Tom Glenn's Blog, page 42

Persnickety Americans

As readers of this blog know, I spent much of my adult life abroad. Because of my work as a linguist (seven languages) and a spy, I was constantly called upon to assist on the battlefield in a variety of countries, many of which I can’t name because my work there is still classified. My work in Vietnam, where I spent the most time, is now declassified. But I can’t speak of where I went or what I did after Saigon fell in April, 1975.

I have lived, in other words, in many different cultures around the world. So I’ve had ample opportunities to compare my own American culture to that of other nations. Many things stand out about Americans, but the one that caught my attention most often was our unwillingness to discuss specific universal human bodily functions. We consider them subjects to be avoided, unmentionable, embarrassing. They are defecation, urination, and especially sex.

Virtually every other culture I’ve encountered is less squeamish than Americans. The French, for example, use the word merde (shit) in everyday speech without flinching. I found similar usages all over Asia and Europe. All the societies I became familiar with during my career accepted the operations of the human body and the products thereof as commonplace and unremarkable and certainly mentionable. The only nation that approached the U.S. in finickiness was the U.K. But even the British have trouble concealing their amusement at our verbal decorum.

My sense is that young people these days are more down-to-earth than us old geezers. They accept the human condition as normal, unremarkable, and certainly mentionable. My guess is that they’ll move us as a society toward more levelheaded approaches to our language.

Betrump

I stumbled across the word “betrump” a few days ago. It means to deceive or cheat. Oddly enough, the word long preceded Donald Trump and was not derived from his name, despite the fact that he told so many lies. Its place of origin is Scotland; its etymology is be- + French tromper (to deceive). In 2017, it became the Daily Mail’s favorite long-lost word because of Trump’s multiple falsehoods. It has only gained popularity since then, because, according to the Washington Post, Trump told 30,573 lies while he was president. Who knows how many he’s told since he left office? The biggest one is that he won the 2020 election.

The Republicans are following Trump’s lead in dishonesty. The majority of Republicans in Congress insist that Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election was fraudulent, despite losing countless court cases challenging the election. They accuse Biden of misdeeds with no evidence whatever. And, according to the New York Times, the Republican Party officially declared that the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and events that led to it were nothing more than a “legitimate political discourse.” It went on to rebuke two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.

Some statistics on Republican betrumping: Republicans led by Mitch McConnell are trying to pass 489 voter suppression bills in 49 states. A total of 121 House Republicans and 7 Republican Senators helped Trump try to overthrow our democracy by voting against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. And 43 Republicans voted to acquit Trump of all charges in the Senate Impeachment Trial. More than 600 GOP state legislators played a role in Trump’s riot on January 6, 2021. Many of those legislators travelled to Washington to participate in the mob attack on the Capitol. According to Wikipedia, “After the 2020 presidential election, the campaign for incumbent President Donald Trump and others filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in multiple states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Among the judges who dismissed the lawsuits were some appointed by Trump himself. Nearly all the suits were dismissed or dropped due to lack of evidence.”

And now the Republican House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy has been exposed for lying. His mistruths were the subject of a political cartoon, an op-ed, and the lead Sunday editorial in the Washington Post on April 24.

The implication is clear: trust nothing the Republicans say.

Thus “betrump.” Strange how fitting an obsolete word can be.

Self-Description

Two different Who’s Who organizations are including me in their catalogue of prominent people—I’ll have more to say about that in coming days. One of them asked me for a paragraph describing myself. Here’s what I sent:

“When asked what qualities account for my successes, I always single out stubbornness. Neglected as a child, I learned to depend on myself. That stood me in good stead when I was putting myself through college and working part time. It was a godsent on battlefields when no one was there to protect me. And it gave me the force that got me through writing six books and 17 short stories. To this day, I’m stubborn. And proud of it.”

My self-reliance and stubbornness came from my impoverished childhood when, with an alcoholic mother and father in prison, I discovered that it was up to me to find food and keep myself clothed. All through my childhood to the day I graduated from college, I worked up to twenty hours per week to support myself. Overworking became a habit. Three times during my life I have suffered exhaustion and been hospitalized.

My stubbornness these days manifests itself in my insistence on taking care of myself to live to be over a hundred. I sleep as much as ten hours a night and nap every afternoon. I watch my diet (almost all fruits and vegetables, little meat, and no sweets), lift weights for more than two hours every other day, and drink lots of water.

It’s working. I’m healthy as a horse. I’ve come to see stubbornness as a virtue, not a vice. I’m even stubborn about being stubborn. More power to me.

Meaning of “Annamese”

My blog posts on my novel Last of the Annamese led one reader to ask what “Annamese” means. I explained the word here some time ago, but I’ll risk repeating myself.

“Annamese” come from an old name for Vietnam, An Nam. “Vietnam” was bestowed by the Chinese on a group of rebellious people living in southern China many centuries ago. Vietnam in Chinese is Yuè nán or 越南 in characters. That means “those who cross over in the south” or “the trouble-makers in the south.” That troublesome population moved south out of China into what is now Vietnam and established its own independent nation. Over the years, the name of that nation changed numerous times, finally settling on Việt Nam—越南.

One of the numerous names for that nation during those interim centuries was An Nam, taken from the Chinese 安南 (Ān nán) meaning “peace in the south.” One of the three principal characters in the novel Last of the Annamese is South Vietnamese Marine Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thanh, an incorruptible officer fighting to save his country from the communists. He dislikes the accepted name for his country, Vietnam, because he doesn’t like being called a trouble maker in the south. He prefers the old name, An Nam, because he wants to be thought of as a peacemaker in the south.

That raises the question: who is the last of the Annamese referred to in the title? It could be Thanh, or maybe his wife Tuyet, or maybe his toddler son, Thu. I leave it to the reader to decide.

From the foregoing, it may be obvious that Last of the Annamese could never have been written without my knowledge of French, Chinese, and Vietnamese, the three languages of Vietnam. That knowledge plus the years between 1962 and 1975 when I spent more time in Vietnam that I did in the U.S. gave me the grounding I needed to tell the story of the fall of Saigon—which I lived through, escaping under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city.

The Annamese Review (2)

After all those years when Americans considered Vietnam a shameful war, seven or eight years ago, I received an invitation to attend a welcome home party for Vietnam vets. After some hesitation, I decided to go. When I got there, young people, who hadn’t even been born when Saigon fell, clustered around me, shook my hand, embraced me, and thanked me for my service in Vietnam. I was so moved that I cried.

Those youngsters and so many others want to know all they can about the war that was hushed up out of shame. Now I tell my stories openly and with pride. One result is Last of the Annamese. That’s the book where I bare my soul about what I went though when Saigon fell. Even though the book is a novel, there is not a single event reported in Last of the Annamese that is fictional. It all really happened.

And it is through that book that I find peace. It’s a tranquility that’s imperfect at best. But for the most part, the nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, and irrational rages are fewer these days. I have mostly succeeded in coming to terms with my memories by writing them down.

Hence, Last of the Annamese.

Ukraine Civilian Death Toll

Since February 24, when Vladimir Putin launched his attack on Ukraine, more than 2,000 civilians have been killed, and another 2000-plus have been wounded, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Those figures are without doubt far less than the actual casualties—in the maelstrom of ongoing war it is impossible to keep accurate track of those injured and killed. Meanwhile, Russia has already suffered 21,000 casualties, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In the long term, the losses on both sides will run to multiple tens of thousands.

Killing thousands of people during war is standard procedure for Russia. Numbers during the war in Chechnya are illustrative. In 1994, Russian troops invaded Chechnya and killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people, most civilians. In 1999, the fighting restarted, resulting in comparable numbers killed.

Then there’s Syria, a war that continues to this day. The United Nations has verified that at least 350,209 civilians and combatants were killed between March 2011 and March 2021, but it has warned that the figure is an “undercount of the actual number.”

Universal condemnation doesn’t seem to faze Putin. But sooner or later, the Russian people will lose patience with their dictator. When the war against Ukraine is lost—and it will be over time—and every Russian knows someone who died, the people will speak.

The Annamese Review

I reported earlier that the Online Book Club has recently published a review of my novel Last of the Annamese. It’s at https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=230842  That got me to thinking about why I wrote the book. There were two major reasons.

The first was to vent. I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) as a result of my time in combat and, especially, because of my escape under fire when Saigon fell. PTSI never weakens or goes away. It’s incurable. All one can do is to learn to cope. That means facing the unbearable memories and learning to live them. The best way I found to do that is to write down what happened. So I wrote the story of the fall of Saigon as a novel, named Last of the Annamese. I attributed to fictional characters all the calamities I lived through myself. It helped.

The other reason for the book was to tell people what really happened when the North Vietnamese completed their conquest of South Vietnam with the seizure of Saigon. The story of the fall of Vietnam was at the time largely ignored by the American public because the war was so unpopular. During the thirteen years I was involved in Vietnam, I travelled frequently between “in-country” (our term for Vietnam) and “the real world” (what we called the U.S.). On my trips home, when I landed in San Francisco with the returning troops, we were met by mobs who spit on us and called us “murderers” and “baby killers.” Those mob encounters made my PTSI worse. For years after the fall of Saigon, no one wanted to hear about the war. I didn’t even mention my years in Vietnam for decades afterwards.

More next time.

Annamese Reviewed

The Online Book Club has just published a review of my novel Last of the Annamese. Take a look and let me know what you think. The review is at https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=230842

Words, Words, Words (2)

Next, for strange words, consider cheapskate. It comes from the 1890s and combines the word cheap, meaning “stingy,” and skate, an obsolete word once used as a negative slang term for a person who’s generally disliked.

That brings us to villain. The word first came into English from the Anglo-French and Old French vilain, derived from the Late Latin word villanus, which referred to those bound to the soil of the Villa, people who worked on an equivalent of a plantation in Italy or Gaul.  What does it tell us about us that we use a term that originated as a name for humble farm worker now to mean, as Merriam-Webster puts it, “a person of depraved and malevolent character who deliberately plots and does serious harm to others”?

 And finally (for now, anyway), investiture. The word comes from Latin investire, meaning to cloth, from vestis (garment). It means a formal ceremony in which someone is given an official title, rank, or honors. Presumably the term came to its current meaning because of our custom of dressing an honored person in a cloak or gown symbolizing his arrival a new level.

What can we learn about ourselves by looking at the way our words evolve? I could speculate, but in fact I don’t know. I’d welcome my readers’ thoughts.

Words, Words, Words

That was Hamlet’s reply to Polonius’ question “What do you read, my lord?” in Shakespeare’s 1603 play, Hamlet. The implication is that whatever Hamlet is reading is meaningless. But I use that word triplet to express my reaction to the many words I’m encountering these days that are in some way unusual.

Take omicron. It doesn’t have a defined meaning. It’s the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. For reasons I haven’t been able to uncover, it’s the name assigned to the current variant of COVID-19 devastating the earth. It is also the name of a star, Omicron Piscium, a binary star in the constellation of Pisces—which, incidentally, means “fish.”

Another is travesty. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a burlesque translation or literary or artistic imitation usually grotesquely incongruous in style, treatment, or subject matter.” In other words, an offensive fake. It’s root means to dress for the purpose of deceiving. How did it arrive at its current meaning from that root?

Then there’s flayflint—to exact all possible gain. Close to it is skinflint, “a person who would save, gain, or extort money my any means.” Here the meaning comes from combining very basic English (Anglo-Saxon) words. “Flay” means to strip off skin; “flint” means to strike stone to create a spark and start a fire; “skin” means the flesh that covers the human body.

More next time.