Tom Glenn's Blog, page 27

Words, Words, Words (Again) (5)

Back to it: one of my favorite subjects: English words.

Today I’ll start with benign. According to Oxford Languages, the word means gentle and kindly, not harmful. Merriam-Webster says that it comes from Latin “benignus,” which was formed from “bene,” meaning “well,” and “gignere,” “to beget.” “Gignere” is also the root of such English words as genius and germ.

Next:  notwithstanding. It simply means in spite of. It’s from Middle English “notwithstonding,” from “not” and “withstonding,” present participle of withstonden to withstand, which, in turn, means stand up against or resist.

That brings us to muckraker, meaning one who searches out and exposes misconduct or publicizes scandal about famous people. It comes from the verb, “muckrake,” which means to rake excrement. “Muck,” by itself, most often means farmyard manure.

Now: hotspur, a rash, hotheaded, impetuous man. The word is a combination of “hot,” meaning overly warm, and “spur,” a device with a small spike or a spiked wheel that is worn on a rider’s heel and used for urging a horse forward. Hotspur has quite a history. It was the nickname of Sir Henry Percy (1364–1403), known as Harry Hotspur, eldest son of the 1st Earl of Northumberland. It also refers to Sir Henry Percy as depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1.

That brings us to Yankee. The word refers to someone living in the northeast U.S., a northerner in the U.S., or simply an American. The word’s origin is unknown. One theory is that is derived from the Dutch “Janke,” a diminutive of Jan meaning “John.” Or perhaps it originated when a British general named James Wolfe used it first in 1758 when he was commanding some New England soldiers. Or maybe the word comes from the Cherokee word “eankke,” which means coward. It remains a mystery.

Whew. Enough linguistic oddity for one day. More next time.

English Spelling Rules (2)

The end result of how English came to be formed is that we’re stuck with the most widely spoken language on earth whose spelling is hopelessly inconsistent and monumentally difficult. As a result, we as a people have more problems with misspellings than any other. That’s why we have spelling as a subject in grammar school and spelling errors show up constantly, even in the daily newspaper. And that’s the major reason that the study of English is so difficult for foreigners: they must learn the spelling of every single word. Only Chinese is more difficult to learn to write.

Should we support a move to simplify English and systematize its spelling? Not for me. I’ve already gone through the anguish of learning to spell. I’ll stick to what I’ve got.

English Spelling Rules

Because I am a writer by vocation and a linguist by trade (seven languages other than English), my attention much of the time is on the English language, its structure, and how it works. As I reported here not long ago, English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian (western German) dialects and was brought to Britain by Germanic invaders (8th and 9th centuries AD). A second invasion led by the Norman William the Conqueror in the 11th century introduced French influence. Then other stimulus from Europe brought Latin and Greek words into our language. As time went on and the U.S. became a country, we borrowed from every language in the world.

The result is that our way of spelling words in our language is as varied as the language’s roots. Spelling of ordinary everyday words, derived from Anglo-Frisian, is supposed to follow rules based on the sound assigned to the 26 letters of our western alphabet, the alphabet used in all romantic and Germanic languages but pronounced differently in each. Compare, for example, how the phoneme con is pronounced in English, French, and Italian.

But even the basic rules are not consistent in English. Compare how we pronounce though, tough, through, thorough, and thought. Then we have words that begin with silent letters such as gnu, gnat, knee, knife, mnemonic, pneumonia, write, and psalm. Other words that contain internal silent letters are doubt, debt, aisle, and muscle. One of the most common among silent letter sets of words is those with the “ght” ending, such as night, fight, light, sought, and bought.

And words not pronounced like they’re spelled are routine in English. Witness: asthma, colonel, lasagna, Arkansas, sword, phlegm, potpourri, hors d’oeuvres, island, knight, rendezvous, Wednesday, salmon, corps, champagne, Tucson, subtle, lingerie, and rapport. Common among these words are those borrowed from French where we have maintained some semblance of the original pronunciation.  

More next time.

Biden Gaining

I believe we are seeing a turnaround in President Joe Biden’s popularity. Because of recent legislative victories, 83 percent of Democrats now approve of the job Biden is doing. That’s an 11-point increase since last month. As expected, 92 percent of Republicans disapprove as do 55 percent of independents.

The American public historically gives presidents low approval ratings. According to the Roper Center at Cornell University, Harry S. Truman polled at 22 percent in 1952. In 1974, Richard Nixon had a 23 percent rating. Jimmy Carter polled at 28 percent five years later, and in January 2021, Trump had a 29 percent approval rating. George H.W. Bush polled the same as Trump in 1992. So Biden’s current rating of 33 percent is quite respectable.

Biden’s rising approval rating reinforces my belief that, polls notwithstanding, the Democrats will retain control of the White House and the Congress in coming elections. The principal reason for my expectation is not that the Democrats have performed particularly well but that the Republicans have disgraced themselves notoriously thanks to the leadership of Donald Trump. The American public, while still concerned about monetary issues such as inflation, is expressing greater alarm at the threat to democracy itself, a very real danger inherent in current Republican campaigns led by pro-Trump candidates. Americans are showing that they understand that unruly freedom is preferable to orderly autocracy.

The outcome of the November 2022 election will show how accurate my predictions are. To the degree that my understanding of the American outlook is correct, Trump’s fascists will be defeated, and the sloppy Democrats will win.

My Review of The Yank

My review of John Crawley’s The Yank (Melville House, 20222) is online as of this morning. You can read it at https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-yank-the-true-story-of-a-former-us-marine-in-the-irish-republican-army?fbclid=IwAR1-7lmF3qjChVh72atD79D8RguNFHZ_i7y0gyAbQlJdbYxQyaKX7JpReQU

Take a look and let me know what you think.

More Classified at Mar-a-Lago?

Given Donald Trump’s prodigious lack of respect for the laws regarding the handling of classified information, how do we know that the raid on Mar-a-Lago recovered all the secret and top-secret documents that Trump stole from the White House? During the brief time that the FBI was on the premises, they could not possibly have carried out a thorough search—the mansion has 126 rooms and fills 62,500-square-foot. Nor does the government have any way of knowing what material Trump may have absconded with when he left the White House. And if Trump has in his possession classified material, what is to stop him from sharing it with other nations as he has done in the past?

Trump has a history of passing national security information to other nations. Wikileaks reports, for example, that Trump discussed classified information during an Oval Office meeting on May 10, 2017 with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, providing sufficient details that could be used by the Russians to deduce the source of the information and the manner in which it was collected, according to current and former government officials. White House staff initially denied the report, but the following day Trump defended the disclosure, stating that he has the absolute right to share intelligence with Russia.

The Justice Department says classified documents were “likely concealed and removed” from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago in an effort to obstruct the federal investigation into the discovery of the government records. Secret material could have been concealed anywhere.

We have, in short, a serious security problem. I wouldn’t be surprised of learn of more raids on Trump’s properties, not only at Mar-a-Lago but elsewhere.

Equal justice under the law is an issue here. Had I, during my thirty-five-year career as a government employee handling classified material absconded with even a single classified document, I would have forthwith been arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. Why is Donald Trump above the law?

Twilight Calm

My recent post about watching planes from my deck reminded me of a phenomenon that is both a mystery and a treasure to me: the calm at twilight. Twilight is defined as the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon. It is caused by the refraction and scattering of the sun’s rays from the atmosphere. Because I spend so much time on my deck looking north from my house over the hundred-foot diameter pond surrounded by trees, I am often there at the end of the day during evening twilight, that brief period after sunset when the earth is still visible in the light from the dying sun. I have observed repeatedly that in the moments after the sun has disappeared below the horizon, all motion stops. Breezes still. Birds go silent. Tree limbs cease all motion. It is a time of peace unrivalled by any other except the morning twilight just before sunrise.

Evening twilight is brief. Then comes night, a peaceful but lively time, filled with the noises and movements of night creatures—animals, insects, and reptiles that can become quite noisy, especially frogs, katydids, and crickets. Temperature permitting, I leave open at night my bedroom windows and let the chorus of night creatures serenade me to sleep.

And when I waken in the morning, nearly always before dawn, I witness again the calm of twilight as sky lights up before the sun rises.

So I claim twilight, both morning and night, as my time—a brief moment of unparalleled peace. May I enjoy it as long as I live.

My Vietnamese Name

When I was a student at the Army Language School (now called the Defense Language Institute or DFI) in 1959, it was customary to assign students a name in the language they were studying. For reasons unknown, I had been ordered to study Vietnamese, a language I had never heard of—in those days we called that part of the world French Indochina. My instructors dubbed me Trần văn Lợi.

In Vietnamese, the family name comes first—that was Trần (陳). The only place I ever came across Trần while speaking Vietnamese was as a family name, but it has a variety of meanings: “ancient” in old Vietnamese, and in modern Vietnamese it can mean “roof-top.” Ở trần means “naked,” and trần tục means “dusty.”

The middle name văn (文) literally means knowledge or culture in Sino-Vietnamese; it’s just a filler. And Lợi (利) means “profit,” but it was assigned to me not because of its meaning but because it was as close to the sound of “Glenn” as the Vietnamese could find.

Because there are only half a dozen or so surnames in Vietnamese (the most common is Nguyễn, the name of the last Vietnamese dynasty, which ruled the unified Vietnam from 1802 to 1884), the given name is the one used to identify an individual. So I was “Ông Lợi,” that is, Mr. Lợi. Or just Lợi with people on friendly terms, like calling me “Tom.” Lợi is pronounced low in the voice with a glottal stop and sounds like single syllable version of LUH-EE.

I have loved languages all my life. I taught myself French and Italian as a child, had four years of Latin in high school, and studied German (among other things) in college. I enlisted in the army to go to the language school to study Chinese, a language that fascinated me. I was disappointed to be assigned Vietnamese but had no choice. I ended up loving the language. It was the first Asian and tonal language I studied (Chinese came later), and learning it taught me a great deal about how languages work. So to this day, I still cherish my assigned name, Lợi.

Civil War

I was shocked to learn that more than a third of Americans, most of them Republicans, now believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified. Equally shocking is that over 70 percent of registered Republicans believe Trump won the 2020 election—in the face of irrefutable evidence that he lost. The recent FBI seizure of classified documents at Trump’s estate at Mar-a-Lago has brought calls for attacks on the FBI and one actual attack against an FBI field office on August 11 in Cincinnati, resulting in the assailant’s death. Then, Sunday’s Washington Post featured an article by Marc Fisher titled, “Fighting words: Are we headed for civil war?” The same day, staunch Donald Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) ominously warned of “riots in the streets” if the former president is hit with charges for taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago home when he moved out of the White House.

In other words, there is a real possibility that Trump Republicans might unleash violence against the federal government now under the control of duly elected Democrats. That would justify response by the U.S. military. And we would find ourselves in a conflict correctly defined as a civil war.

Our nation has never during my long life been so threatened. The ultimate perpetrator is Donald Trump, still harping on his false claims that his defeat in the 2020 election was due to fraud. He encourages his supporters to protest and approves of violence. Were he restored to power without winning an election, fascism would triumph.

Have we really come to this?

Planes at Sunset

I’ve blogged in previous years about living in Columbia, Maryland, and sitting on my deck looking north across the pond, surrounded by mature trees of all varieties. These days, with summer’s end at hand, I spend as much time as I can on the deck, especially at the end of the day. I live in the approach and departure flight paths from Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI), less than twenty miles to my east. I watch low-flying planes head south toward me, then turn east to land at BWI. And I see planes much higher up and much louder—presumably using much more energy to climb—flying west after takeoff.

Weather permitting, I take all my meals on my deck so I can delve into my glorious surroundings and enjoy them to the hilt. That means that I have plenty of opportunities to watch the BWI planes. My favorite time bar none is evening twilight. Then I can watch the planes lit from below when the sun is too far down to see from my deck but still shines up and floods the underside of the planes with brilliant light. The sight takes my breath away.

I am humbled by my good fortune. But I judge that I earned my happy retirement: I repeatedly risked my life on the battlefield for the good of my country, first in Vietnam, later elsewhere (still classified). I didn’t do it the rewards; I did it for my country and especially for the man fighting next to me. And I came away scarred by Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. So the beautiful place I now live and write are the just recompence for my sacrifice.