Picard discovers that the intent of the alien captain is that he and Picard cooperate to fight a creature.
• Slowly, Picard realizes that the reason that the Federation has never been able to communicate with this alien race is that they only speak in allegory and metaphor; likewise, they find straightforward speech baffling.
• The alien captain dies, but Picard is now able to communicate with the aliens, so Everything's Fine.

How many Standard Star Trek Tropes did you spot in that executive summary of a synopsis?  (More at Darmok - Wikipedia and Star Trek One Trek Mind: Deciphering "Darmok".)

One of the reasons I like this episode is that it is one of the few examples of science fiction in media where there was an honest attempt to live up to SF's nickname "The Literature of Ideas." While any literature can be described as starting from the question "What if...?" -- "What if the teenage children of two feuding families of Verona fell in love and secretly married?" -- in Speculative Fiction the "What if?" gets to be (one might argue should be) more out of the ordinary.

In this case, "What if we met a race/culture that only communicated in metaphor and allegory?"

This is cool.

Mind you, it is also absurd, because, as is pointed out in the article "Deciphering 'Darmok'" I linked above,

Yet there's one annoying thing about “Darmok.” If the Tamarians only speak in these metaphors, how did they ever learn the words that later came to be used in the phrases? How did they know that walls fell around Shaka if they need a phrase to symbolize the word “wall?”

They had words for stuff, but they couldn't just use a word? They couldn't say "Here", meaning "take this", they had to say "Temba, his arms open"? How did they learn what "arm" or "arms" or "open" were? Or "his"?

Not to mention, how does a race that only speaks in metaphor develop the science and math needed to become a space-faring race?

My assumption has always been that there were certain ceremonial occasions on which it is an unbreachable imperative that one speak in these metaphors, not unlike a Vulcan's dedication to logic. We know Vulcans are actually susceptible to emotion and illogic, and that they must fight to maintain their control, so perhaps this alien outreach mission would be regarded as a failure if they didn't play by their own internal rules. ("Deciphering 'Darmok'" posits a race that is partially telepathic.)

Another thing I liked about the episode is that they routinely broke every other magic double-talk generator device on the show, but this is the only episode I remember where Universal Translator failed.

Given Roddenberry's known utopian vision for the future -- routinely ignored on the show, when it was convenient, but don't dare suggest to him that he was full of shit! -- he probably had some Chomskian notion of a "language organ"...

On This Date...

...in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln stood up in Gettysburg, PA, and delivered what may be the greatest oration in American history:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Ironic to consider that it wasn't even supposed to be "the main event", which was supposed to be The Honorable Edward Everett's two hour long "Gettysburg Oration". The lesson there for public speakers is obvious.

A couple more cool language links

The disappearance of the Trans- (or Mid-) Atlantic accent.
 Cool Video Reveals Why People in Old Movies Talked Funny | GOOD

As a "taught" (as opposed to "learned naturally") dialect, it was a now-obsolete version of "BBC English". (As opposed to the nearly-universal Mid-Western pronunciation used in American broadcasting today; when I was growing up, linguists said that the "average" American dialect was spoken in a suburb of Detroit. I guess that would mean I grew up speaking the US equivalent of Received Pronunciation...)

Beware of the video there finishing and then autoplaying into some progressive claptrap...

Also: Appalachian English - Maggie's Farm.

Again, these were both found on Instapundit, here and here.

If this is weird, I don't want to be normal

Why is English so weirdly different from other languges...

English is not normal
No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language

by John McWhorter

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.

Pretty interesting. He manages to avoid the whole "English lies in wait for unsuspecting languages, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets for spare grammar and syntax" thing, which I find oddly disappointing...

h/t Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit » Blog Archive » WE DON’T WANNA BE NORMAL: English is not normal.  I don’t know.  Of all the languages I learned, English was the easiest. I don’t want to know what that says about me.

QOTD, 03/05/15

I just started reading Inventing Freedom, by Daniel Hannan, Member of European Parliament for South East England.

...to the Eurocrat, "unregulated” is more or less synonymous with "illegal."

For "Eurocrat", one can easily substitute, say, "Bureaucrat." Or "Statist." Or "Leftist."

The full quote runs thus:

British Euro-skepticism owes a great deal to a resentment of what is seen as unnecessary meddling, but, to the Eurocrat, "unregulated” is more or less synonymous with "illegal." I see the difference almost every day. Why, I often find myself asking in the European Parliament, do we need a new EU directive on, let's say, herbal medicine? Because, comes the answer there isn't one . In England, herbalists have been self regulating since the reign of Henry VIII. In most of Europe, such a state of affairs could never have come about.

The same "reasoning" leads to seeing "loopholes" anywhere the statist sees free men and women doing as they please.

What He Said

Via SayUncle, Publicola posts Publicola: A Few Things Volume One; in many cases, I was gonna say that, but couldn't find either the words or the time. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it...

For example:

It's Massey's Fault - House Retro Iced Tea Rub A Dub Step Mix

If a bill did not pass out of a committee, it is not the fault of someone whose actions you disapprove of. If a law that further imposes upon our Rights gets enacted, it is not the fault of someone whose words you thought did not wax poetic enough. It's the fault of the damn legislators. No one else's. Group punishment is a very old model, and one that gunowners should not fall for. So if Person A, whose goals and methods bear a passing resemblance to Person B, gets negative attention somehow and is used as an excuse to deny Person B his Rights, then why the hell don't ya blame the person that is actually responsible - the legislator! - instead of said politicians scapegoat (Person A)?

Whatever open carrier is used as an excuse for not passing a pro-gunowner law or for passing an anti-gunowner law, it's the legislature to blame, not the open carrier. If you don't like his tactics, then talk with him and try to change his mind. If that fails, then accept that different people approach problems in a different manner. Also accept that we ain't all in this together. I know a lot of gunowners who'd leave me on the side of the road if they got national reciprocity, a guaranteed low permit fee, and maybe sound suppressors being a $5 tax and instant background check away. I know some that would settle for far less. Whereas I want an end to all prior restraint based gunowner control laws. No restrictions on owning or carrying anything. So my goals are different than the goals of other gunowners. I think this same difference is at the heart of the folks blaming other gunowners for this or that. After all, a different method is used to get 5 yards to the 50 yard line than one used to get to the end zone that's 55 yards away. Some folks are happy on the 50. Others want the end zone.

Blame the legislator. Or legislature. That guy with a gun yelling about treason and his Rights being infringed - he didn't do anything to you, other than become used as an excuse by folks who weren't really your friends anyway (that'd be the legislators, btw). If you want to deride him for being "not politically smart" or for "not helping" I can't stop you. Though, I see no reason for one gunowner to turn on another if they both want the same thing, that thing being freedom. But if you just want the army to show up and stand there until you've negotiated like a bunch of Scottish lords from a badly a-historic Mel Gibson flick, then perhaps you shouldn't be so appalled when someone with less politically savvy (and a few more vertebrae) than you have shows up, wanting to pick a fight and maybe, just maybe win back his freedom.

Too long to be a Quote Of The Day...

My only objection is the suggestion that criticizing people for being married to counter-productive tactics is, in itself, counter-productive.

On the other hand, this same reasoning also applies to the whole "We lost, so I'll blame the NRA and SAF and GOA and JPFO and..."

This'll be interesting...

So, up jumped a monkey from a coconut grove, er, popped a proposal for a unit reunion in Tacoma.

Now, the thing with have served 20 years in a (mostly) peacetime Army is that you tend to move around, and in most MOSs you don't really get a lot of chance to put down metaphorical roots. The "career model" I had explained to me somewhere along the line is that, in a 20 year career, a soldier will serve one overseas "long tour" of three years, and one overseas "short tour" of one year. The Army being a big bureaucracy some will do two long tours and no short tour, some will do two short tours, guys are always pulling strings to get an extra short tour.

Then we have Fort Brag, NC, often called the most appropriately named installation in the US Military, to which a guy will report straight out of AIT and never leave until it's time to retire. Theoretically, he does an overseas tour in there; if he's really plugged in, it'll be with the 173^rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy, so he can stay on jump status. If less plugged in, he'll go to Korea for a year.  (No kidding, I knew First Sergeants and Sergeants Major who were on their first overseas tour ever.)

Now, being an MI Geek means that assignment models and  theories about career development go out the window. Especially if you're a Korean linguist, what with effectively NO overseas long tours.  The longest I was stateside was not quite two and a half years, at Ft Ord, and that was because the Seventh Infantry Division (Light) had priority to make the Light Division Concept work, or something. (As Alton Brown might say, that's another blog post.)

There were also slots in Hawaii.  Hawaii sort of counted as an overseas tour, simply because it costs so much to move someone there and back. People assigned to Hawaii often need to be removed by the US Marshals Service because, well, it's Hawaii...

So, that leaves the assignments in Korea.  Which, at the time, were all "short" and all considered "hardship." Oh, you could apply to extend, and they practically begged you to, and I am probably the only 98GxLKP SIGINT/Electronic Warfare Voice Intercept Operator - Korean¹ to apply four times, on three different tours, for extension and to be turned down all four times.²

Anyway, in 20 years I had 7 overseas tours, plus various and sundry TDYs and exercises, for almost 9 years in Korea. So the idea of a "reunion" is a little odd, what with all that moving around, the confirmed list has a few people I never heard of, and a bunch I was last assigned with 20 or 30 years ago, but I always heard their names. I spent a total of maybe three years assigned to this unit.

So, anyway, if you hear of a riot in Tacoma Friday night, the creaky old MI Geeks had nothing to do with it...

***

1. Now 35S 35P SIGINT Linguist.  Gee, they actually improved something! {Corrected}
2. The first time the company clerk lost my paperwork.   The second time I was heading to Ft Ord and the 7<^th ID, see above comments regarding Light Division workability. The third and fourth times I don't know why they did it, but it led to my meeting Mrs. Drang, so that worked out after all. The only time I was successful in getting extended was when I didn't want to, I was retiring and they kept me in Korea for an extra six months.  On flight status, collecting flight pay...  
3. No, there is no "three" above. I made a couple of minor corrections to this post, including actually publishing it; apparently, I saved it as a draft, and tried to link the draft on facebook, which doesn't work too good.

The Marketeers have Weird Ideers

Well, it sort of scans...

Consider the following ideas:

• What idjit decided that milk shakes have to have whipped cream and a cherry on top?
• At least Jack's minions give you the option; Ronald's serfs just hand it to you that way, like it not.  I think the redhead's do, as well.
• Some buffoon is marketing (on Amazon) a black electric toothbrush as "the ultimate Father's Day gift."
• Finally:  Look, Gevalia, we know that you're using that Fabio clone to try and sell women on the idea that your over-roasted Euro-coffee is sexy, but...
• ...A cup of coffee is sometimes called a "cuppa Joe", which means what you're trying to peddle would NOT be a "cup of Johann" but a "cup of Sepp."

Peeves

"Moving forward."
I hate that phrase.
I'm not sure why it irks me as much as it does, but of all the modern management catch phrases, this one, more than any other, is guaranteed to get me an ass-chewing after a staff meeting, when I can't help but grimace.
"Moving forward"?  But we're not talking about something that moves. 
Why not just say "From now on"?  Or "In the future"? 
Sounds passive-voice to me, and I've been drilled to avoid passive voice whenever possible. 
Or maybe it's just that modern management fads piss me off generally.

Patriot's Day

Usually, on April 19th, I post about Lexington and Concord, and the American Revolution.

This time...  Given the events of the last week, I keep coming back to this:

Earlier this week, I had some errands to run after work, and instead of coming back home, showering and changing and then going out, I just went out on the way home*.

Saw a vehicle on the road with two bumper stickers:

Obama/Biden 2012 

and

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism

So much fail there.

First, let's consider the semantics.  (Also maybe a problem of perception.)  Certainly, dissenting against an unjust policy, war, etc. is a Good Thing.  But what about a just policy, or war?  A foe invades your country bent on conquest and destruction, and collaboration is patriotism?

Reads like something out of Orwell.

Then there's the fact that this nitwit probably thinks that, every time I disagree with His Imperial Majesty, Barack Hussein Obama, I am a racist, crypto-fascist, bitterly clinging closet mass murderer cum terrorist, but whenever he disagreed with President Bush he was simply expressing the highest form of patriotism...

Admittedly, it is not "certain" that he thinks that, but since he hasn't removed the Obama/Biden bumper sticker, and, in fact, replaced the 2008 one with a 2012 one, it's probably safe to say that.

Maybe it's a bit of some sort of cognitive dissonance.

Or maybe some forms of dissent are more high than others.


*Since I cannot carry at work, I don't think I'll be doing this again any time soon, what with mad Chechens importing their insane homicidal cause. Large population of "Russian" immigrants around here, and I've seen many tattoos and bumper stickers to indicate a connection with that tragic nation.

The Elements of Style

The Elements of Style from Jake Heller on Vimeo.

"A note on usage"

Scott Johnson @ Powerline Blog.
I would add that "decimation" is not a synonym for "ruined" or "destroyed."
And the word is "orient", not "orientate."

Although there may be those who would, indeed, use "enormity" to describe Steve Jobs...

Word of the Day

Dictionary.com Word of the Day

zugzwang: a situation in which a player is limited to moves that have a damaging effect.

Sometimes known as "Working in the Salt Mines."

Or "being a fiscal conservative in Washington State."

Supply your own.

Question of the day, 08/31/2010

When did the word "literally" come to mean "figuratively" or "so to speak"?  How can otherwise intelligent people expect me to take them seriously when they commit such solecisms catachresis. (Catachreses?  Catachresi?  Make that "commit such a catachresis.")

Say what?

Article in the New York Times Magazine regarding theories of how ones language shapes ones thought.

Nice Choice of Words, Pal...

Interior Secretary Ken Salzar, speaking of the oil slick from the British Petroleum oil rig that just happened to blow up on Earth Day, told Fox News

We were stepping on the neck of BP to do everything we can do

and told CNN

Our job is keep our boot on the neck of British Petroleum and make sure they live up to their responsibilities.

Just a short jump to George Orwell's

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. 

h/t Wizbang.

Speaking of Language...

Dave Kellett, in today's Quote of the Day: "'The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary.'"

Last weekend, at Stitch Witch's birthday party, one of the other guests was wearing a t-shirt that said "English does not borrow from other languages. English follows other languages into dark alleys, knocks them on the head, and then goes through their pockets for stray grammar and syntax." Or something like that.