"The Americans," Walt Whitman predicted, will be "the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world -- and the most perfect users of words."
While we wince as Tony Soprano wields a single Chaucerian vulgarity as noun, verb, adjective and adverb, it is easy to wonder over the poet's wisdom. Perhaps, however, wishful Walt did anticipate something terribly prevalent in the American character: our poignant desire to sound genteel, our sincere pursuit of stylish pronunciation, our flirtation with the fancy.
And with the French. We are convinced that the French are haughty, stinky and perverse, and we deplore their government's unreliability as an ally. But we go gaga over their language. We call our coffeehouses "caf?s" and our dress shops "boutiques." We don't have drivers; we have "chauffeurs." (These words we pronounce perfectly, just as we do rendezvous, coup d'?tat, derri?re and m?nage ? trois.)
To name the galaxy of intimate female apparel, we adopted the French word lingerie. But its pronunciation we utterly mangle. (The vendeuse in Galeries Lafayette in Paris has no idea what the "lawn-zheray" department is.) To do it right, we need simply take our own "tangerine," replace the "t" with an "l" and drop the second "n." Voila! But instead, we came up with a bastardized pronunciation that seems to sound more Gallic.
It is probably the soup?on of nasalizing in the first syllable of lingerie that undermines our saying it correctly. (Ditto with ing?nue.) But how do we explain our bungling of that final syllable? Could it be that the sound of the French "?" with an acute accent has a certain cachet?
Perhaps it was this yearning for classiness that caused Senator John Warner, just before the second Gulf War, to tell the CNN broadcaster Wolf Blitzer (a killer superhero name wasted on a mortal) that the "US military found a cachet of Iraqi weapons."
Our rendering of "lingerie" would be understandable were we simply to Anglicize it, rhyming the first syllable with "tin" and the last with "tea." (This is how my Argentine ex-husband pronounces the word. He also accents the first syllable and -- sans logic -- uses a hard "g." The charming result in no way contributed to our divorce.)
"Whence," though a term many editors deem arcane, is still in vogue. We reach for its high-minded sound, but in so doing often spoil its elegant shorthand by adding the redundant "from."
Late US president John F. Kennedy, during a 1962 speech in Newport, Rhode Island stated: "We are tied to the ocean from whence we came."
Roger Morris, when discussing his book Partners in Power, said: "They obviously didn't know from whence [former US president] Bill Clinton came."
Only Adelaide really gets away with it, when in Guys and Dolls she sings: "Take back your mink to from whence it came."
In our earnest striving for finesse, we sometimes embellish simple words, adorning them with extra syllables.
"Genetical" and "melodical" feel more sonorous, less blunt, than their cleaner, three-syllabled selves.
An MSNBC anchor, speaking early this year of a possible war with Iraq, said: "Considering the dangerousness of the situation..."
A few days later, an ABC newsman reported that "donators are giving over US$100 million of their Matisse collection to the Met."
And on PBS, Charlie Rose, in a discussion of Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was searching for the tag to identify a bioethicist's field of study. The allure of the deluxe bioethicist was so great that rather than whittle back to bioethics, Rose grafted on, uttering "bioethicism."
Myriad such utterances occur in print and on television, not least of them the misuse of the stylish "myriad." In late 2002, for example, Leon Panetta, the former Clinton chief of staff, told Blitzer of "a myriad of possibilities" for a new economics team.
We are often lured to the chichi sounds of plural nouns because we perceive the correct forms as vulgar. We react to a "stimuli," observe a "phenomena" and declare: "This criteria..."
Bill Clinton, in a commencement address, turned to JFK Jr. and said: "I understand that you're an alumni."
These errors result from our solemn desire to sound highbrow. But our misuse of the plurals threatens to bring about the extinction, in English, of the singular suffixes of Latin and Greek.
The impulse to sidestep coarseness produces "from everyone but you and I," with "I" seeming more polished than "me."
Our horror of appearing uncouth leads us all -- kings and commoners alike -- to opt for the ubiquitous adverb instead of the terse, accurate adjective. "This perfume smells strongly," we say, or "The fish tasted strangely."
When asked how he felt about life on other planets, Carl Sagan said, "I feel passionately about it."
One such construction is used so frequently that examples abound. Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, discussing Jacqueline Kennedy's refusal to speak to him after Dallas, said, "I felt badly about that."
Even Hemingway, master of the taut, wrote in A Moveable Feast: "I felt badly that Ford had been rude to him."
Not one of the above, be assured, was bemoaning difficulty with his sense of touch.
We've borrowed again from the French to name a specific item of lingerie: the brassiere. We may abbreviate the word in the US, but the French have abandoned it altogether (especially on the Cote d'Azur). In France, a woman's undergarment for supporting the breasts is called a soutien-gorge, literally "throat-sustaining."
Speaking of "bras," have you ever met a yoga teacher who doesn't instruct her students -- once they've achieved shoulder stands -- to come down from their inverted positions "very, very slowly, one vertebrae at a time"?
Jerelle Kraus, an art director at The New York Times, is writing a book about Op-Ed pages and their art.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations