WordLo

A Sputnik moment is a point where people realise that they are threatened of challenged and have to redouble their efforts to catch up.


Obama followed his Energy Secretary Steven Chu in declaring that the United States stands at a new "Sputnik moment" in the development of such technologies as clean energy and high-speed rail. The idea has been percolating for several years now: Robert J. Samuelson of Newsweek and Mort Zuckerman of U.S. News & World Report both used the expression in 2005. It's unclear whether Americans listening to Obama will be moved by the historical reference, particularly those too young to appreciate the threat that the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite represented during the Cold War era. Obama continued the aeronautical allusions by referring to new energy innovation projects as the "Apollo projects of our time."

Sources: Using English
"Commander in Speak: Parsing Obama's Speech", CBSNews

"Choice Words from the S…

“A political concept whereby a significant amount of responsibility for the running of a society’s services is devolved to local communities and volunteers.”

The phrase was coined by Prime Minister David Cameron, who said in July: “The big society ... is about liberation – the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.” David Cameron spells out how his vision of a 'Big Society' could address Britain's problems.
David Cameron's big idea of the campaign is the "big society". This was launched with some fanfare at the end of March at an event in London, and made it into the Conservative manifesto. Three weeks later, it was being buried by Cameron's colleagues, one of whom said, "We need to turn Oliver Letwin's Hegelian dialectic into voter-friendly stuff." (Letwin, chairman of the Conservative Research Department, has a PhD in philosophy.)That shadow minister meant to dismis…

Cablogrammi.Gli “embassy cables” o “diplomatic cables” sono rapporti ufficiali scritti da funzionari e ambasciatori facenti capo al dipartimento di Stato americano, aventi come oggetto le interazioni tra funzionari americani o tra questi e ambasciatori o funzionari di governi stranieri.
Ogni rapporto contiene un riassunto iniziale e poi i dettagli su determinati eventi o incontri. Fanno il giro delle agenzie governative, delle ambasciate e dei ministeri, ciascun documento secondo il suo livello di riservatezza, e servono a informare l’apparato diplomatico americano a Washington e in giro per il mondo sull’evoluzione degli scenari politici globali. Ogni rapporto è contrassegnato da una sigla che indica il grado di riservatezza. Sul sito di Wikileaks è possibile scorrere i file secondo il loro grado di riservatezza, il loro paese d’origine, il loro argomento, eccetera. 15 mila sono “segreti”, 101 mila “confidenziali” e 133 mila “non riservati”. Il paese più trattato – con oltre 15 mila d…

Sta per «Big ignorant fellow from Offaly», la zona rurale dalla quale il premier irlandese Brian Cowen proviene. Lui risponde sempre con un'alzata di spalle. Per quanto lo riguarda - dice - Biffo è l'acronimo di «Beautiful intelligent fellow from Offaly». Le molte critiche alle sue origini, alle sue decisioni e anche al suo aspetto non scalfiscono la corazza del Taoiseach. «La politica non è un concorso di bellezza», taglia corto.

Per gli irlandesi il premier Brian Cowen è un «biffo». Trichet: urgente salto di qualità nel patto di stabilitàdi Nicol Degli InnocentiIl sole 24 ore

The Telegraph thinks that bunga bunga is either the punchline of a bawdy joke beloved of Berlusconi, or an 'erotic ritual' that the Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi told the Italian PM about. The Irish Examiner says that a bunga-bunga is 'an after-dinner game for one naked man and a bevy of naked young women'.There are only five words beginning 'bunga-' in the OED, but bunga bunga, nor indeed, bunga, isn't one of them. Perhaps there is something about the combination of letters 'bung' that makes this a good start for slang words. There are 52 entries in the OED that begin 'bung' but there are 72 entries in Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang that begin with these four letters. Several of the slang entries relate to the sense of bung as a slang word for 'anus' (not mentioned in the OED), several others to things to do with drinking, since a bung is a brewer or publican (the OED has 'bung-ho', a drinking toast) and yet others…

The roughly 15 million Americans who voted for the first time in 2008

more on: Washington Post


La percentuale molto alta di elettori al di sotto dei trent’anni e quella degli elettori “di colore” (o latino americani) che favorì l’elezione di Obama nel 2008.

more on: L'Occidentale

When is a leak not a leak?

The classified documents unveiled by the Web site WikiLeaks stretched the semantics of leak to a bursting point.


“The word ‘leak’ just doesn’t seem adequate for a data dump and security breach of this magnitude,” wrote Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University, in a blog post for Foreign Policy. “This is not so much a leak as a gusher.” Jack Shafer of Slate concurred: “To call the torrent of information about the Afghanistan war released by WikiLeaks a mere leak is to insult the gods of hydrodynamics.”

Read more on: On Language, Ben Zimmer

published on: Johnson

I'VE quickly become slack about maintaining my blacklist of tired phrases used by lazy journalists. (Seems this journalist is too lazy even to look for tired phrases.) But hooray! Someone has now starting doing it for me. A new web tool called Listiki lets people create lists of things and manage them collaboratively, and one Alison Gow ("Journalist, skier, biker. Usually in Liverpool, always over-caffenated") has created a list of journalistic clichés, to which 16 people have already contributed. Among them:

http://listiki.com/journalism-cliches-i-most-dislike

Outpouring (of grief/support/etc)

Grisly murders. Or brutal ones.

"Plummeted" meaning "was down a bit"

In scenes of reminiscent of (insert film/TV show here)

Only time will tell (I haven't a clue)

Yes, indeed. Will Listiki take off, and will this list turn into a comprehensive encyclopaedia of journalistic mediocrity? Only time will tell.

By Sean Curran

Parliamentary Correspondent, BBC News

Could the expenses scandal turn out to be good news for the English language?

A group of MPs has been having a bit of end-of-term fun by talking about the sort of language used by politicians and civil servants.
To help their plain English party go with a swing they invited along some star witnesses: Matthew Parris from The Times, The Guardian's political sketch-writer Simon Hoggart and Professor David Crystal, a linguistics expert from Bangor University.

Everyone agreed that a lot of political speeches are gobbledygook, full of words and phrases like "stakeholder", "multi-agency", "level playing field", "outsourcing" and "blue-sky thinking".
I could go on but that's part of the problem. Politicians do go on and on and on, inventing more and more gibberish.

David Crystal pointed out: "politicians could not be accused of lying if nobody understood what they had said".

da: Repubblica

Do you speak Cameronese?” è la domanda, semiseria of course, posta dal quotidiano Guardian di Londra ai suoi lettori. Non c’entra il Camerun. C’entra David Cameron, il nuovo primo ministro britannico. Il quale ha un accento inconfondibilmente “posh”, che rivela la sua appartenenza alle classi sociali privilegiate e la sua frequentazione delle migliori scuole e università del regno. In più, talvolta Cameron parla in modo un po’ particolare. In “Cameronese”, appunto. Quando un giornalista gli ha chiesto perchè, nei dibattiti televisivi in campagna elettorale, non ha parlato della sua idea di “Big Society” (Grande Società, ossia un modo di responsabilizzare e coinvolgere la gente), ha risposto: “Well, all the questions were rather subjecty subjects”. Che si può tradurre all’incirca così: “Bè, il fatto è che tutte le domande (del pubblico) erano su argomenti molto specifici”. Ma lasciamo stare il senso della frase: è quel “subjecty subjects” che ha attirato l’attenzione dei …

By Mail On Sunday
If you want to make it in the new Government, you need to know the lingo. So civil servants have produced a guide to ‘speaking Cameron’ to help its employees adjust to life under the Coalition. The briefing note, drafted by officials in Michael Gove’s Education Department – but expected to be emulated across Whitehall departments – is headlined ‘language of the new Government’. The memo – drawn up for the benefit of outside agencies hired to work for the department – is divided into two columns: words used before May 11 (the day Mr Cameron entered No 10) and those which should be adopted instead. The first word which the memo says should be dropped is ‘State’. The officials write that it should be substituted for Mr Cameron’s cherished concept of the Big Society, his idea that power should be taken away from Government and handed back to communities. The concept, which is thought to have been driven by Mr Cameron’s long-term image guru Steve Hilton, can be felt throu…

Hung Parliament:lo scenario in cui, in un sistema bipolare come quello del Regno Unito, nessun partito ottiene la maggioranza assoluta per poter governare da solo.
In inglese, "hung parliament" è un’espressione idiomatica, tanto che molti dizionari inglesi la trattano come voce indipendente o comunque viene inserita sotto l’aggettivo hung e non è associata al participio passato del verbo hang. Il significato di hung infatti è metaforico e descrive una situazione di incertezza, “in sospeso”.
Molti media italiani non sembrano rendersene conto e probabilmente pensano a una collocazione (le singole parole che compongono l’espressione mantengono il significato che hanno al di fuori della collocazione stessa), tanto che la traduzione preferita è "parlamento appeso". Addirittura c’è chi parla anche di "parlamento impiccato", ignorando che il participio passato del verbo hang nell’accezione “impiccare” è hanged e non hung.
Più adeguata e' la scelta di chi ha ma…

published on: Guardian

Should politicians speak their mind, or mind how they speak?

Gordon Brown, who has apologised for calling a Rochdale woman 'bigoted'.
Whether or not this exciting and unpredictable election breaks the mould of British politics, it may be remembered as the campaign in which some leading politicians actually said what they thought: Tory Europhobes are in league with a bunch of nutters, and people who disparage immigrants are bigoted. I can't have been the only viewer to do a double take – did he really just say that? – when Nick Clegg used that particular N-word in the second TV debate. But after all the gibberish about "fairness" and empty rhetoric of the manifestos and party election broadcasts, it was refreshing to hear someone use language that had not been vetted into gaffe-proof blandness by the spin doctors. The excellent Tory blogger Iain Dale has pointed out that, as the party leaders had agreed with the charity Rethink not to use lang…

There's no reference to Hegel in the Tory manifesto, but there is an allusion to one of the founding fathers of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. The "institutional building blocks of the Big Society", the document reads, "[are] the 'little platoons' of civil society".
“Little platoons" is a phrase that occurs in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the classic expression of conservative scepticism about large-scale attempts to transform society in the image of abstract ideals. The Tories today use it to refer to the local associations that would go to form a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation".
The problem is that, for Burke, little platoons weren't groups that you volunteer to join; they were the "social subdivisions" into which you are born - the kind of traditionalism you would have thought Cameron's rebranded "progressive" Conservatives would want to avoid.
The…

Term in China associated with administrative transparency.

published on: Schott's Vocab

In an article for Inter Press Service, Kit Gillet noted a sixty-year tendency in the Chinese government not to disclose information on budgetary and spending matters and revealed, “this may be about to change”:In January, in what some are calling China’s first case of “naked government,” Baimiao, a small town in the southern province of Sichuan, released its budget to the public. The details were not pretty: they showed that 65% of local government spending had gone to accommodating and entertaining officials.
Then, in March, Guangdong, the province closest to Hong Kong and the manufacturing heartland of China, announced that it would be publicizing its financial budget for this year. This is the first time that a provincial-level administration has decided to release these records since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.
Many feel that this could be the beginning of greater govern…