Quotation of the Day – Jan. 30, 2018

“There is, and ought to be in this great country, the freedom to say goodbye.  That is, the freedom to hug one’s spouse and children, the freedom to organize the myriad of human affairs that collect over time.  It ought not to be—and it has never before been—that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home, and work. And sent away.” – Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the Southern District of New York, writing in a court order that released an immigration activist so that he may get his affairs in order before deportation.

Thought of the Day – Jan. 27, 2018

The last Bush administration developed the “non-denial denial” into an art form – seeming to deny a damaging news story without actually doing so, if you looked closely enough at the exact wording.  The phenomenon pretty much disappeared during the Obama presidency, though Hillary dabbled in it during the campaign.  Now it’s back in a new guise, as witnessed in Mike Flynn’s admission last year that he “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”  Is that really the best you can do when you first deny the story, then realize that the Feds have it all on tape?  Let’s call it the “half-hearted denial.”  Wonder why he didn’t learn from his master and just claim loudly that whatever he doesn’t like is “fake news.”

Quotation of the Day – Jan. 25, 2018

“A person who has traveled abroad praises foreign countries when he is back home; but when he’s abroad, he praises his homeland.” – Hippel (1741-1796)

Quotation of the Day – Jan. 18, 2018

One of Trump’s underappreciated strengths is his sly command of irony, on display again last week when he tweeted that his two great assets in life were “mental stability and being, like, really smart.” Note the superfluous “like,” which is stupid when spoken but intended as humor when written. The president isn’t making a fool of himself. He’s having a laugh that’s part self-deprecation, part trolling, and actual wit.

Misunderestimation has already been the political stock in trade of one two-term Republican president. I believe that Trump is ignorant, incurious, vain, gauche, bigoted, intemperate, bullying, suggestible, reckless and morally unfit for his office. But he’s not deficient in cunning, and that cunning deserves healthy respect from his political opponents.

Brett Stephens, NY Times, Jan. 11, 2018

Quotation of the Day – Jan. 15, 2018

“I don’t know if the president is clinically off his rocker. I do know, from what I saw and what I heard from people around him, that Donald Trump is deeply unpredictable, irrational, at times bordering on incoherent, self-obsessed in a disconcerting way, and displays all those kinds of traits that anyone would reasonably say, ‘What’s going on here, is something wrong?’”

This week, Trump called a bipartisan, on-camera discussion on immigration and border security. “This was clearly to establish himself as sane in reaction to the book,” Wolff said. The meeting was strange for several reasons, including Trump’s eagerness to agree with everybody there.

“It fits another premise of the book,  He doesn’t care. He just wants somebody else to do his work. He wants a win and the nature of the win doesn’t really matter.

“I’ve talked to a number of Donald Trump friends and cronies. He ran on the idea of ‘I’m a negotiator’ but they all say he’s never negotiated anything. Negotiation requires detailed understanding. It’s methodical. He can’t do it.”

Michael Wolff in an interview with The Guardian, Jan. 14, 2018

Quotation of the Day – Jan. 12, 2018

“Being an American is not natural.  Tribal is natural.  So you have to work at being an American.” John Stewart, on the Charlie Rose show last year

Adventures in Translation

Back in the mid 1990s, I taught German for a year at Carthage College (Kenosha, WI).  At the beginning of fall semester, a student handed in an essay about his wonderful summer in Bavaria, written in English.  Told him to get credit he would have to write it in German.  He looked disappointed. 

A few days later he came back with what I now realize must have been a machine translation.  Every sentence had errors.  I’ll never forget one in particular:  “Das Hirschkuhsehvermögen ist immer zwanzig zwanzig.”  Most of the time I could at least figure out what he was trying to say, but that one had me stumped.  A Hirschkuh is a female deer (usually a red deer).  Sehvermögen means ability to see.  So a female deer’s ability to see…?  I had no clue what he meant.  Zwanzig is of course twenty, but why was it repeated? 
 

 

Then it hit me.  The only English expression in which “twenty” is repeated is: “Hindsight is twenty-twenty.”  The student entered that sentence in English, and the computer translator gave him the German equivalent of “A female deer’s ability to see is always twenty twenty.”

That was then.  Trying the same sentence just now brings up: “Rückblick ist immer zwanzig nach zwanzig.”  While Rückblick is certainly better than Hirschkuhsehvermögen, Google Translate seems to think this sentence is about time: “Hindsight is always twenty after twenty.”

Maybe in another twenty years they’ll get it right.

Quotation of the Day

I’ve started collecting quotations from pundits to see how they hold up over time.  Here’s one made by David Brooks just over a year ago (Jan. 5, 2017): “Trump is not a national leader; he is a national show. The crucial question of the Trump administration could be: Who will fill the void left by a leader who is all façade?”

Quotation of the Day – Jan. 5, 2018

“If you don’t want people to read a book about you, why would you take legal action to try to stop people from reading the book about you? I wasn’t going to buy the book, I was just going to read the excerpts in magazines and move on. But now that Trump’s lawyers are going all-out to try to stop it from being published, I’m buying 20 copies. I can’t buy enough of the books. I’ll buy it for my parents, my in-laws, my cousins. I’m going to walk up and down my block stuffing books into my neighbors’ mailboxes.” – Jimmy Kimmel, on Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury