I used to be Editor-in-Chief at Franklin Electronic
Publishers. We specialized in
educational materials, especially dictionaries. Under the
invigorating if sometimes idiosyncratic leadership of its CEO Mort David, the company undertook to
revive the bankrupt Franklin Computer (which made Apple clones, and was slain by
Apple in the courts, in a classic B-school case, bearing certain interesting
parallels to the Stuxnet virus -- but that would lead us into deeper waters),
debuted the “Spelling Ace”,
basically invented the E-book before the term was coined, and eventually
hit the skids, in part owing to a sophisticated but overambitous and premature
(“before its time”) project for a general handheld reader platform; had it succeeded, we would all be
saying “Bookman” instead of “Kindle” (or, if I had had my way at the
christening, “Koala”: interesting
that Amazon eventually came to a similar conclusion, cf. Kindl, Austrian for ‘little child’ -- i.e., koala). But in the meantime, the company
undertook some quite innovative projects, never simply plunking an existing
work onto a handheld electronic platform and allowing you to scroll, but
bringing to the table a wide range of linguistic value-addeds, and occasionally
even authoring a work, if such did not exist in print.
One such -- or rather, family of such -- involved the Oxford
ESL dictionaries: the Oxford Students Dictionary, and the flagship OALD. We began by licensing the former,
and then targeted them to specific audiences by adding translations in Arabic,
Persian, etc. I oversaw some of
these efforts. The Arabic
went smoothly and sold well.
The Persian … well, I don’t know Persian, so that was more
difficult. A Princeton
resident myself, I wrote to a Princeton professor of Persian, asking for
recommendations for local translators, and in reply received hate-mail: IT’S NOT PERSIAN YOU IGNORAMUS IT’S
FARSI. (Or perhaps it was the
other way around: perhaps I called
it “Farsi” and that pushed his brightred hotbutton, who knows or cares.) So I had to wing it, hiring a
Farsi-speaker -- educated and intelligent, but not a trained lexicographer --
and had him submit a sample. Then,
as quality-control, I hired a second such native-speaker to evaluate the
efforts of the first; and was
informed that the first translator was an illiterate non compos mentis; she then submitted her own counter-sample. Disheartened, I hired a third to
evaluate both these efforts, and was told that their combined ignorance was
like Pelion piled upon Ossa, or Ossa upon Pelion (I can never remember
which). As the proverb has
it: Two of a trade do not
agree.
Anyhow -- longstoryshort -- the project was eventually
completed, but never turned into a product, because of the ban on trade with Iran. There were certain exceptions, but we wound up not
qualifying. Now, this was
bone-headed: how could it possibly
not be in our national interest to teach English (and, along with it, English
cultural assumptions) to Iranians?
But so it fell out.
After that fiasco, I paid a bit more attention to the legal
language surrounding our efforts.
And one odd bit that kept coming up was that our products, offers, etc.,
were valid pretty much throughout the known universe, with the exception of …. Hades; Planet X; and (my memory may be a
bit off on those, but not on the memorable next one) “Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan”.
Wh- wh-
whhhhaaatt ???
-- Sic. You
were perfectly at liberty to sell our electronic reference products in
Afghanistan, thus spreading far and wide the message of American free
enterprise, and disseminating knowledge in the form of dictionaries, Bibles,
and encyclopedias; but before you
could close the deal, you had to ask the headman of the particular village you
were dealing with, “Um, who controls your hamlet?” And if he replied:
“The Nazis”, or “The Illuminati” or “Giant Reptiles from Mars”, you were
good to go. But if he replied “The
Taliban”, then no dice.
Now, at that time, there were many regimes on the globe, more
evil than the Taliban -- the Taliban being, after all, sincere if extreme representatives of one of the major
Abrahamic religions, and who if
nothing else did keep the heroin
production down -- yet these were singled out. Why?
I’ll hazard a guess -- subject to correction, but it is
seldom you will see anyone comment upon this strange embargo, let alone explain
it -- : the Taliban had ticked off American feminists. The issue was obscure
enough that the Bryn Mawr lobby could have its way, unopposed and almost
unnoticed.
That would all be but a footnote to farce, but for the
circumstance that Usama bin Ladin subsequently pitched his tent on Afghan soil. His band of carpet-baggers had
never been sponsored by the Taliban, with whom they lived in uneasy coexistence
(al-Qaeda tends to screw up any nation it enters), yet, when we (justly, and
inevitably) retaliated for 9/11, instead of zooming in on al-Qaeda, the Bush
administration allowed them to escape, and instead ousted the Taliban, thus
eventually restoring Afghanistan to its coveted place as #1 supplier of opium
to Europe: as though Hillary,
rather than Condaleeza (though perhaps her too) had been the éminence grise (or: éminence rose) behind this folly of a policy.
~
What prompted these musings and effusions
was actually this morning’s
New
Yorker, in their wonderful “Cartoon Caption Contest” section at the very
end of the magazine (a tasty dessert, saving the best till last).
The cartoon, offered captionless
in an earlier issue, was of Noah and his wife on the Ark -- which was filled to
capacity with nothing but giraffes.
Clearly the best in the roster of proposed captions was one from
Ms. Mary Newell, of Gainesville,
Florida:
“Mistakes were made.”
This naturally put me in mind of the sorry legacy of the
Dubya administration. But
what really caught my eye was a
startling geographical restriction on entering or even voting in the contest:
“Any resident of the United States,
Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the
United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland…”
So, Quebec is to Canada what the Taliban-controlled regions
were to Afghanistan.
But look more closely at this list.
Roughly, it corresponds to the
Anglosphere.
But so, roughly -- and very
politically -- does the territory known to the IC as “Five Eyes” (or at least,
so I was told by a friend who heard it from a guy who thinks he maybe saw it on
the Internet).
But with this
difference:
the addition of the
Republic of Ireland, and the exclusion of New Zealand.
…
Excluding
Ireland from your intel distro
sort of makes sense -- the place is overrun by excitable unreliable Irishmen. But why play favorites in a frigging
Cartoon Caption Contest? There
aren’t even any cash prizes, just boasting rights. Moreover -- Would it really be so terrible if
some Dane or Dutchman were to enter the contest? Most of them speak better English than we do; but if,
perchance, their entry were linguistically limping, it simply wouldn’t
win: no harm done.
Try as I might, I can conceive of no picturesquely sinister
reason for The New Yorker’s oddly gerrymandered geographical
limitations. So the best I can do -- if it’s dark conspiracy you desire,
wheels within (wheels within) wheels --- is to point you to a vast tentacular
plot, so clandestine that it has not a name, nor even a covername, but only an
alias for a nickname for a nom de guerre of a coverterm:
Enter those who dare …
[Bonus tidbit]
A near-synonym of “no-go zone”, current in the IC, is: denied
territory. Impress your friends!
