As a linguist ourself, it warms our heart when we hear
real-life tales of the exploits of these mighty beings. Some of them we have documented
here:
I never thought I’d post one with the title “Tattoo’d
Chinese linguist saves the day”, but hey,
this is America. (As for
what that’s supposed to mean: it doesn’t mean anything.)
Our newest example is unfortunately fictional (indeed, as we
shall see, lame even as fiction), but what with all the attention lavished on
celebrities and sports-stars, we take such scraps as we can get.
In Monday’s pilot of the lustrous though ludicrous new
series, “
Blindspot”,
concerning a
shapely unclad tattooed Special-Forces polyglot female
amnesiac with superpowers (go back and read that again slowly:
yes, that’s what it says) a situation
arises in which, for reasons too complex or rather too contrived to go into,
the FBI needs to decipher
instanter
some emails in Chinese,
or else Very
Bad Things will happen to Gotham.
The agent in charge barks:
“Get me all the Chinese linguists!”
That conjures up a fairly comic image, in which several
dozen Sinophiles are clustered around the screen displaying the
email, translating in unison, in a
sing-song chorus, “Dear sir or
madam: I am an imprisoned Nigerian
prince …” -- However, there’s a reason for the broad-sweep order. On television, to show decisiveness and
leadership, the floor-boss barks (or “snaps”):
“Check these prints against the
files of every police department in the country!”
or
“Scan the footage from every
security camera in the city for the past ten years!”
or
“Seek a match in the dental records
of every adult male going back to the Neanderthals!”
Still, we forgive all that, since it poses the question
which so many have asked and so few answered: “Where’s a linguist when you really need one??”
But now the screenwriting takes a turn for the absurd. None of the Bureau’s chinoisisants are up to this task, for,
as we are instantly informed (by a non-linguist), the dialect variety in
question is, um, Wen Zu (how could
she possibly know that?), commonly known to other Chinese speakers as “the
Devil’s language”. Omigosh, then
Gotham is doomed!
Where did that
come from? -- Simply to set matters up so that the mnemonically-challenged
Wonder Woman (who can’t remember her own name, but who remembers every language
she ever studied, to the last detail) can pipe up pertly and pluckily :
“I know Wen Zu !”
At which point the program’s full agenda stands revealed, as
clearly as had it stepped naked out of a hold-all in Times Square. So far from being mere eye-candy
for men, as P.C. critics were objecting before the show even aired (her déshabille is never more than partial,
with the best bits left out), this show is the latest media sacrifice upon the
ever-higher-towering altar of Feminarcissism. This is the new paragon of womanhood: the
rocket-scientist-cum-brain-surgeon-cum-astronaut-cum-poetess-cum-Black-Belt,
the woman who can Have It All, Do It All, as well as men or rather better, all
without smudging her makeup.
Scenes from future episodes:
Hapless FBI guy:
“O noez, the only way to find out
what these superintelligent but fusedly-confused brain-joined Siamese twins
know before the bomb goes off, is to perform a neurosurgical separation, and
here we are with them in a rowboat, without oars, and far from any hospital.
Whatever shall we do?”
Wonder woman:
“I can perform the operation!
I’ve done it many times under battlefield conditions, with no equipment
but a tongue-depressor -- one of which I happen to have right here in my right breast
pocket, just above my right breast!”
and
Hapless FBI guy:
“Curses, the only way to save
humanity is to solve the Riemann Hypothesis, pronto! And me without my pencil!”
Wonder woman:
“I can provide the solution!
It follows as a direct corollary from a more general theorem which I
have already proved!”
and
Hapless FBI guy:
“Oy veh! Here we stand stranded with the doom-timer ticking, at the
bottom of a sheer five-thousand-foot cliff, at the top of which lies the
remedy, and I forgot my climbing shoes!
We’d have to fly!”
Wonder woman:
“I can fly!”
Now, there is a wrinkle here, which will likely strike
no-one but linguists. The puzzle
is an e-mail -- i.e., in written, not
spoken Chinese. And Chinese is
ideographic, not alphabetical.
Which means that the various dialects, which vary from village to village
and which are sometimes mutually unintelligible, still are written in basically
the same way. The email would thus
be intelligible to all.
(And after all that, the episode never even made use of her
marvellous skill, so far as I can tell.
Of course, I may have blinked, and missed the content of the email -- the
pilot tried to pack a season’s worth of flim-flam into forty-five minutes, so
as to cater to those with short attention-spans.
Instead, the key to it all turned out to be a cryptic phrase
they’d heard earlier but now suddenly cryptolinguistically decrypted:
“mother of exiles”:
Aha, the Statue of Liberty! --
Cf. the crossword-puzzle motif in “
Rubicon”.)
~
Anyhow, even though NBC may in this case have stretched the
facts a bit (indeed, racked the fiction), we appreciate the shout-out. Linguists really are rather godlike
beings. For starters, we’re taller
than other people.
Here are some actual portraits from our archives:
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Archie the Arabist
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Gertie the Germanist
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Rickie the Russian-maven
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