Sputnik moment

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 It's unclear whether Americans listening to Obama will be moved by the historical reference, particularly those too young to appreciate the threat that the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite represented during the Cold War era.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 State of the Union", Visual Thesaurus

Big Society

“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 dismiss the idea, but in doing so he revealed a finer appre­ciation of the philosophical antecedents of the "big society" than he might have wanted to admit to. For what Hegel called, in his Philosophy of Right, "civil society" - the stage "which intervenes between the family and the state" - looks very much like the network of voluntary organisations to which the Tories propose to "redistribute power" as they seek to weaken the power of Labour's big state.

Read also:

Do you speak Cameronese?

'Delivery's out, implementation'a in': The civil servant's essential guide to Davespeak

Cable

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 documenti – è l’Iraq. Un altro database – ordinato per persone e paesi – è disponibile sul sito del Guardian.

fonte: Il Post

In the mid-1860s, the first durable transatlantic submarine telegraph cable was completed, and by the end of the decade, the portmanteau (i.e. blended word) cablegram had been born, combining the nouns cable and telegram. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation, from 1868, specifically notes its novelty: "The new word cablegram is used by a New York contemporary to characterise a telegraphic dispatch." The Corpus of Historical American English pushes the date back a couple of years to 1866, in Jane G. Austin's novel Outpost: "'Hello, a cablegram!' exclaimed the young inventor. 'It must be from Mr. Illingway, in Africa."

In any case, whether by clipping from cablegram or by metaphorical extension from cable, the noun cable with the meaning of a message sent by submarine telegraph cables was in place by 1883, the date of its first OED citation.

When did cablegram/cable get restricted semantically to diplomatic realm? It's hard to say, since the word cable has the non-telegraphy meanings that get in the way of Internet searches. It seems to have begun sometime around the World War II years. A search of the Google News Archive shows that mentions of personal cablegrams tend to be from prior to the 1920s. The phrase business cablegram(s) gets about a dozen hits between 1900 and in 1940, and none thereafter. Diplomatic cablegram gets its start in the 1930s and notches several hits per decade from the 1950s to the 1980s, before disappearing by the end of the 90s. Diplomatic cable(s) shows up throughout the 20th century, but really starts to pick up in the 1940s, and continues to be used steadily up to the present.

Source: Visual Thesaurus

Read also:

Leaks

Scandal suffix switchover

On the use of suffix -gate to flag up controversial stories

Wikileaks: cablo(grammi), telegrammi, documenti?

BIFFO

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 stabilità

di Nicol Degli Innocenti

Il sole 24 ore

Bunga bunga

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 relate to the sense of bung meaning a bribe or a pickpocket (these senses are in the OED).

published on: The virtual linguist

Use it: Bunga-bunga for party. As in, "I went to Silvio Berlusconi's bunga-bunga in Milan last weekend. It was wild!"

Why: Because "party" is just so bland.

Source: Star Tribune

read also:

The Top 10 Everything of 2010

Top words of 2010

At this time last year, you might not have known what a spillcam or a vuvuzela was. But you probably do now. The two phrases are among the Top Words of 2010, according to the Global Language Monitor, which analyzes trends in word usage with an emphasis on global English.

"Our top words this year come from an environmental disaster, the World Cup, political malapropisms, new senses to ancient words, a booming economic colossus and a heroic rescue that captivated the world for days on end," said Paul JJ Payack, president of The Global Language Monitor. "This is fitting for a relentlessly growing global language that is being taken up by thousands of new speakers each and every day." The Monitor tracks the frequency of words and phrases in social media, on the Internet and in global print and electronic media and accesses proprietary databases, according to its website.

"Spillcam": rose to prominence after an underwater camera captured images of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico after a well ruptured. 

"Vuvuzelas": gained fame -- or infamy -- after the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, during which fans blared the loud, brightly colored horns.

Other top words include:

"Refudiate": a conflation of "refute" and "repudiate" used by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin; "guido" and "guidette," terms heard on the TV show Jersey Shore; 

"Snowmagedon," a hybrid of "snow" and "Armageddon" that was used to describe record snowfalls in the United States' east coast and northern Europe last winter, according to the Monitor.

"Tea Party," the grassroots conservative movement that gained momentum leading up to 2010's midterm elections, made the list of Top Phrases of 2010.

Bimbo eruptions

Term describing rumors alleging extramarital affairs.

The term was coined by Betsey Ross Wright, an American lobbyist, activist, and political consultant who worked more than a decade for Bill Clinton in Arkansas. During the 1992 campaign, Wright coined the term "bimbo eruptions" to describe rumors alleging extramarital affairs by Clinton.

Published today in Financial Times, “Walkout by the ‘ four cats’ puts more pressure on Berlusconi”, pag.33

Source: Wikipedia

Surge voters

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

Leaks

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

The journalese blacklist becomes collaborative

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.

MPs told to mind their language

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".

Do you speak Cameronese?

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 linguisti. In pratica, Cameron ha inventato un aggettivo, “subjecty”, derivato dal sostantivo “subjects” – argomenti. David Crystal, un docente di lingua inglese interpellato dal Guardian, sostiene che c’è un precedente illustre: anche Shakespeare inventava aggettivi.

'Delivery's out, implementation'a in': The civil servant's essential guide to Davespeak

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 throughout the list: civil servants should not talk about ‘leading change’ but about ‘empowering change’, it says. The 30 key ‘translations’ include several mentions of families, another key part of the PM’s ‘brand’. More...Shire wars: Cameron risks new 'Turnip Taliban' rebellion with secret plan to drive out old-style constituency chairmen. The guide says that the emphasis is no longer on England being ‘the best place in the world to grow up’, but should be on Britain being ‘the most family-friendly place in Europe’. The list, which is subject to the caveat that it ‘depends on the context the words are used in’, spells the end for much of the jargon which sprang up during New Labour’s 13 years in power. ‘Stakeholder’, meaning someone with an interest in a policy, has been abolished, to be replaced with ‘people, volunteers, practitioners, professional organisations etc’, while ‘delivery model’ has been axed in favour of ‘getting things done’. The term ‘integrated working’ has been replaced by the more verbose, but comprehensible, ‘people working together to provide better services’. Last night, a Government spokesman said the guide was a natural consequence of the change of regime. ‘All new governments have new policies, which they communicate to the public with fresh language and tone,’ said the spokesman. ‘It will come as no surprise that we’ve been working on this.’

Hung Parliament

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 mantenuto l’espressione inglese e l’ha spiegata con “parlamento paralizzato”, “parlamento bloccato” oppure con un più descrittivo “senza maggioranza assoluta”.

tratto da: Terminologia etc.

Bigots and nutters

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 language likely to increase stigma against people with mental health problems, Clegg should have apologised. Dale added: "It may be a small thing to some people – and a case of political correctness gone mad for others – and of course people say many things in the heat of the moment, but a word of regret from Mr Clegg may be in order here. "Clegg doesn't need me to defend him – it would be inconsistent of me, given that the Guardian scrupulously avoids the use of offensive words such as "nutter" – but all the same: in an era when, if you say "isn't it a nice day?" to a politician, they will start evaluating how it will play in the tabloids before replying, he surely deserves some credit for being human, and not a permanently on-message android. The same argument might apply to Gordon Brown, had he not characteristically made a difficult situation worse today with his grovelling apologies over what, despite our best efforts to stamp out the automatic application of "gate" to anything remotely scandalous, some of my colleagues are calling "Bigotgate".In reply to the woman who asked "All these eastern Europeans – where are they coming from?" the prime minister might have settled for a simple reply: "Er … eastern Europe."Instead he let slip that he thought her a "bigoted woman". Given that she also said: "You can't say anything about immigrants," he may have had a point. Why shouldn't he speak his mind for a change? Better, surely, than following John Prescott's example and giving her a thump.

Little platoons

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 election campaign hasn’t been all surface effects. There’s been a bit of philosophy at times, too, as the Tories, borrowing from Burke and Hegel, have attempted to form a new kind of political language.


Modern politicians often sound as if they are speaking the same desiccated, drearily technocratic language. That has been true for much of this campaign, but, for all that, there have been some conceptual and rhetorical innovations, and even phrases that appear to be the freshly minted coinage of spin doctors and campaign managers turn out to be made of older metal than we might have expected.

published on: www.faqs.org

Naked Governement

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 government transparency in China.
“In the past this [greater transparency] has been a topic that nobody was allowed to talk about, but at least now we can talk about it in the open and hope for a change,” Li Chengyan, a professor at Peking University’s School of Government, told IPS.
“Although it is just a beginning, I believe we will see a chain effect; other local governments will have to make their budget transparent under pressure from the public,” Li said.