Word of the Day: “Dabiq”

[Update 16 Oct 2016]    As for the pronunciation, BLUF:

DA-bick

[Details:] 

Since the name of this ill-omened Syrian village is once again in the news, as the purported site of the latest ISIL beheadings,  and as the media are still mispronouncing it, here once again is some orthoëpic guidance.

[Original post 23 Oct 2014]

The name of ISIL’s English-language magazine -- its answer to al-Qaeda’s uninspiring Inspire -- is mysteriously titled Dabiq.   I hope to explain this as time permits, but in the meantime there is a narrowly linguistic matter,  à la “ISIS or ISIL?”: namely, how to pronounce the word.  As it is currently being mispronounced in the media, I thought I’d weigh in before the error spreads.

(That's "Caliphate" to you & me)

The Arabic is دابق , with a long initial vowel and a short final vowel.  Accordingly, a narrow transcription would be Dâbiq.   The d here is the plain (unemphatic, non-pharyngealized) consonant; hence the long â has a relatively light or fronted character.  Pronounce the word

     DA - bik

with accent on the first syllable, whose vowel is like that in cat.  The second syllable is like Bic (the name of the ballpoint pen), or Bick (the Hayes-Bickford, near Harvard Square, where I had my first traumatic encounter with what Cantabridgeans consider “regular coffee”), not like beak.

As for why the Islamic State would name its European-language outreach magazine in so obscure a way as Dabiq,  and why they would proclaim (probably falsely) that the latest beheadings took place in the hamlet of that name -- Ah, thereby hangs a tale, with roots deep in History!

The reference is to a Prophetic Tradition (a Hadîth), according to which apocalyptic end-time events will involve an episode in that otherwise obscure hamlet. 

لاَ تَقُومُ السَّاعَةُ حَتَّى يَنْزِلَ الرُّومُ بِالأَعْمَاقِ أَوْ بِدَابِقَ

[For the full hadith, cf. http://sunnah.com/muslim/54/44]

But there are hundreds of Hadith, even thousands;  and this one is by no means among the better-known. 

Nor does its content specially favor ISIL’s agenda as opposed to any other Muslim’s.  For that, the following motif is far more telling:

Drown like dogs, infidels

Noah’s flood is acknowledged in Islamic tradition, but does not bulk large.   Its use here by the Islamic State  is pure gloating and minatory schadenfreude:  Everyone is going to die, smitten by the wrath of Allah, apart from one precious remnant (to belong to which, it helps to have a low-numbered IS party-card).

Why, then, of all the titles one might have chosen, choose this obscure one?  We ask this simply as a student of rhetoric.

[tbc …]

[Update, Ash Wednesday, 2015]  In the latest terror incident in Tunisie, a group which, a while back, pledged allegiance to ISIL, killed four policemen.  The group is being reported as Phalange Okba Ibn Nafaâ, Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade and various other renditions.   A proper transcription would be Katîbat `Uqba ibn Nâfi`, or `Uqbah ibn Nâfi` Brigade.   (Here the circumflexes, for which you may also substitute a macron, indicate a long vowel, which affects the stress:  thus, it is the first syllable of Nâfi`that stressed.)  In Arabic:

عقبة بن نافع

So who is this gentleman, for whom the brigade is named?  

Not, as one might suppose, some recent martyr who is being commemorated (such is the style of Palestinian groups, for instance).   Rather, the group has reached all the way back to the 600s A.D. -- the first few years of the Islamic era. Uqba ibn Nafi was a Crusading Muslim general who led the conquest of the Maghreb, after his famous uncle had conquered Egypt.

Here they are  smiling for their group portrait:

Hi mom!

 

This harking back to the earliest days of Islam, is typical of Salafis, and is in line with the choice of Dabiq for the magazine.

~

Incidentally… A similar point may be made w.r.t. that large-font word that headlines the very first issue of Dabiq:  “Khilafah”.   It means ‘caliphate’, and is pronounced “khee-LAFF-a” (where the kh- denotes the final sound of Bach, or the initial sound of chutzpah.)  But the point is -- since there is already a perfectly serviceable English word for this, why use a transliterated Arabism?

It all goes towards establishing a self-isolating identity for Salfist-takfiri Muslims.  Thus again and again, in English text, you’ll see them denounce “kuffar” (pron. koo-FAHR), which simply means ‘infidels’.  Or they’ll text about “making dua”, where dua (phonetically more narrowly, du`aa) means ‘prayer’.   The devotees simply wish to mark themselves off as different.   For a discussion of the socio-theology of that stance, see our discussion of    الولاء والبراءة

Bon chic bon bio

In a recent post,

A fou-faraw in France

 we suggested above that the reporter’s somewhat “off”-sounding “the male demonstrators” might have been in part a crypto-Gallicism, unconsciously inspired by the special contemporary French political use of the ethnic codeword les jeunes (literally 'the young-folk', but that wouldn't render the flavor at all).  A similar apparent case of unconscious loan-translation appears in this morning’s New York Times, datelined Paris.   In prose reminiscent of a gourmand's menu, as gooey and thick as pâté de foie gras, we read of a state-subsidized (and rather louche-sounding) real-estate speculator, remaking the Marais section of Paris (“one of the city’s trendiest” districts, the reporter reassures us, lest some francophone-capable American readers hesitate to venture into a section whose name literally means ‘swamp, morass’) into an “Epicurean Village” (epicurean  not in the sense of the  ataraxia of Ἐπίκουρος,  but of self-indulgent sybarites):

“It’s going to be totally designed, with a library so people can think about the meat.”

(I blink.  Did the sentence really say that?  Let’s re-read it slowly:

It’s

going to be

totally designed,

with a library

so people can think

…
so people can think

…

so people can think

…

about the meat.

Yep, that’s what it says all right.)

Quoting the silk-scarf bedraped entrepreneur, our blithe and flighty reporter goes on:

“Over there will be the cheesemonger, where the cheese will be hidden in designer drawers, and taken out and explained.”

All right -- now I’ve lost the readers’ confidence;  you must think I’m making this up.  So here’s the link; go see for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/europe/an-epicurean-village-is-too-rich-for-some-paris-appetites.html?ref=world

One pictures the scene:  “You, cheesemonger!  Explain that cheese!”   -- "Ahh, ma-dame.... Allou mee too extract heem, from zee deesigneur draweurs..."
(Actually, shouldn't 'designer drawers' refer to panties by Yves St-Laurant?  Strange place to stow the cheese...)

Our reporter continues, this time in her own prose, rather than that of the sleek little Frenchman:

Fashionably dressed butchers, …

(Actually we must pause here, overcome.  “Fashionably dressed butchers”, what an image.   Trendily attired plumbers;  dishwasher-repairmen in gay raiment …  -- Let’s try again.)

Fashionably dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs  will work in an upscale collective  --

(No, sorry,  got to pause again for breath.  A “collective” -- shades of those olden times in Berkeley!  But -- faut préciser -- an upscale collective.   Très chic. -- Truly, today’s feminized-and-yuppified New York Times  is priceless.  And this is the news section, Gawwd help us; not the Gomorrah of "Style".  --- Let’s try one more time:)

Fashionably dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs  will work in an upscale collective, dominated by the principal of zero waste, 

[ => “The  Principle   of  Zero   Waste”  <= ]

peddling [Is that really the verb you want? -- Copy editor] high-concept foods from mod spaces …

(“High-concept foods” -- “Mod spaces”.  Can’t make this stuff up.  -- Well, she can. -- To resume: )

… high-concept foods from mod spaces, using  biological products  sourced only from French farmers.

(We fall exhausted on our labors.)

Anyhow, en tant que philologue,  allow me to draw your attention to that phrase, “biological products”.   For the average American reader, I suspect, that does not have quite the effect that the gushing author intended.   To the ear of the anglo-saxon (as the French call us), that sounds suspiciously like a tissue sample, or an excretion, or something suspected in an ebola outbreak.   But what is really meant is what, in the preceding paragraph, she styled more idiomatically as “farm-fresh gastronomy” (semantically, there is a bit of an enallege adjectivi there, since what is “farm-fresh” here is not really the gastronomy, but the food which the gastronomes are shoving down their pie-holes, washed down with a nice chablis;  but let that pass).   The sense, surely, is an unconscious semantic loan-translation from French biologique: it means ‘natural, organic’, and (among the trendy) is usually abbreviated bio  (as in : des produits bio;  the modifier does not inflect for number or gender)

That word gastronomy, although correctly used (albeit modified askew), has perhaps a faint aura of Gallicism as well:  gastronomie is quite common in French, and has no untoward associations;  whereas, in its article gastronomy, Wikipedia feels obliged to caveat: “Not to be confused with Gastroenterology” (that’s the discipline that peers into those icky “biological products” deep in the unmentionable places of the anatomy).     Fate, though, does sometimes intervene, when the oleaginous or mycological excesses of the gastronomes (another word common in French, rare in English;  it means ‘food-fetishist’;  we generally employ the euphemism gourmet -- another French loan -- which means ‘narcissistic food-fetishist with too much unearned disposable income (sweated from the hides of the working class) and too much goddam time on their hands’)  does lead them into the operating-rooms of the gastroenterologists.

(Enough, enough.  Epicurean village delenda est.  Times, cancel my subscription.)

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[Update 1 July 2017]  And now this, a headline of a rare stupidity, even for the Saturday New York Times:
 

‘That First Crisp Bite Can Make or Break the Hot Dog Experience’

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/insider/that-first-crisp-bite-can-make-or-break-the-hot-dog-experience.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

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Word of the Day: “pipolade” (bis)

Repeatedly disappointed by Le Monde, I switched to daily checking of Le Figaro instead.   It often reports news of interest that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere --  things the Left abjures, because politically-incorrect, and which the American Right abjures, because their knowledge of and interest in Abroad is limited to occasionally peering across the Bering Strait (“Russia … You can see it from here,” in the words of one of the Republicans’ senior stateswomen).  Additionally, the readers’ comments tend to be quite literate and witty, and lend themselves to quotation to illustrate new usages in the ever-evolving French tongue.

However, just as a subscription to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times (which I maintain, years after having moved out of the Northeast) inevitably brings with it, wrapped inside more serious sections like a dogturd in a pooper-scooper bag, the egregious, the ineffable “Style” section, addressed to the mindless with too much money (and which must be extracted with tweezers, while wearing elbow-length plastic gloves),  so subscription to the Figaro newsletter brings with it the bling-bling scraps & scrapings from its gynecocentric supplement, Madame Figaro.

Yet today, the thumbnail come-on offered a new word I’d never seen:   pipolade.

Tranches de pipolade

Jude Law, Madonna, Brad Pitt... Ce que les people nous ont fait savoir cette semaine... et dont on aurait très bien pu se passer.

You can view the word in action here, if you don’t mind a spot of brain-damage:

http://madame.lefigaro.fr/celebrites/tranches-de-pipolade-011212-307598

(Well, let us not be too harsh:  they did after all add that wise proviso, “dont on aurait très bien pu se passer”.)

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So what is “pipolade”?   The etymon is evidently the English or rather the American word people -- yet, not as in “We the People”, but as in … People magazine, trail-blazer in the decline of American letters.  The word thus means “glitzy gossipy tidbits from the world of empty celebrities”.   The celebrities in question (as here, all three featured) are mostly American, whence the appropriateness of the American etymology.

The word People itself is used appositionally/asyndetically in the Madame section of Le Figaro, things  like

La semaine people

Michelle Obama tout près de Dustin Hoffman, Amanda Seyfried trop proche de Hugh Jackman, Diane Kurger très loin de Quentin Tarantino…

 

Now -- Why bother to serve up such a trifle?  You don’t really need to add this odd word to your active vocabulary.  But it does nicely illustrate a trait of French, active for well over a century:  namely, to borrow Anglo-American lexical Kulturgut  in a quirky Gallicized form, deliberately distorted:  acknowledging their interest in the doings of the perfides anglais (and now the amerloques loufoques) while maintaining a certain hexagonal integrity, by dressing up the word in a jester’s cap and bells;  as though to say:  this we simply toy with, the Académie française will never ratify this.

Pour nos essais

en langue

la plus châtiée qui soit,

checkez-out   …..

La francophonie, à l'usage du Dauphin

To give a further sense of the flavor of this frileux variety of Languages in Contact, compare another … not borrowing, exactly, since the word exists nowhere outside of France, but Anglo-Franco hippogriff, appearing on the same page of the trusty Le Robert & Collina Super Senior (the dictionary title being itself a rather larky-sounding Anglico-Gallico confection)  in which I am dligently writing-in our new arrival:   pipi-room.

Mmmyes;  you heard that right.  Along with the idiom aller au pipi-room.  Glossed with the British equivalents (equivalent both referentially and in playfulness) “loo” and “to go and spend a penny”.   And indeed, this pipi undoubtedly played a role in the lexicogenesis of pipolade, marrying up with people in a ceremony presided-over by things like limonade and rigolade…

There is a curious anglo-babytalk parallel in German:  Pipi-pause (‘pit stop’).  It looks English but, like pipi-room, is not.   This sort of coy/twee playing-around with expressions for the urinary function (reminiscent of playing-around with the Wiwi-macher itself) have parallels in British English and (abundantly, though with a different twist) Australian English, but not really in adult American, which typically sticks to a certain surly onomatopoiea.

In summary, re pipolade:  This, then, is the sort of bend-sinister offspring of unmarriageable parents, in which the American doyen of Romance Philology, Yakov Malkiel (may God receive his soul), with his keen ear for linguistic playfulness, used to delight.

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[Update 15 December 2012]  A link to the following  appeared in my mailbox this morning:

2012, l’année du strip-tweet

Bar Refaeli, Pink, Rihanna, Baptiste Giabiconi… Les people se sont mis à nu sur Twitter

Note the use of les people in the sense of ‘pop celebrities’.  But what of this strip-tweet?  Is it a genuine/common American phrase, borrowed into French?  Or is it like pipi-room, scum villages, et cetera, confected from American spare parts, in a Gallic mould?

A Google search found, zwar,  plenty of instances of contiguous strip plus tweet -- but most of them had nothing to do with the usage here, but occur in contexts like “… Sunset Strip.  Tweet …”

Well, I don’t use Twitter, nor track celebs, so U B the judge.

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[Update 24 January 2013]    Meanwhile, the guardians of the linguistic citadel wage a battle of Sprachreinigung (hygiène du langage) , as they have done since the eighteenth century:

Le Journal officiel du 23 janvier préconise d'user du terme «mot-dièse» au lieu de «hashtag». Sur le réseau social, on se gausse de ces combats perdus d'avance.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/2013/01/23/03004-20130123ARTFIG00550-twitter-mot-diese-contre-hashtag.php?m_i=hUehN%2B_tGVNLf5HYwETvni_pORDxRlyI_9OJLf5qCWnoLQ2hL

That is, instead of the word in international use, which is composed of two familiar English words but which, for all I know, may actually have been coined in Finland or Japan, French-speakers are urged to call it a ‘sharp’.

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[Update 11 May 2014]  The latest from “Madame Figaro” (by far the worst offender):

Les baskets slip-on gagnent du terrain

Des motifs arty, du cuir, du poulain, du raphia... La tendance mix & match a tissé sa toile sur la reine du street wear.

For more re such gynecomorphic bobo-talk, this:

  http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/08/bon-chic-bon-bio.html

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(French !) Phrase of the Day: “scum villages”

In our essay from yesterday,

            Word of the Day: “pipolade”

we instanced French and German derivata that purported to be based upon English constructions -- which, however, do not exist in English, although the base word does -- “people-ade”, “pee-pee room”, “pee-pee pause”.  And just today, another one, in French, though apparently taken directly from Dutch:  scum villages.

Last year,  we reported in extenso on the Dutch proposal for building social leper-colonies, housing the unwanted in shipping containers:

            The Rise of «la Racaille»

At that time, the proposal was floated by the ineffable Geert Wilders, under the name of “tuigdorpen”:

http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2824/Politiek/article/detail/1833354/2011/02/10/Nieuw-is-het-idee-van-Wilders-tuigdorpen-niet.dhtml

Back then it might have been dismissed as the provocation of a notably histrionic right-winger. But this time around, the sociology is quite different, since the measure is being proposed by the mayor of Amsterdam -- Europe’s longtime hippie-city -- who moreover is from the Labor party, and who admonishes the citizens to pay no attention to the precedent behind the curtain:

   Des villages pour rassembler les marginaux à Amsterdam

Let Le Figaro tell it:

       

Le maire de la ville doit lancer en janvier un programme visant à construire des camps où seraient logées les personnes violentes ou considérées comme antisociales.

Les opposants à ce projet parlent de «scum villages», des villages pour marginaux.

This “villages pour marginaux” is a decidedly euphemistic translation, of a phrase deliberately provocative, like Sarkozy’s la racaille, or Wilders’ tuigdorpen, which it directly reflects.  

Philological note:   In English, scum (of old Germanic origen) is a very harsh word when applied figuratively, though it is cognate with the much nicer German Schaum ‘froth, foam’ (which figures in the English word meerschaum), and its etymon is the source of the equally frothy French word écume.

A German derivative of Schaum -- Abschaum --  does, however, mean ‘scum’ with all its connotations, and that is what the German press is using, rather than the pseudo-anglicism in the French:

Plan gegen "anti-soziale Bürger" Amsterdam pfercht Unruhestifter in "Abschaum-Dörfer"

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-- Back to Le Figaro :

En janvier, Eberhard van der Laan, le maire travailliste d'Amsterdam, lancera un programme visant à lutter contre les comportements antisociaux. Les familles à problèmes, les personnes violentes... seront réunies dans des conteneurs maritimes basiquement aménagés, rassemblés dans des banlieues, où on leur apprendra «à se comporter».

Now, given the reputation of Amsterdam-the-open-ward, and that of European leftists, one would sooner have imagined such a proposal being launched to quarantine, say, “homophobes” (a weasel-word, but that must wait for another day), rather than the sort of people whom Wilders most prominently has in his sights (immigrant Muslims).  Yet indeed -- I had to read this passage twice, scarce believing my eyes -- such indeed, it would appear, is the actual idea behind this plan!

À ceux qui qualifient ce plan de liberticide, il rappelle qu'il a surtout été lancé afin de protéger les homosexuels, fréquemment victimes de harcèlements. «Nous voulons une société qui les défende», clame-t-il.

An astute reader of Le Figaro  comments:

Il y a un épisode de South Park dans lequel les gens intolérants sont envoyés dans des camps de redressement... on s'en rapproche!

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The article continues:

Si le maire d'Amsterdam a récemment assuré que les coffee shops vendant légalement de la marijuana resteraient ouverts malgré la nouvelle loi contre le «tourisme de la drogue», ce nouveau plan pourrait faire perdre à la capitale hollandaise sa réputation mondiale de «ville de la tolérance».

 

Again we note a linguistic oddity, in the Languages-in-Contact line.  What need has French of the English phrase coffee shop -- we who have, precisely, borrowed the French word café ?!?

A comment by another reader  clarifies the situation -- while introducing yet another pseudo-English borrowed phrase:

Triste situation, qui semble désespérée. Mais nous avons aussi des zones assez comparables, si ce n'est que nous n'avons pas de drogue en libre circulation (pas encore de "coffee shops" ni de "salles de shoot").

In other words:  coffee shop is being used in a quite specific, narrowed, Eurocentric sense, with the sort of naughty aroma that French borrowings into English used to give off. -- As to salles de shoot, it is a part-borrowing, part-loan-translation, cum typical Gallic arbitrary deformation of an English root, just to show who’s boss (despite all evidence to the contrary):  from shooting gallery, in the druggie sense;  in parts of Europe, these are state-sponsored.

Pour nos essais

en langue

la plus châtiée qui soit,

checkez-out   …..

La francophonie, à l'usage du Dauphin

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Once again, several of the Readers’ Responses are worth quoting:

Voilà ce que la Drogue Libre a engendré à Amsterdam. Une population marginale, certes mais nombreuse, de paumés et encombrants et tout-à-fait inaptes dans la société "normale" du travail et capable d'autonomie.

---

Dommage que la Guyane et l'Australie ne soient plus disponibles !

--

pourquoi pas des villages aux iles kerguelen ou en centre afrique

---

Et ils vont construire des miradors autour? comme quoi l'occupation allemande aura laissé des souvenirs et des idées.

---

Nous rejoignons certains films d'anticipation comme New York 1997 ou Banlieue 13....

---

Chez nous, ça existe déjà! Il y en a en périphérie de toutes les grandes villes : ça s'appelle des "Cités", avec le statut juridique de Zone de Non-Droit!

~

[Update 5 November 2014]    Of course, what counts as habitable housing, and who counts as scum, is a relative matter. 

The most inhumanely compressed living-space I ever witnessed, was in undergraduate housing at the University of California at Berkeley.   There was just room enough for a camp bed, and to stand beside it with the door closed, and little else.   The reason this view sticks in my mind is that the student whose misfortune it was to spend his life in that room, was apparently going mad, as he had drawn on the wall, in ink, the outline of his erect penis.

Actually I did live in something just as bad, in the downmarket Sunset district of San Franciscio the summer before I began graduate studies in math at Berkeley:  I lived, literally, in what had been a pantry, just off the kitchen that was now a communal kitchen for everyone who roomed at the dwelling.

Another instance of students pickled and packed like kippers:

Israeli students find affordable housing — in metal boxes

Three years after mass protests against living costs, a student village made of shipping containers rises.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israeli-students-find-affordable-housing-in-shipping-container-apartments/2014/11/03/0349cf5e-5f9a-11e4-9f3a-7e28799e0549_story.html

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