Martyrdom in Linguistics

Lately  it has been my lot, to sit among scribes and dragomans, who strain and groan to set in print, and then to clothe in English,  thoughts (and threats) originally expressed in an alien tongue.  Often we are ignored by our masters, occasionally admonished, but never exposed to opprobrium or bodily outrage -- unlike our predecessors in Classical times.  Let Plutarch tell it (as transmitted by Dryden):

When the king of Persia 

sent messengers into Greece,  with an interpreter, 

to demand earth and water, 

as an acknowledgement of subjection,

Themistocles, by the consent of the people,

seized upon the interpreter,

and put him to death,

for presuming to publish

the barbarian orders and decrees

in the Greek language.

-- Plutarch’s Lives, s.v. Themistocles

For further notes on the pain and prowess  of philologers, try this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/03/forensic-linguists-save-day.html

Substitutionary atonement

It is a repeated motif of the thriller-series “24”, that Jack Bauer offers himself up as a sacrifice -- in Season Six, for one specific hostage.   We marveled at that them here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/24-season-vi-executive-summary.html

Against the background of all the other whiz-bang implausibilities of that show, this one was not the most far-fetched, but it still seemed a stretch.

And yet now we have a real-life authentic hero of law enforcement, who did exactly that during yesterday's terror attack in France, and died for his pains:

Arnaud Beltrame

https://www.valeursactuelles.com/societe/arnaud-beltrame-les-francais-ont-recu-un-modele-94219

The  Christian doctrine with which such acts are blessed, is called “Substitutionary atonement”.  

Jack Bauer received no thanks for his gambit; les gendarmes de France are likewise best appreciated by the bobos-gauchos  when letting themselves be stoned or shot at, rather than firing back.   A few of them have been getting somewhat annoyed:

    http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/10/entre-bleus.html

Rorschach Morphology

In a classic cartoon, two psychiatrists are depicted in the first panel  as approaching each other, each saying “Good morning.”

In the second panel, as they walk away from either other, each has a thought-balloon, thinking:  “I wonder what he meant by that?”

It’s supposed to be a joke on psychiatrists;  though indeed, anyone familiar with psychology and linguistics recognizes that to be a quite valid, indeed deep, question.

~

So this morning, we have a “Good morning” scandal.   It has been reasonably widely (though not well) reported in the mainstream world press, though so far not the American.  E.g. a high-circulation popular Parisian daily:

http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/israel-un-palestinien-arrete-apres-une-erreur-de-traduction-de-facebook-22-10-2017-7348206.php

La police israélienne a arrêté par erreur la semaine dernière un Palestinien qui avait publié sur Facebook une photo de lui accompagnée des mots «bonne journée ». Selon le quotidien israélien «Haaretz», pour une raison encore inexpliquée, le logiciel de traduction du réseau social a converti cette phrase en «attaquez-les » en hébreu et «faites leur du mal » en anglais.

The BBC’s brief note on the matter  is sociolinguistically useless for readers who wish to figure things out for themselves, since it shows neither the photo nor the Arabic:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41714152

Israeli police arrested a Palestinian man last week after a Facebook post he made saying "good morning" in Arabic was mistranslated to read "attack them" in Hebrew, local media have reported.

Police confirmed that the construction worker was briefly held under suspicion of incitement but was released as soon as the mistake was realised.

The post showed a photo of the worker next to a bulldozer in the West Bank.

Such vehicles have been used to attack Israelis in the past.

There is only one difference in lettering between the colloquial Arabic phrase for "good morning to you all" and "hurt them", pointed out The Times of Israel.

Actually the Times of Israel doesn’t “point out” any such thing.  It merely piggybacks off an earlier Haaretz report, and does not give either the original Arabic nor the purported “one difference in lettering” that would give the meaning “hurt them”.  -- Indeed, to anyone familiar with printed Arabic, that proviso is a cop-out anyway:  The (usual) unvoweled Arabic ductus is so low in redundancy  that, “merely” by changing “one letter”,  you can radically change the meaning of just about any short message.   -- More anon.

Here is the beginning of the original article in Haaretz:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.818437

No Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before arresting the man, who works at a construction site in a West Bank settlement

That detail provides an innocent explanation of why the fellow would take a selfie with a bulldozer.  He probably drives the thing.

It continues:

The Israel Police mistakenly arrested a Palestinian worker last week because they relied on automatic translation software to translate a post he wrote on his Facebook page. The Palestinian was arrested after writing “good morning,” which was misinterpreted; no Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before the man’s arrest.

That bit about the dreadful consequences of not having an Arabist on your payroll is a pleasing one (to Arabists).   Compare this:

Where is an Arabic linguist when you need one ???

~

Back to the psycholinguistic intricacies of “Good morning”.

The linguistically naïve reader (here in the hands of linguistically naïve journalists, so no help) will assume that “Good morning” in Arabic  is completely straightforward, and that any translator -- human or machine -- that couldn’t translate that simple phrase, would be utterly incompetent.

Now, there is in fact  a straightforward, MSA phrase for ‘Good morning’ in Arabic,

صباح الخير

Phonetically (and we’ll stick to phonetics from here on, since Microsoft often mangles Arabic script): ṣabāḥ al-xayr.  Literally, ‘morning of goodness’ (syntactically, an idafa), to which the usual Arabic morphosemantic rules apply.

But that is not what he wrote.

Einführung in die vergleichende “Guten Morgen”-Morphosemantik

Of the languages with which I am familiar, German comes closest to having a word-for-word equivalent to “Good morning”:  Guten Morgen.  Yet even that is not linguistically straightforward:  the idiom involves not guter, but guten -- grammatically an accusative.   So, you understand the way the phrase is used, but you probably have never reflected on its grammar, and perhaps could not explain it if you did.

Further, in parts of Germany (e.g. Schweinfurt, where I lived for a summer with a German family), people don’t usually say Guten Morgen anyway, they say Grüß Gott -- a phrase I am fond of, and frequently use, but whose syntax is obscure;  I suppose it’s a sort of iḍāfa.

In French, a word-for-word equivalent to the greeting is not current.  You don’t say “bon matin”, you say bonjour, literally ‘good day’, or (as in the Le Parisien version) bonne journée (the nuance of difference being untranslatable).  (There does, however, exist in French  an early-morning greeting  which we lack in English:  bon réveil.  I’ve never myself heard that, not being an early riser.)

In Spanish, you must go even further afield, using a plural, buenos días, lit. ‘good days’.

As to what such phrases are used for, there are subtle distinctions.  Thus, in current American English, Good morning! is simply a greeting -- a pure illocution, like hi or hello, with no descriptive content. (Note:  In British English, it can serve as a good-bye, even as a curt dismissal.  Thus, the heavy father in Wodehouse's Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin says "Good morning, Mr Bodkin" to the unwelcome suitor of his daughter, signaling that their interview is at an end.)  Good night!, by contrast, cannot be used as a greeting:  it is a formula of leave-taking -- a valediction.   Good day!, the word-for-word equivalent of the French greeting bonjour, is no longer used in everyday American English, though it survives as a breezy greeting in Australia -- the iconic G’dye!  Good afternoon and Good evening can still be used in the U.S., though they sound a bit formal.  And at least the latter has also been used (at one time, primarily perhaps in England) as a valediction.

As mentioned, French doesn’t normally use “Bon matin”, at least not the variety of French I’m familiar with.  Bonne matinée might be used but, like bonne journée, my hunch is that it is not so much a pure greeting as an optative, relating to what might follow the encounter, like the trademarked American “Have a nice day!”  (I first heard that one in Berkeley, California, decades ago;  since then it has spread like kudzu  throughout the English-speaking lands.) 

As for Guten Tag, there’s that accusative, a fossilized echo of its likely origin in such a phrase as “Ich wünsche Ihnen einen guten Tag”, which is an optative.  Do contemporary speakers feel this influence, in which case Guten Morgen is not after all an exact equivalent of Good morning ?  Hard to say.

In Modern Standard Arabic (and in most dialects), ṣabāḥ al-xayr corresponds pretty closely to “Good morning”, but things get colorful from there.  Although you may respond in kind, usually (in line with the Koranic injunction, “When you are greeted, respond with the same greeting, or a better one”) you say something like ṣabāḥ al-nūr (‘morning of light’),  or ṣabāḥ al-full or ṣabāḥ al-yāsimīn (both meaning ‘morning of jasmine’).

In the dialects, things get wilder.  Thus, in Yemeni, a very characteristic morning greeting is kaṣbaḥtu, to which the standard reply is  baḥḥakum Allah bi-xeir (sic; the initial ṣ has been dropped).   And -- save the mark! -- there even exist untranslatable Yemeni expressions involving the ṣ-b-ḥ root, which my Sanaani teacher explained as “a morning warning” -- thus potentially, in line with the interpretation of the Israeli police, a threat.

However, what the Palestinian really wrote was:

يصبحهم

And in view of what has gone before, you will no longer be inclined to jump to conclusions that you understand all the nuances of that.

First, we cannot  without further analysis  give a phonetic transcription of that, since it is a script sans diacritics.   Morphologically, it’s a third-person-masculine-singular transitive verb, with third-person-masculine-plural direct object.   The verb could be either Form I, II, or IV, all of which have transitive uses. 

So, how did the translator the Israelis relied on  parse it?

The “automatic translation software” is not identified, though its digital facepage is doubtless blushing magenta.    I just tried it in Google Translate, and (taking the verb as form-IV) it renders the Arabic phrase  as “become them”, so the mystery remains.

The most straightforward assumption is that we are here dealing simply with the MSA verb, form II (syntactically transitive, semantically delocutive), in which case  the expression means “He says ‘Good morning’ to them.” 

That is actually a somewhat strange thing to say.  You’d expect more like “(I say) “Good morning” (to you(-all))”.   “He” makes sense as referring to the fellow in the photograph; but who are ‘they’?   The object-pronoun is definitely third person (and thus, the BBC rendering as "good morning to you all" is incorrect).

Whether there is some further nuance in Palestinian, I do not know offhand.  And as for a translation as “attack”, with the information we have been given so far, it is inexplicable.

~

For another cautionary-tale  about the perils of interpreting  brief swatches of Arabic, try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/10/rorschach-philology.html

[Appendix]  The article that prompted this post  was of the “Mistranslation Howlers” motif;  my reply was partly out of annoyance with that complacent genre, which often finds linguistic illiterates gloating  over anecdotes that turn out  either to be more gray-area than appears at first blush (such as the one above), or to be urban legends.  A likely example of the latter is the hardy perennial about the Chevy Nova being marketed among hispanophones under that name.   Laymen observe triumphally that, in Spanish, “No va” means ‘it doesn’t go’; epic fail !!  Actually, nova is a perfectly normal word of Spanish astronomical terminology (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova );  it is neither spelled like “no va” (being one word, not two), nor pronounced the same (being forestressed).

The “Good morning” article was at the expense of the Israeli counter-terrorist authorities.  There seems indeed to have been a misstep in the software, though one more subtle than most accounts suggested.  The article first appeared in Haaretz, itself an Israeli publication;  its appearance may have been unmotivated other than by the universal Schadenfreude over (alleged) mistranslations (some of which pass into legend, like “Ich bin ein Berliner”, whether or not the interpretation is linguistically well-founded), or there might have been a little Israel-internal scalpel to grind -- nescio.  But I would like to add a further observation, of respect for those who must work the intricate and dangerous CT mission.

Notoriously, terrorists (and criminals) use cover-terms.  The IC took a beating over a now-celebrated message intercepted (we are told) from Afghanistan on September 10, 2001: “The match begins tomorrow.”  The post-hoc Besserwisser wagged their fingers and berated the Agency for not getting that message translated until September 12 (which, given the exotic language of the message, and the skeleton crew left in CT after the relentless whittling-down of the Clinton and Bush years, is only too understandable.)  More to the point than the timeliness, is the interpretation:  Was it really obvious, or should it have been obvious, that this particular message, among a mass of similar things, foretold the 9/11 attacks?  I personally have no idea (though a later news story did aver that the message was eventually determined to have referred, in fact, to an upcoming soccer-match).

Now, as mentioned, the message in the current case  is rather cryptic:

يصبحهم

It is not (according to a Comment to this post, below, from a colleague with significant language experience in Palestine) a particularly usual way to wish someone (or some third parties, in this case) top o’ the morning.   Might it have been an allusion, a wink-wink, or at least contextually suggested one, to the Israel CT team?  In other words, we need not assume that the team just blindly-blandly took the Hebrew mistranslation as the final word on the subject.  They might (given their special knowledge of the folkways of their target-set) actually have known what they were doing.

 

But surely (objects the straw-man, less savvy than yourself), something as simple as a verb meaning ‘to offer a morning greeting’  could not be re-interpreted to mean anything nefarious.  Yet as present company has learned, language has more tricks up its sleeve  than most folks give it credit for.  Consider the following famous phrase of German, which contains a verb meaning ‘greet’:

Und täglich grüßt das Murmeltier

Now, I know German reasonably well;  but when I first encountered that expression, my hair did stand on end (like quills upon ye fretful Murmeltier).   It has the d’outre-tombe knell of those mystery radio-phrases that Cocteau (with a wry nod to maquisard comsec during WWII) stuck into his 1950 movie Orphée ("L'oiseau chante  avec ses doigts").   What could it possibly mean?  Were it my day-job to interpret such things, if it came up in traffic  my first instinct would be to shut down all our embassies instanter.   Yet it is merely the German version of the movie-title “Groundhog Day”.

Inghimasi Murmeltier ... greets you

.

 

Where is an Arabic linguist when you need one ???

Germany is reeling from an improbable sequence of events.

Some good intelligence work leads the German police to the apartment of an immigrant, professedly Syrian.   They arrive in the nick of time:  the apartment turns out to be full of a powerful explosive, TATP, which has been used in numerous recent terrorist attacks in a number of countries.   But then things get weird.

* Even though they have surrounded the Plattbau (DDR-style prefab-modular apartment complex) with dozens of trained SWAT-team types, the suspect, seen nonchalently exiting his apartment, somehow manages to elude all his pursuers and besiegers.   All they managed to do was to get off a ‘warning’ shot, the signal for him to skedaddle.  (That sort of ineptness used to annoy me on “24”:  but at least the show had the excuse that the villains must not be caught before the final episode.)

Grenzschutzgruppe 9  on the job!

*  Despite an APB (including saturation-publicity on social media), the suspect manages to escape from Chemnitz to Leipzig uncaught and unmolested.

* There, he phones a Syrian acquaintance of his, asking “Hey man, can I crash at your pad?”    Sure, says the acquaintance (hereafter carried as “Mr BNB”)

* In the telling of Leipziger “Mr BNB”, he and two friends, having been alerted by social media to the identity of their guest  whom -- so he says -- he previously had never set eyes on, tie up the fugitive with electrical cord, and phone the police.  However, for lack of a translator (BNB’s German being poor), nobody can understand him, and essentially tell him “'Ain't nobody got time for this'.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/us/911-call-operator-arrested-hang-up-trnd/

Note that this was more than an inconvenience for the caller:  to show up in person at the Leipzig police station to make himself understood, would be to risk being spotted by local jihadis.  These don’t like snitches any more than do the thugs of Baltimore.  [Update:  And indeed, the Syrians have since complained of death-threats against them from local Muslims, and are being processed for a witness-protection program:
http://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/id_79274232/fall-al-bakr-zwei-syrische-hinweisgeber-unter-polizeischutz.html]

* Dauntless, BNB goes to the police station in person.  There, they leave him cooling his heels for an hour, despite the fact that he is bringing them the most startling news and biggest coup of the year.  Again, lack of translator?

* The cops finally grab their prey, already trussed like a turkey, with  “Eid mubarak” ribbons around his ankles, and haul him off to the pokey.

* There,  he is put on suicide watch.  But then a psychologist interviews him; she concludes that this would-be suicide bomber is in no danger of, um, suicide, and the watch is relaxed.   Unsupervised in his cell, he frolics, smashing a lamp and messing with the electrical cord.  He is left unmolested.   Next thing you know, he has hanged himself.

That is unfortunate;  since, reportedly, instead of grilling the bastard around the clock as to who-all was in his network (you don’t get TATP just off the Internet; indeed, the stuff is devilishly hazardous to transport), the authorities had only one lone chat with him before he died, taking his secrets with him to the grave (and beyond, to Hell or Seventh Heaven, according to taste).  And once again, their excuse is:  Lack of a translator.

Am Dienstag führte eine Psychologin ein Gespräch mit dem Häftling. Er habe sich dabei "ruhig" verhalten, erklärte Rolf Jacob, Leiter der Justizvollzugsanstalt Leipzig (JVA). Die Intervalle zwischen den Kontrollen seien daraufhin auf 30 Minuten ausgedehnt worden. Dass al-Bakr später die Deckenlampe herunterriss und versuchte, an ein Stromkabel zu gelangen, ließ bei niemandem die Alarmglocken schrillen. "Man hat das mehr als Vandalismus ausgelegt, als er – warum auch immer – so gehandelt hat", erklärte Jacob am Donnerstag auf einer Pressekonferenz. Ein Gespräch mit dem Häftling konnte mangels Dolmetscher nicht stattfinden. Am Mittwochabend fand dann eine Auszubildende den Erhängten.

derstandard.at/2000045855572/Schwere-Vorwuerfe-an-Sachsens-Justiz-nach-Suizid-in-Zelle

Solution:  Shower Arabic translators with mucho dollars, wherever they may be found.

(Contributions via this site;  bullion or Swiss francs only, please;  no dollars, pesos, or second-party food-stamps accepted.)
 

Arabic linguist  ponders an irregular verb

An Austrian reader agrees:

Eine Auszubildende macht den Rundgang?!

"Mangels Dolmetscher"?!

Also wenn ich den einzig gefassten mutmaßlichen IS-Selbstmordattentäter Deutschlands in meinem Gewahrsam hätte, dann würde ich ja mal auf der Stelle 50 Dolmetscher mit Helis einfliegen lassen und ihn von dutzenden GSG-9-Polizisten im Wechsel persönlich bewachen lassen bzw. einen Undercover-Zivilpolizisten in seine Zelle als Mithäftling schleusen.

http://derstandard.at/2000045855572/Schwere-Vorwuerfe-an-Sachsens-Justiz-nach-Suizid-in-Zelle

For further thrilling tales of the true-life adventures  of those godlike beings, Arabic linguists, check out these fact-filled articles:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/03/forensic-linguists-save-day.html

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/navy-linguists-save-day-updated.html

Debased Debates

My wife and I no longer even own a TV;  the only time we ever watch it  is if we are traveling abroad, or (sometimes) if in a stateside hotel.  The latter circumstance obtained the other day, as we found ourselves (on the second leg of a fortieth-anniversary celebratory trip, this one in the northern hemisphere) in a very nice Holiday Inn, on the night of the second “Presidential” “debate”.   It was futile, but sort of fun for a married couple to watch, over goat’s-cheese and cabernet, in a comfy fluffy pillow-filled  hotel bed.

My own political opinions being of absolutely no interest to anyone, even to myself, I’ll stick to mentioning a couple of telling points that either side might have made, but failed to, in the almost content-free flyting that, these days, passes for debate.  (If the word “disaster” were to disappear from the English language, Mr Trump’s public vocabulary would be sliced in half.)

* Mr.  Trump boasts he’ll wipe out ISIL, without hinting how.  Mrs Clinton was silent on this, but could well have countered by mentioning several singularly brilliant recent victories over ISIL leadership, widely reported in the press.  Plus Mosul and Raqqa are hanging in the balance. -- That by no means implies that the immediate threat of ISIL to Europe (and, to a lesser extent, to the US)  is diminished in the near term:  if you stomp on a wasps’ nest, the wasps (extra mad now) disperse.   So there is much to be done;  but this Administration (though I say it as shouldn't) has been doing a good job in CT overall.

* Both Democracts and Republicans have been culpably negligent as regards illegal immigration (and by that assertion is intended nothing debatably political, but apodictically universal:  If you have a law, either repeal it or enforce it;  that’s what “law” means).  President Obama and Mrs. Clinton further (and this is a political observation, rather than a logical  -- you can agree or disagree, without sinning against Aristotle) have lately imperiled the Republic by calling for (and implementing) additional (by Presidential fiat) legal immigration  from lands that have little to offer us but blood and chaos.   Several very recent developments in Europe underline this observation, including one in Germany (the Jaber al-Bakr affair) unfolding  even as the candidates spoke onstage;  yet Mr Trump failed to mention these. 

(If your wish to educate yourselves, you unfortunately will have to search on variant Romanizations of the Arabic name:  Jabir el-Bakr, Djabir al-Bakir, Dschaber al-Bakr, and so forth.  Pronounced JAB-ir al-BAK-er.)

Note:
All that was really only by way of leading up to a much more interesting story, that of the Suicide-Bomber who Unexpectedly Committed Suicide:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/10/where-is-arabic-linguist-when-you-need.html

[Update 15 October 2016]  To those who would dismiss Jaber al-Bakr’s terror plot as the work of an isolated madman, with no coordination with ISIL and rejected by the Muslim immigrant community in Germany (and hence, nothing to get worked up about;  with the suicide, Case Closed), consider this:

Jaber’s brother has been talking to the press.   He is one of the “suicide skeptics”.  In an earlier interview, he conceded that, while his brother might have had ISIL ties, he would never have killed himself.  Now he is (lyingly) denying the ISIL ties, and accusing the German authorities of having bumped off his brother in jail.  So far from apologizing for Jaber’s planned atrocities, he is threatening revenge :

Bruder des toten Jaber Albakr "Meine Reaktion als Araber ist Rache"

Der Bruder des toten Terrorverdächtigen Jaber Albakr spricht im DW-Interview eine Drohung aus. Sein Bruder sei kein IS-Mitglied gewesen, sagt Alaa Albakr zudem. Im "Spiegel" klang das anders.

Der Bruder des toten Terrorverdächtigen Jaber Albakr  sinnt auf Vergeltung für den Suizid seines Bruders. In einem Video-Interview der Deutschen Welle spricht er dabei auch indirekt eine Drohung gegen die drei Syrer aus, die seinen Bruder in Leipzig überwältigt und der Polizei übergeben hatten.

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/bruder-des-toten-jaber-albakr-meine-reaktion-als-araber-ist-rache/14692358.html

As for the three Syrian “heroes” (or not; the jury is still out on this), they have disappeared from Leipzig and gone into hiding.

Jour de la Bastille

Félicitations à nos alliés de plusieurs guerres, et meilleurs vœux pour une solide coopération entre nos nations.

Et heureux anniversaire à mon épouse Suzanne Marie, née en ce jour il y a, eh ben, quelques années et le pouce, et qui porte un nom français en l’honneur de cette amitié  plusieurs foix séculaire.

Pour célébrer, voici le palmarès de nos aperçus hexagonaux:

La francophonie

A beautiful friendship

À propos de Nice

Et puis, le soir, ce carnage, souillant la fête et la nation.

Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras

Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!

Ils nous viennent de l’Afrique, et des pays de Mahomet. 

Chez nous  de même.

Aux armes,  chrétiens!

EXXXclusive! Actual transcripts of Omar Mateen’s 911 calls !!!

Many observers have questioned the depth or solidity of the Orlando killer’s ties to ISIL.   That he called 911 during the drama three times, is beyond dispute.  But -- was he just then attempting to make initial contact with the group (a bit late, that!); or was it a pre-arranged call?

The essential scenarios  could not be more different:

(A) “Hi, you don’t know me, but my name is Omar, and I’m a loser, and my wife dumped me, and I spend all day whacking off in the basement and want to kill myself, but, better to go out in a blaze of glory, y’know?  As a “martyr”?”

(B) “Heyyy, Abu;  Omar here.   ConOps 938b is in progress as we speak.  Inform the Illuminati.”

Obviously, we need to get to the bottom of this.  And thus the spectacularly tentacular research department at the World of Dr Justice (Headquarters:  Geneva), which has a mole in every organization of any consequence, drilled into the matter, and came up with the actual tapes, “transcribed in Hollywood” by our team of international linguists.

Call #1:

Caller (dials; waits;  gets dial tone, which times out)

Caller (dials again; gets a recording, “We are sorry, but you need to dial a “1” before--“; caller hangs up.)

Caller (dials again, and again, and again; finally gets through).

911 (recording):  “Thank you for dialing 911; your call is important to us.  For Spanish, stay on the line.  For English, press 2;  for Lithuanian, press 3;  for Arabic, press 3 only do it backwards;  for Hebrew…”

Caller (to himself):  “Damn it!”

911: “You call is important to us -- reeally, reeeally important to us!  Muy importante! Sehr sehr importgestrudel!!  Please stay on the line!!!”

Caller (Waits; fifteen minutes pass)

911 (dispatcher):  “Good evening, how may I direct your call?”

Caller:  “I am Omar -- Omar! -- and I have hostages--“

911: “Please hold while I attend to a caller on another line.”

[Ten minutes pass.]

911:  “Thank you for holding. We--“

Caller:  “What was that about?”

911:  “Tragically, a kittehhh climbed up a tree and could not come down---“

Caller: “Allah’s curse upon the kittehhhhhh!   I am holding hostages and I--“

[A time anomaly occurs as the convo is shifted back to the technology of the 1950s:]

Operator: “Your time has expired.  Please insert another dime--“

[Call ends.]

Call #2:

Caller [dials 911 seventeen times in succession, for good luck]

911:  “Good evening.  How may I direct your call?  For City Hall, press 1.  For--“

Caller:  “I am Omar, and I am loaded for bear!  Fear me!  I am calling to pledge allegiance to the Caliph, the Lord High Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, master of Mosul, regent of Ragga --“

911:   “Sir, can you spell that?”

Caller: “? --! -- ??!!!    -- No, I can’t spell that!  I can barely spell my own name, how do you expect me --“

Hostages [voices in the background  cannot refrain from intervening.  “Aboo Baker Al Big Daddy--“  “No, you fool. A-Boo Ben Adam --“  -- Shots ring out, and the voices cease.]

911: “We are sorry, but there is nobody by that name at this extension--“

Caller: “Damn this extension!   And a plague on bacon!”

[Call unexpectedly cuts out.]

Call #3:

Caller [so heated, the steam purls over the wires]:  “This -- is -- Omar --….”

911: “Ah, Omar!   Welcome back!  This is the third time you’ve called tonight.  Can we interest you in our exclusive Frequent Callers Club ™?  For a moderate weekly fee, you’ll receive premium service, including reduced wait-times--“
Caller: "Don't you get it? I have--"
911:  "-- and for a slightly fatter fee, you can get "911 Prime":  after one hundred successfully completed calls you win a toaster."

Caller: “I HAVE HOSTAGES !!!”

911:  “We are sorry sir, we do not offer hostages services to other than our premium customers.  Transferring your call to the Department of Motor Vehicles….”

Caller:  “THAT DOES IT! I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!"

[spray of gunfire; the line goes dead.]

[Note:  That is satire; but what the media have told us stretches credulity even further.  Reportedly, the perp not only put in multiple calls to 911, he also called a TV station ("Am I famous yet?") and surfed the Net to see how the attack-in-progress was being reported.  The question poses itself:  During all that time, and the assailant's distraction, what were the patrons doing?  Why didn't they rush him?  Or simply leave?  The building had half a dozen exits!]


[Update 15 June 2016]  More 911 fun:
 

Verizon: 911 calls mistakenly routed to empty back-up call center

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-911-system-problems-20160615-story.html#nt=oft12aH-1gp2

"Your call is important to us..."