Appendix to "la quenelle" : the "Rabi`ah"

[Update Jan 2014]   There is a ludic, aesthetic dimension to this, which you notice immediately in the case of the ungainly quenelle (at least you do if you are not humor-impaired, like Valls and Hollande), along with a certain modest pride in coming up with a gesture that never previously existed.   Here is a somewhat subtler case:

This gesture is new to the global political landscape, and could only have been born in Arabic, in particular in Egypt.   For it depends upon an Arabic double-pun.

The hand is holding up four fingers (thus the visual pun in "R4BIA").  The reference is to Râbi`ah Square in Cairo, where protests against the military coup that overthew the elected President Mursi were held.  The square is so named after a medieval saint,

رابعة العدوية

“Huh?” you say.   Well, although Râbi`ah was her name, like many names in Arabic  it has a literal dictionary meaning:  in this case, the feminine form of the adjective meaning ‘fourth’.   Reinforcing the four-ness of it all is the fact that Râbi`ah Square, unlike its more famous Cairene sister Tahrîr, a large, roughly round arena,  is a quadrangle, fed by four streets, in which the demonstrators massed.   So something of a pun.

Or actually, a double one, or else none at all, depending upon whether you think the next link in the etymology reinforces or reverses the sense of word-play.  For the saint herself was named, not by randomly selecting a girl’s-name out of a hat, but because she was the fourth born in order.

[Update]  The Director of the Latin Divison at the World of Dr Justice (headquarters:  Geneva), Dr Keith A. Massey,  weighs in with this:

Romans also named their children by ordinal numbers, hence things like Julia Secunda, Quintus, etc.

Somehow, to our present perspective, that seems sort of impersonal.  But -- autre temps, autre moeurs.

[Update 2]  For a tendentious piece, but with lots of intriguing information, try this:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dawn-perlmutter/a-new-muslim-brotherhood-symbol-r4bia/

[Update 3]

It is a  matter of current debate, to what extent this Rabiah symbol, born in a broad-based protest, has been hijacked by extremist jihadi groups.   The matter is not entirely academic;  it could affect actual choices in CT.

My hunch is that, simply as a matter of psycho-geometry, the symbol is ill-suited to serve Salafists, let alone out-and-out takfiris.   It is too inclusive, like those four streets all leading into the square, as though from all four corners of the Earth.  Quadruplicity, as we know from Russell, drinks procrastination;  it does not quaff Hotspur.  (Inside joke, folks, you get it or you don’t;  moving along.)   And if Jung is correct (which he probably is not), this implication common among Westerners  should be universal.   

Indeed, if any number were to be a symbol for Muslims, it would have to be one, since Muslims are such rigorous monotheists.  As, accordingly, the finger-gesture:

Kamal asked, “When is he going to forgive you?”

The mother gestured upward with her index finger and murmured, “Forgiveness comes from God.”

-- Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk (transl. of Bayn al-Qasrayn, 1956), 1990, p. 210

(That gesture has also been common in recent years  among evangelical Christians.)

Note further that, for those using the gesture, it is not simply “holding up your open hand” (as opposed, say, to a militant fist), as it might strike a Westerner;  it quite definitely contrasts with a five-finger symbol that antedates it by centuries in the Mediterranean region:

To ward off the evil eye, Khadija spread her fingers apart  and held up her hand with the palm facing Yasin, reciting “And from the evil of the envious person in his envy.” (Qur’an 113:5)

-- Naguib Mahfouz, Palace of Desire (transl. of Qasr al-Shawq, 1957), 1991, p. 34

If someone flashed you that symbol, it would be an insult;  much as the Quaker/hippie two-fingered “Peace” sign, if performed palm-in and in England, means something very bad.   And, just as with that last example, if you turn the palm inward for the Muslim five-finger gesture, it changes the meaning, in this case from hostile to friendly:

He spread his hand across his chest to express his thanks.

-- Naguib Mahfouz, Palace of Desire (transl. of Qasr al-Shawq, 1957), 1991, p. 138

For more on the khamsa  خمسة‎, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsa

[Afterpiece]

Let us dwell a bit upon the semiology of gesture in the Arab world.

Some gestures are apparently instinctual, and hence seem transparent, and probably universal.  As:

… flogging the ground with his camel-stick  to give emphasis to his words

-- Wilfred Thesiger,  Arabian Sands (1959; repr. 1990), p. 160

He shook his head rather forcefully  as if to expel these thoughts.

-- Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street (transl. of al-Sukkariyya, 1957), 1992, p. 30

Others are clearly more culturally conditioned:

We squatted down to drink, for no Arab drinks standing.

-- Wilfred Thesiger,  Arabian Sands (1959; repr. 1990), p. 165

She held her hand out to him  after wrapping it in a corner of her cloth, so she would not nullify his state of ritual cleanliness.

-- Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk (transl. of Bayn al-Qasrayn, 1956), 1990, p.

I once put my hand on the back of bin Kabina’s neck, and he turned on me and asked furiously if I took him for a slave.

-- Wilfred Thesiger,  Arabian Sands (1959; repr. 1990), p.  163

Ibn Sa’oud had ridden up to his enemy’s tent, and laid his hand upon the tent pole  so that the prince of the Shammar had no choice but to let him enter.

-- Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (1907, repr. 2001), p. 47

Antiquity breathes through such gestures.   Intrigued, I queried the official Latin and Theological authority of this site, whether there were any parallels from Roman history, and received this reply:

Roman citizens always reclined to eat or drink. The slaves always stood.

In fact, one of the accepted rituals for manumission was to ask the slave to recline and join you at table. If you did this in the presence of witnesses, you had de facto set the slave free.

It is for this reason that the default stance at Liturgy in the Historical Church has always been standing. At Liturgy we are hoi douloi tou Theou, the servants of God, standing ready to serve him.

Early on, people began to feel that, at particularly "high" moments of Liturgy, the reading of the Gospel, the Consecration of the Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, they wanted to kneel.

The Fathers of the Church were so concerned at this incorrect impulse that they passed a Canon at the 1st Council of Nicaea, banning kneeling on Sunday, period.

When people persisted in violating this Canon, St. John Chrysostom wrote into the Liturgy the correction:

"Let us stand upright and listen to the words of the Holy Gospel."

And yet, in most Orthodox Churches you will still see people drop to their knees, precisely when the Liturgy reminds them that they are forbidden to do so.

Rome has recently also waged a war on this point, reminding the faithful that the only stance that is always correct in Liturgy is standing.

For further thoughts on psychogeometry, in a mathematical/theological context, try this:

On Symbols.

[Update 13 Sept 2014] Another visual Muslim symbol, this one banned in Germany:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/flagge-verbot.html


 [Update 3 Oct 14]  For a lovely gallery of recent political hand-gestures, now this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/02/hong-kongs-crossed-arms-and-other-hand-gestures-of-defiance-around-the-world/?tid=hpModule_04941f10-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e

One might add the "one-finger" gesture of ISIL, but that is not so much protest as triumphalism.

Weasel Words of the Day: “stronger”; “about”.

weasel word [fr. the weasel’s reputed habit of sucking the contents out of an egg  while leaving the shell superficially intact] (1900) :

a word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or position

-- Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

Certain terms are, in our society, inherently weasel-words:  pro-life; pro-choice.   Nobody in the debate opposes either “life” or “choice” simpliciter;  to find such factions, you would have to attend a meeting of Death-Eaters (anti-life) or neuroscientists (denying the existence of the faculty of choice -- Free Will).   The resort to these euphemisms  degrades the debate.

For other terms, it’s not so obvious.  Take the expression “Let me be perfectly clear.”   For many people, this phrase seems consumately weasely in itself;  but really, this is only because of its well-known characteristic use by Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who would typically follow up the phrase  with a lie or an obfuscation.  But such infractions do not inhere in the phrase.   Owing to our long memory of its Nixonian misuse, no-one can any longer say it with a straight face  (a snide version of the phrase, "Read My Lips", similarly fell out of favor owing to a spectacular mishap by Bush senior); but in principle, a straightforward and respectable use exists for it.   At the lower end, it would be just a kind of throat-clearing, giving the reporters time to get out their pencils and lend an ear.   (Note to the new generation: Back in Nixon’s day, reporters used these things called “pencils”.  They’re kind of hard to describe.)  At the highest end, the use of the phrase would follow the following pragmatic conditions.  (Note to the laity:  “Pragmatic” in the linguistic sense of pragmatics, the discourse-related partner of semantics,  rather than in the politician’s sense of “yes this is lame but let’s do it anyway  because anything else could hurt our poll numbers”.)

Conditions of legitimate use:

(1)  What I am about to say is no off-the-cuff throwaway line.  I have thought about what I am about to say, and you are free to quote me; I won’t complain, when the outcry arises, that the remark was “taken out of context” or that “that wasn’t what I meant”.

This licenses the expression’s use in a moral and alethic sense;  so used, it is admirable, statesmanlike.

Then further, at the next meta level up,  there is a pragmatic consideration that licenses the speaker even to use an expression (any expression that make such claims as in (1), not just this one) in the first place:

(2)  I am, by general acknowledgement, in a position of some authority;  I am a person whose words must be well-weighed, as they are likely to be acted upon.

~

We earlier analyzed (and excoriated) certain other weaselly expressions that lately have proliferated weed-like in the public square: as, “Well, again, …”    Here are two more -- neither of them obvious weasels, but which reveal their mustelid nature upon analysis.

(I)  “stronger”

This one looks innocent enough, and most uses of it indeed are.   The instance that caught my attention, on the news broadcast this morning on NPR, was not truly weaselly in the sense of wittingly devious, but it was at best intellectually lazy -- and thus, in the event, reprehensible, since the woman who used it is a prominent newscaster for National Public Radio, and should know better.   The subject was U.S. policy towards Syria, and the newswoman asked her interviewee whether, in his opinion, the U.S. reponse should be “stronger” -- point à la ligne;  no indication of what that might entail.

It is a subtle point, but that move already corrupted the terms of the discussion, by presupposing a linear dimension of assessment, running from weaker to stronger.  There are a very few cases in life where so simple an evaluatory topology may be in place:  say,  “This beam is stronger than that one”.  (Note:  I had to rack my brains to come up with a use that would be semantically impeccable; but even here, you would need to qualify:  Are you speaking of transverse bearing-strength; longitudinal bearing-strength;  resistence to sharp impact, from an impact angle ranging from 0 to 180; resistence to compression; resistance to elongation; resistence to torsion; or what.  You see, even the simplest things  are not so simple).    Such a state of affairs certainly does not obtain in the boiling Syrian cauldron:  not statics but chaos theory would be the relevant quantitative handmaid.

But it is worse than that.  The antonym of “strong” is “weak”, and weak is what no President ever, ever wants to be called -- not simply for political reasons, but for socio-psychoanalytical (the President as the symbolic Father of the Country; weak = impotent:  the worst possible thing for a would-be father to be).  Hence, the subtext or subspin offered by presenting the problem in terms of “stronger” or “weaker” politicies, is simply to provoke unconsidered military action -- “Don't just stand there -- bomb something!”   Such an attitude does indeed characterize the premature-ejaculatory public pronouncements (better some jism that falls to the ground, than not getting it up at all, one supposes) of some Republican Vulcan chickenhawks:  but they know not whereof they speak.

Try this experiment.   Ask one of the Congressional sword-rattlers whether the U.S. should ofter “stronger support to the Syrian Christian community than the Obama administration has been willing to offer”;   you are likely to get a forcefully bellowed “Yes!”  But the principle dividing-line at present, in that fractured and ever-shifting Syrian mosaic, runs between, on the one side, the Asad regime and its allies in the religious minorities, Alawite, Kurd, and … Christian;  and on the other, a hodge-podge of ill-coordinated Sunni Syrian rebels, plus an increasingly potent and more tightly organized and more violent al-Nusrah Front, which is run by al-Qaeda.  So, Senator, just what exactly did you have in mind?

There is nothing wrong with toughness per se;  it is simply a socio-rhetorical fact about America that, frequently, the call to “get tough” is made in blithe independence of the facts on the ground.    Thus, if you maintain that the Obama administration have been panty-waisted pussyfoots in dealing with Iran, you are free to do so;  but intellectually you are in arrears if you do this in ignorance of things like the Stuxnet attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet), or the affects of our increased sanctions against that steaming, simmering, and suffering land.  To take one item at random from the morning’s news:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-iran-hanging-20130121,0,2907702.story

In Iran, two muggers caught on video are hanged

The death sentences are seen as a get-tough message from Iranian authorities alarmed about escalating street thuggery amid a sanctions-driven economic downturn.

Students of history are familiar with the sometimes unfortunate effects of harsh sanctions, for instance against the Weimar republic, which paved the way for National Socialism.

(II) “about”

A new rhetorical formula has sprung up, now everywhere to be heard on broadcast political discussion (I say “broadcast” because the formula is more characteristic of speech than of writing):  “It’s not about X, it’s about Y.”

There exists, of course,  a perfectly valid use of this formula:  but it crucially depends on what the meaning of “it” is (to coin a phrase).   If, say, It here refers to A Tale of Two Cities, then the following are pragmatically impeccable statements (the first false, the second true):

(i)  It’s not about London and Paris, it’s about Minneapolis and St. Paul.

(ii) It’s not about the Franco-Prussian war, it’s about the French revolution.

Whereas, the characteristic of the new use which we wish here to put beneath the magnifying-glass (and upon the rack), is that now the word “it” … does not actually refer to anything;  it is more like the “expletive” it (again, I use the term expletive in the sense of grammarians, not in that of the Nixon tapes) in expressions like “It’s raining” or “It’s a shame the way things worked out””.    In the latter instance, the “it” is non-referring, but the copula still has some work to do, having the same value as it does in the non-cleft relative  “The way things worked out is a shame.”   Whereas in the new use -- “It’s not about profits, it’s about America” or “It’s not about moving forward, it’s about the environment”  and so forth -- the copula too is emptied of all significance, having (so to speak) nothing left to copulate with.   The resulting formulae mean almost nothing, and are virtually impossible to paraphrase.

The context of this morning’s use -- again from “Weekend Edition” -- was a discussion of the proposal to put armed guards in every school.   (My own alternative proposal, to put an etymologist in every school, did not come up for discussion.)  The person being interviewed said:

“It’s not about romance or drama,

 it’s about protecting our kids.”

Almost nothing else was offered by way of argument;   the above statement was allowed to ring over the airwaves unchallenged, as a genuine argument in the debate.

Now, take out your pencils (ask Gramps what that means) because this is a test:   Does that statement present an argument in favor of the proposal, or against it?  And, in the event that the statement is semantically vacuous, with no “cognitive content” at all,  was it intended, as a rhetorical move, to support or refute the proposal?

[The exciting answer will be revealed tomorrow.   Meanwhile, tell your friends.]

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Footnote:   There is an interesting -- and telling -- meta-pragmatic condition-of-use here, basically opposite to that in (2) above for “Let me be perfectly clear”.  The latter is a Winner’s phrase;  whereas “It’s not about X, it’s about Y” is used either by, or when addressing, subalterns.   The very vacuous semantics and collapse of syntax, dissected above, are badges it wears on its sleeve.   The warrant-for-use condition would go something like this:

(3)  Me’m jist folks here, as are y’all -- never did have much of a head for grammar, or argumentation, or cogency, or exposition -- but b’dang this here thing comes from m’heart!

The kinesic equivalent of the phrase would be a plaintive look from a puppy basset-hound.

[Note on the note:  Another linguistic technical expression.  Kinetic is already a twenty-dollar word, whereas kinesic will setcha back a fitty-bone.

For those fond of words costing upwards of a hundred dollars, click here:

Logophilia. ]

Historical bonus:

Over a century ago, the psychologist and philosopher William James  already adverts to the weaseliness of “about”:

All dumb psychic states have … been coolly suppressed; or, if recognised at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts “about” this object or “about” that,  the stolid word about  engulphing all their delicate idiosyncracies in its monotonous sound.

-- William James, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (in Mind, 1884)

[Update, 24 January 2013]   This morning, NPR interviewed a woman who was trying to get gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered  covered under the Violence Against Women Act.  Her concluding statement:

"This is not about identity politics; this is about where the unmet needs remain."

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

[Update later that evening]  You needn't listen long to NPR, before being exposed to yet more semantically vacuous tricks of syntax.  Just now, with reference to the Newtown shootings:

"It's the commission's job

to allow victims to be victims."

This echoes the brain-damaged slogan of the '80's, "Let Reagan be Reagan."   It's not a question of weasel words, since any word can be used in this structure, which we dub "Triumphalist Tautalogy".  It's weasel syntax.  Other examples:  "Business is business" (used by someone screwing you); "Boys will be boys" (excusing bad behavior), "War is war" (excusing even worse behavior).

[Meta-update]  I have pondered deeply a wealth of examples of such Sappy Syntax,  and extracted this pearl of wisdom from its oystershell grip:

~  The Meaning of Life  ~

~  is to live  ~

~  a life full of Meaning … ~