Month: August 2011

Maybe Palin has this condition.

A reader adds to the growing list:

My wife and I are especially fond of “biritilulo,” a word from Papua, New Guinea, that literally means “to argue over yams” but is actually a great, loud row deliberately started between two angry parties as a way of letting out tension. It allows everyone to realize that the conflict in question is silly and to get on with life.

Another:

My favorite is the Spanish “sobremesa”: it means sitting around the table in leisurely conversation after the meal is over.

Another:

There’s also “saudades” in Portuguese, which is the pain and the pleasure of missing someone or something.  The pain part is obvious; the pleasure is because the realization that you have a connection with a person or place that is so strong it causes you pain.  And, more generally, it’s joyous to remember what you love. Soldiers looking at pictures of their lovers or family are experiencing saudades.

Another:

As a Brit in Thailand I’ve been having trouble with the Thai word “khrap” (or “ka” if the speaker is a woman). This word is added on to the end of a sentence to make it more polite. It’s usually reserved for talking with strangers, and if you watch Thai TV with a female presenter pretty much every sentence she utters ends with a cute “ka”. For example, “sa-was-dee” means “hello” in Thailand, but you’ll always hear it as “sa-was-dee ka/khrap”.

Another:

I’m sure you are deluged on this, but here is one that is worth noting: the Yiddish word “farible” (or “faribel”). It means to hold a grudge for years (or decades) over some trivial slight. “She has a faribel because she wasn’t originally invited to the party.”  For some reason this very useful Yiddish word never made it to the US, but it is widely used among Jewish South Africans.

Another:

I grew up in a German/English bilingual household, and my favorite German word without an English equivalent is “jein”, a mashup of “ja” and “nein”, thus taking the phrase “yes and no” and reducing it to one simple word, easily said with whatever intonation suits your feelings on the question being asked!

Yet another:

Oh my goodness I love this thread! German has so many great examples. As a college student from California studying abroad at a private German Uni, I learned some great words. “Fremdschämen” – feeling shame or embarrassment on behalf of someone else (this is apropos during late nights at the bar). Likewise, “Schadenfreude” is taking pleasure in others pain. But for me, post-college, this one is perfect: “das Wanderjahr” – a year (or more!) of travel and fun before settling into a career.

One more:

Your reader who submitted “l’esprit d’escalier” as a word with no English equivalent isn’t quite right.  The neologism “retrotort” (based on “retort”) is not commonly known, but it’s pithier.

For the first time:

Meet Miles Morales, a half-black, half-Hispanic American teenager who, inspired to do good after the death of Parker at the hands of the Green Goblin, takes flight and has his first fight in the pages of Marvel Comics' "Ultimate Fallout" No. 4, in comic shops on Wednesday.

Alyssa Rosenberg thinks this is progress of a sort. Adam Serwer's support is more full-throated.

(Photo from comedian Donald Glover, whose campaign last year to be cast in the new Spiderman movie kicked off a firestorm about race and comic book characters.)

“What’s violence? A man who pins you against the wall and kisses you, is that violent? There’s violence and there’s violence. To me, he wasn’t violent,” – one of DSK's former lovers.

“If we were really domestic terrorists, shoot, President Obama would be wanting to pal around with us, wouldn’t he?” – Sarah Palin, sinking, as ever, to the occasion. One really needs an appropriately tacky response. How about:

"How's that 'Obama palling around with Osama' workin' for ya?"

Then there's her outline of her upcoming campaign against Romney:

“I do not have respect for what he has done through this debt ceiling debate. He did this: he waited until it was a done deal that we would increase the debt ceiling, and … then he came out and made a statement that he didn’t like the deal after all,” Palin said, holding up her finger in the air to indicate that Romney had assessed the political climate before making his decision.

She'll eat him for breakfast.

Larison foresees a messy end to the Libyan misadventure:

The official administration line has been that the U.S. role was minor, the U.S. was not engaged in hostilities, and regime change was not the goal. It doesn’t matter that all of this was untrue. It will be impossible for the administration to come back to the public and Congress and say that the U.S. must help secure Libya after the toppling of Gaddafi as a result of the war the U.S. just fought. [Robert] Danin [of the Council On Foreign Relations] is right that “we” are stuck with the aftermath in Libya, but “we” (i.e., the public and Congress) never consented to this and won’t accept it.

Elle Herman asks us to lower our expectations of what they can do:

On a good day, about a fourth of my students don't do the reading or the homework; if I set up a conference after school, they might show up and they might not. Why? Because one kid thinks he has an STD, and another girl's brother just got out of juvie, and another guy wandered to the ice cream truck and forgot. Because they're teenagers. Because they're human.

And that's my biggest problem with the myth of the extraordinary teacher. The myth says it doesn't matter whether the crazy kid in the back makes me laugh so hard I forget what we were talking about, or two brilliant kids refuse to accept my rubrics, scrawling their long-winded objections as a two-part argument that circles over every square inch of the backs of their essays — the makeup of the class, the nature of each student and the number of students are immaterial as long as I'm at the top of my game.

Lee Crawfurd looks at how to deal with extraordinarily bad teachers.

From a new Gallup report:

Adam Serwer isn't surprised:

Muslims are more likely than any other religious group to disapprove of targeting civilians, whether it's done by the government or by a terrorist group. That means their views are most in line with international law, which prohibits the deliberate targeting of civilians under any circumstances. The finding is somewhat intuitive — whether we're talking drone strikes or suicide bombings, Muslims are often the most likely victims.

Jeffrey Goldberg lists them:

A plot against the Dome of the Rock is one.  Another would be an attack inside the U.S. of the kind that just took place in Norway — an assault by a white, Christian extremist agitated by the imagined specter of worldwide Muslim domination, either against a government target, in the Oklahoma City and Oslo manner, or against a Muslim target.

Shashank Joshi analyzes what Pakistan could do to head off the third – an attack on India by ISI-aligned terrorists.

Today on the Dish, the dust settled and Andrew stood by his support of the stop-gap deal, especially since it would finally force the GOP to make tough defense cuts. Readers reacted to Obama's pyrrhic defeat, some heard a liberal screech and rose to defend Obama while putting it in perspective (read: he also got bin Laden). Andrew revisited the white conservative South's deathgrip on American politics, we kept an eye on the super committee to the rescue, and McConnell insisted it's never personal. Congressional Republicans appeared to bear the brunt of it, Josh Barro deflated Republicans' anti-tax ideology, Frum tried to talk some sense into Republicans, and the right grew outraged when Biden called them terrorists even though they embraced it first. Chait looked on the bright side for liberals, but Kevin Drum admitted that liberals have largely lost the public opinion battle on high government spending. Scott Galupo missed the conservative George Will of yore and Will Wilkinson wasn't impressed with the results of whole debt ceiling charade since spending was still on the up. Andrew Exum didn't believe less military spending would mean less war, and even with defense cuts our spending blows the Cold War figures out of the water. Seth Masket raised concerns over Obama's reelection due to the economy, but as both sides attacked, with readers dissenting, Obama remained the best man to support.

On the foreign policy front, Breivik's bad Christianity made at least one man realize that the 9/11 guys don't represent all Muslims. The US still wasn't accepting our Iraqi allies as immigrants into the US, China could be positioned to be al Qaeda's next target, and those chanting for sharia law in Egypt couldn't agree on what that means. An Israel-Hezbollah war may be heating up, Goldblog cringed at the Judeo-Christianist alliance in the US, and Netanyahu followed Obama's lead on the 1967 lines which made us wonder what all the original fuss was about.

In national affairs, readers refuted Andrew's claim that real ex-gays don't exist, and Miley Cyrus tweeted her support of marriage equality to 1.8 million tween followers. New photos of Palin's one-month pregnancy emerged, and we parsed the politics of "free" birth control. Nate Silver wasn't your average academic, the slow bike movement could democratize biking beyond hipsters, and enforcing patents for streaming music doesn't make sense. Smart phones could let us make purchases with our faces, mammals can't mess with our big brains, and meat moves after it's dead when you add salt.

FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here and VFYW contest winner #61 here.

–Z.P.