Rorschach Philology

Six years ago, Fox News (and imitators) ran a most ill-founded story in a genre that we may term Allah-sightings.

The underbelly of a plane was streaked, thus:

Mene, mene, tekel  upharsin

Omigosh!  Arabic writing!  Terrorists on the tarmac!  How did they get access to the airplane!!  At whom shall we point the finger of blame!!!

BLUF:  Bogus.  The streaks on the airplane are not writing of any sort, let alone a terrorist message in Arabic.  (Our post on the matter, and on the underlying problem of the semiotic ambiguity of abstract images, can be viewed  here.)

Later, someone imagined that, by tilting your head a certain way, a decorative swipe on a certain brand of sneakers looked rather like … you guessed it,  “Allah”.  Only this time, it hadn’t been placed there by jihadis;  rather, by Islamophobes, since shoes are well-known to be held in low esteem in circum-Mediterranean Islamic lands.  Hullabaloo on social media.  Fortunately that story died before it could become a staple of the jihadi media, else we might have faced further killings such as those that followed the Danish-cartoons scandal.
Here you can read about that episode:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/nike-to-trash-trainers-that-offended-islam-1257776.html

Again:  Bogus. Judge for yourself:

And now we are being told, by such gullible outlets as the BBC and the New York Times, that (in the words of the headline in National Geographic),

    Viking Funeral Clothes Reveal Surprising Arabic Lettering

Namely, once again, that ubiquitous "Allah".  Along with (as a bonus) "Ali", another simple graph that is little more than an extended swoop.
The proper response to such a claim (by a Swedish “textile archaeologist”, not a linguist) is to present the evidence, and weigh it.  But that would be merely one step in the arduous progress of empirical science.  Instead, to pump up their headlines, the media assume the truth of that unproven assertion, reporting the claims in factive mood, as “Why Are These Viking Burial Clothes Inscribed with Arabic Script? “(History) and “Why did Vikings have 'Allah' embroidered into funeral clothes?” (BBC).   At the same level:  Has Eric the Red stopped beating his wife?

What is really going on this that the clothing is decorated with an abstract geometrical blocky design, part of which reminded the textile specialist of something she’d seen somewhere in Arabic script -- specifically, the early variety known as Kufic script -- or rather, a decorative blocky variant of Kufic. 

Now, it is unquestionably the case that Arabic scripts have been used for calligraphy, typically depicting brief Koranic quotations.   Great ingenuity was devoted to some of these, so that the results  in some cases  resembled those Hispanic-American “tags” which only the initiated could make any sense of, or the similarly cryptic Hippie-era posters for San Francisco rock concerts.

Poster for a SF Shiite mosque
known as the “Fillmore West”.
Notice the “Allah” hidden in the picture.

The fabric pattern in question, however, is extremely simple, and likely merely generic.  Thus:

For an example of genuine Kufic-block-script-(influenced) design, cf. this:

And sure, if you select a bit here and a bit there, there is a sort of resemblance -- as there could hardly fail to be  in sketches so schematic.  Actually, even at that, the match is not close, so that the Swedes conceded that, to read the thing as “Allah”, you had to read it in a mirror.   Which would seem to be a sort of Black-Mass version of the holy name, like Satanists chanting the Credo backwards.  Hardly evidence of Islamic influence.

(For many examples of  subjectively-similar or suggestive designs, simply google-image "fret motifs".  You will find  to your surprise  that Islamic influence extended even to the Aztecs and the ancient Greeks!)

[Note btw, that that serious-looking graphic with the mirror and all, is by no means a photo of any part of the actual tattered garments.  Rather, it is an idealization of a piece of the garment, which then in turn is given subjective interpretation.  Thus, there are actually two layers of "Rorschach" here.]

Medieval Islamic abstract decorative designs, whether linguistic-influenced or not, are quite lovely, and have been influential in many sister cultures.    As to whether these Viking funeral garments were directly or indirectly influenced by these, I can have no opinion, not being an art historian.   

Certainly it is within the bounds of historical possibility that there was contact, since the Vikings were great seafarers, and the Arabs  great wayfarers; they intersected, in particular, during the time of the Moors in Spain.  (Raid on Seville, 844 A.D.)

 
But as a student of linguistic sociology, I detect a few clues as to why, despite but a slender stalk of empirical support, this story has legs.  By the same NY Times reporter  (though in this case, she is rather more guarded, having run her rough-draft past some skeptics)  came this recent article:

    A Female Viking Warrior? Tomb Study Yields Clues

[Note:  In the PC Guardian's  article,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/13/viking-burial-clothes-woven-with-allah-unveiled-by-swedish-university

in a picture purporting to show a "re-enactment" of Viking combat, the only warrior with face visible is ... a woman.]

And, even more telling, this spin

   White Supremacists Flustered by Viking Discovery

(Someone bring Steve Bannon his smelling-salts.)

The pattern of journalistic dots, though as sketchy as those on the Viking garments, at least suggests why so empirically underbuttressed a claim  would be embraced for a comforting narrative.

[Footnote for the Arabic-literate]  Even with that mirror-image sleight of hand, there isn’t really a match.  The Viking design shows three horizontal strokes, all of them connected; whereas in Arabic, the initial alif is non-connecting.  And the blob that struck the Swedes as resembling the final hā’  of Allāh  would be upside-down.  So, if the design had been intended to spell Allah, it was a (double) misspelling, and thus blasphemous.

Seeing Allāh in that clothing  is like spotting Orion in a skyful of stars.   And from there to such gormless headlines as “Were some Vikings Muslim?” (National Post), and even speculations as to whether they were indeed Shiites (based upon another supposed sighting of the simple design for "Ali"), is like concluding that the skies proclaim the truth of the Olympic religion.

For a wide-ranging survey of Arabic language and stylistics, check out this:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

[Footnote 19 October 2017]  A day or so after this post went up, another Arabist went up on Twitter to scoff at the Swedish claims, making some of the same points (e.g. about non-connecting alif), but adding a new one based on timelines.  For, whereas Kufic script is ancient, the subvariety of ‘square’ or blocky Kufic, supposedly postdates the Vikings’ floruit by centuries.

A nice idea, but there’s a hitch.  For, the design was constrained by medium in which it was worked (whether made by Vikings, or merely captured by them), a thin strip of stiff fabric:  the weave imposes its own rectilinear preferences.   Just as Babylonian clay tablets virtually dictated the geometry of cuneiform, so this hem would itself bring forth or invent `square Kufic’, pour les besoins de la cause, independent of any prior existence of the style  or imitation thereof.

[Sociopolitical footnote:  It is perhaps no accident that this fond fantasy was emitted out of Sweden.  As is well known, that nation has, in recent years, been wondering whether it has perhaps bitten off rather more than it can chew, so far as imported demographics.  However, it has long been politically impermissible in Sweden to remark publically on the elephant in the room.  So the sparring goes on  in code  and behind cover.] 

Who knew that Vikings were so controversial?  For a quite aggrieved-sounding feminist article from that same drearily reliable Guardian, try this:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/15/how-the-female-viking-warrior-was-written-out-of-history

That article's headline is conclusively proven by a passage in the Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy, where historians of old were caught bwa-ha-ha'ing as they inked out all such records.

~

Appendix on Steganography

A genuine case of a name hidden in designs, is that of the stellar cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, who used to work-in the name of his daughter  NINA (all-caps), in drawing after drawing.  Here is one with the hidden items highlighted:

Notice that, as was the case with the Arabic spelling of Allah and `Ali, the ease with which the name Nina can be secreted away as part of a larger design, is dependent on its simple form;  if his daughter’s name had been Murgatroyd, Hirschfeld would have been out of luck.

After signing his name in a lower corner, he would usually append a small Arabic (Arabic!) numeral, showing the number of times the name was hidden in that particular drawing.  Here, for example, in a (rather cruel) portrait of Katherine Hepburn, we are challenged to find three occurrences:

 

And in this tour de force, the name “NINA” appears no fewer than thirteen thousand times.:

 

Can you spot them all?  Set aside the rest of your life, full-time, to accomplish this necessary task.

 

~

An earlier instance  of steganographic eisegesis:

Ancillary to the great Hollywood witch-hunt, a satellite inquisition in 1951  was mounted against ‘subversive modern art’ at the (old) County Museum in Exposition Park.

A group called Sanity in art  swore they detected maps of secret defense fortifications  sequestered in abstract paintings, and one painter … was accused … of incorporating propaganda in the form of a thinly disguised hammer-and-sickle within a seascape.

-- Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 63

NORAD installation, Cheyenne Mountain (artist’s impression)

For more along these lines, try
=> Rorschach Morphology

 

[Update] XXX-clusive!

Tomb find indicates prehistoric dinosaur may have been Jewish

 [Update 25 II 2018] The latest example   of seeing something that isn't there, and getting the world spun-up:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article201604224.html


 

Does the Administration leak like a sieve?

26 August 1963 -- a very tense day in U.S. relations with South Vietnam:

The Voice Of America practically broadcast the contents of the Top Secret  Saturday cable,  alerting anyone who was listening  that the United States was ready to abandon Diem and Nhu, and back the generals  talking of overthrowing the government.

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 565

Hearing of this, our Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, blew his stack.

Lodge’s anger was directed at the loss of whatever element of surprise there might be in a generals’ coup.  Probably he was deluding himself on that one.  Truck drivers at the tea stalls of Saigon  usually knew more about such things  than the American ambassador.

-- id, p. 566

And in general:

The Pentagon could rip apart any Vietnam policy  with leaks,  true and not so true.
-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 603

Does the President harbor a petty animus against the Press?

American Media and the Kennedy Administration worked hand-in-glove to create the Society-of-the-Spectable image of glamorous Camelot.   Further, even moreso than in the case of the crippled FDR, the media scrupulously hid JFK’s health-problems from the public -- much worse, as he took office, than FDR had at the beginning of his first term:  Had the public been aware of the many physical liabilities they were electing (cf. historian Robert Dallek’s 2002 book, re just how severe these were), that squeaky-close 1960 election might well have broken the other way.

Equally indulgent and gingerly was the media approach to Kennedy’s many flagrant affairs while occupying the Oval Office.   Yet for all that,  they didn’t get a pass from POTUS:

Kennedy … was angry again … He picked up the phone and got Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.  “Did you see that goddamn thing on Huntley-Brinkley?  I thought they were supposed to be our friends.  I want you to do something about that.  You do something about that.”

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 300

(That final implied threat, and its prose style, incidentally recalls that of Mafia dons.)

“The fucking Herald Tribune is at it again,” Kennedy said that morning in an angry telephone call to his press secretary.  Then he canceled the twenty-two Trib subscriptions  that came to the White House each morning.

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 300

(One suspects, incidentally, that that last fit of pique, meant only that some hapless aide would have to drag himself early out of bed each morning, and drive off to a newsstand, to purchase 22 copies.)

The I’s have it (or, ISIS it is)

A couple of years back, when the media was confused about the labels ISIL versus ISIS, I posted a politico-linguistic explanation:

   http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/isil-vs-isis.html

Summary:

(1)  The expert bodies that had been following the group from the start (State Department, IC) used ISIL, where the “L” stands for “Levant”, which is the closest equivalent to the term in the Arabic name for the group,  al-Shâm, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

(2)  Since that is what he’d been hearing from his briefers, that is what President Obama said.

(3)  Possibly by confusion with the name of the goddess Isis, along with the unfamiliarity of the term Levant among the laity, the popular media took to using ISIS, despite the fact that this term singles out only Syria.   (As a sideshow to this, certain conspiracy-minded lo-info voters tried to read some nefarious significance into President Obama’s continued use of the term ISIL, that he and his discussion-mates had been using all along.)

But now we have a new POTUS -- one who, for most (or actually, still all) of his life, has paid more attention to the pop media, than to academia or the State Department.  And he says “ISIS” -- just like they do on TV.

Accordingly -- and gracefully -- government entities have bowed and followed suit:  where previously their briefing-papers used ISIL, now they use ISIS.

The IC thus arrives, by a circuitous route, at exactly the position advocated by The New Yorker a year ago:  to speak “ISIS” with the vulgar, but to maintain an academical-casuistical mental reservation, to the effect that the final “S” stands not for “Syria”, but for… al-Shâm.

 And thus does language evolve.

“Wes Brot ich ess’,  des Lied ich sing’.”

Given recognition at last

[Footnote:  An alternate explanation, that you’ll hear around town,

is that the use of ISIL was nixed because people couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it.  Some IC miscreants were even pronouncing the word to rhyme with pizzle.  (Look it up.)  And this, despite our wise guidance here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/isilisis-update-to-pronunciation-wars.html

Wa-Llahu-a`lamu.]

~

Actually -- there's a bright side to the switchover to “ISIS”:

(1)  That “Levant” business was always a stretch on ISIL’s part.  They never did get a real foothold outside Syria.

(2)  As for any association with the goddess Isis, that’s great:  any depiction of that goddess, ISIL would destroy on principle, so quasi-“naming them” after her  can only annoy them.   (For similar reasons, some people say Da’esh, since ISIL doesn’t like it.)

A propos of nothing at all;  added merely to annoy ISIS

. 

Attack of the Killer Crib-Monitors !!

On the heels of the third Presidential “debate”, there was much hand-wringing and finger-wagging against Trump, for refusing to commit himself in advance to not contesting the election, no matter how it turns out.  Actually no rational candidate should do that -- there is always the possibility of a squeaker, in which the seemingly-losing candidate may demand a recount (most recently and notably in Bush v. Gore).   But additionally, there exists a scenario, unfortunately not science-fictional, in which Hillary  not only would, but should, contest the results, and indeed demand something more thorough-going than a mere recount.

Namely, as the candidate herself maintains (very plausibly):

(1)  Russian state actors hacked the DNC data as well as that of the chairman of her Presidential campaign.

(2)  Putin is said to have it in for Mrs Clinton.

So -- what if a state actor were to hack the vote-count, and throw it to Trump?

When I mentioned this scenario to people at work, they mostly preferred to shrug it off and keep their fingers crossed.  And indeed,  (1) + (2) do not entail that Putin either would, or could, pull of a vote-fraud on that scale.  But the very next morning, two news items caught the world’s attention.

(3) Russia sent its fleet through the English Channel.  As they passed Dover, they trained their guns on England.

(4) A wide variety of very prominent (and, one would imagine, relatively well-defended) Web sites  were -- a thing unprecedented -- simultaneously unreachable.

(3):  Would (Putin is not reticent about flourishing power). 
(4):  Could (rather than attacking such sophisticated well-fortified sites as Amazon and the New York Times, he need only get past the defenses of the clueless retired librarians and what have you  who run the elections in Mississipi et cetera).

As it turns out, the attacks were not quite as concerning as one could have been led to believe by vague early media accounts.   The attackers didn’t manage to hack their way into the sites in question, where they would be in a position to make mischief (say, to order one billion copies of The Art of the Deal with next-day shipping to the Clinton campaign).    Rather, they merely flooded the servers of a somewhat obscure DNS company (one which originated, in Wikipedia’s phrase, as “a community-led student project” at Worcester Polytech), which performs the humble domain-name service for various sites.   By way of comparison:  Anyone can temporarily block access to Fort Knox by burning a semitrailer on the entrance road;  that is quite different from actually breaking in and making away with the gold.   Specifically as applied to electronic vote-counting,  all that a DDOS attack could do would be to disenfranchise that fraction of Alaskan voters (they won’t be missed) and overseas servicemen  who are allowed to vote via the internet;  it wouldn’t change their votes to a different candidate, nor those of non-Internet voters.

Nevertheless, the attack was significant for the novelty of its Denial-of-Service robot army,  relying in large measure on the “Internet of Things” -- “smart” (read: idiot-savant) devices like late-model thermostats and baby-monitors.

"Smart" refrigerator,  plotting evil

Now, I have long been annoyed, in a grumpy curmudgeonly way, with contra-Okhamian appliances and interfaces, that try to do so many things that they perform their core function less well, and have multiple points of failure.   But I had not realized their potential for active lethality, in concert, a sort of globe-girdling zombie army.  So I contacted my old friend  Песец из Канады,  surveying the bedraggled march of history  from his perch in the frozen north:

> As a guy who used to program for limited-memory ROMs serving closed,
> pre-circumscribed-purpose platforms, perhaps you can answer this:   How
> can a single-purpose device like a thermostat  have the capacity to
> store, and then launch upon instruction, malware used for DDOS ??

He replied:

Nowadays, "limited memory" means gigabytes.  It actually costs *more* to make a product that is only capable of doing what it needs to do and is not also a mass-produced general-purpose computer.

For the moment, people still tend to buy products that "connect to the Internet!!!"  As more of these IoT disasters unfold, I expect that eventually people will learn that they must never allow Internet access from any computer whose program they are prohibited from replacing.  First off, "connects to the Internet!" is just a bullet-point on the packaging; manufacturers don't really want to pay what it would actually cost to develop a *secure* product that connects to the Internet.  Second, there are considerable social forces acting on manufacturers to engage in frankly-evil acts -- and one evil act can build upon another, leading to a DDOS attack.

Example: Samsung used to sell a television set that recorded all your voice conversations (for no reason) and sent them to a central server (for no reason) over an Internet connection (that a TV doesn't really need).  It offered a menu item for turning off this behaviour, but the Samsung TV was programmed to lie to its "owner" and claim that it had stopped spying, while actually continuing to do so under orders from its manufacturer.  In a perfect world, Samsung's corporate charter should have been revoked for this.  Instead, TV's are joining thermostats as IoT objects that can be co-opted by terrorists.  Isn't it nice of us to provide them with this free ammunition?

Microsoft's Windows 10 has the same problem -- it spies on you, offers an option to turn off the spying, then continues to do it anyway.  Windows 10 should not be used on any computer connected to the Internet, especially by a person who holds a security clearance from any country.  A computer that has been programmed to accept orders from "our spies" over the Internet is a computer that can be co-opted by "their spies" over the Internet.

GM's "OnStar" vehicles have the same problem: a car that can be remotely shut down by police is a car that can be remotely shut down by an assassin or a terrorist.  Wouldn't it be interesting to find out if it's technically possible to convince all the GM-branded cars on the Beltway to simultaneously shut off their brakes and steering while travelling at highway speeds?

Speaking of computers inexplicably connected to the Internet, *why* do American e-voting machines have Internet connections?  The only obvious reason to do that would be to allow the government to disclaim the result of an election that doesn't go their way: the American people didn't *really* vote for Donald Trump, that was just the Russians hacking our voting machines because they're evil demons who do evil things for no reason -- after we give them the necessary tools for no reason.  How dare the Russians "interfere" with our election by publishing the emails that Hillary insisted on letting them have!  And why is it that we are preparing for cyberwar against Russia, when it always seems to be China conducting cyberwar against the USA?  That's like invading Iraq because some Saudi dissidents based in Afghanistan attacked New York City.

I'm voting for Stein.  Thankfully, I will not have to move to Canada after the election.

That assertion about Windows 10 was startling.  I did not wish to post anything so denigrating about the LOVELY, PEACEABLE, TOTALLY NON-LITIGIOUS ALL-POWERFUL MEGA-ENTITY MICROSOFT (who can crush poor bloggers like a bug) without some supporting footnotes, which my correspondent kindly supplied:

http://www.howtogeek.com/273513/why-you-shouldnt-use-anti-spying-tools-for-windows-10/
    "You can’t fully disable telemetry on Home or Professional editions of Windows 10...  If you have a major philosophical problem with the fact that Windows 10 doesn’t let you avoid non-security updates or disable telemetry, don’t try to fix it. Instead, just switch to another operating system, like Linux..."

http://www.disclose.tv/news/the_extent_of_windows_10_spying_software_is_revealed/127799
    A more alarmist article, claiming that even buying the Enterprise edition of Windows 10 still won't stop all the spying.

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/70037/windows-10-keylogger
    Windows 10 keeps copies of everything you type and sends them to Microsoft's servers.  There is a button to turn this off, but Microsoft keeps sending out updates that turn it back on -- and you are not permitted to turn off those updates.

Those assertions are disputed elsewhere, e.g

http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-microsoft-is-not-spying-on-you-with-windows-10/

The dispute is way above the pay-grade of this peaceful, penguin-loving site, and we take no stand on the matter.

Wholesome penguins, lacking Internet access,
don’t worry about any of this

~

Miscellaneous musings:

(1)  In the case of weaponizable appliances, we are faced with a double-bladed Tragedy of the Commons.   It is simply not in the interests of the various cost-cutting Asian-tiger gadget manufacturers to add in security (which in any even would be swiftly obsoleted;  and nobody’s going to pay for ongoing anti-zombie tech-support for Net-connected blenders and toasters).  Nor does the individual consumer particularly care (save in so far as heroically public-minded) whether his electr(on)ic toothbruth or Web-connected hamburgerbun sesameseed-applicator  was out on the town last night, ravaging Reddit (though they do seem a bit hung-over this morning).

(2)  When the DNC hack was pinned on Putin, pundits wondered aloud (or rather, aprint) whether we should retaliate by deploying our own cyberattack tools.  That was ill-considered.

(a) First, sanctions, to have any point, must be publically announced -- a tariff, an embargo, a finger-wagging on the New York Times editorial page, or what not.   The virtue of cyber tools is that they can be used stealthily and (with luck) deniably -- exactly the wrong scenario here.

(b) Cyberwar is serious business, and its means stand on the forefront of (secret) research.  You want to minimize exposure of your tools until they are needed to be deployed for real, and not just as a petulant gesture.

To retaliate against Putin (or anyone else), you select that arrow from your quiver that best meets the case; you don’t limit yourself to mimicking his moves, doing exactly what he did (as the lex talionis enjoined).

Which raises the question:  In Friday’s attack, cui prodest?   On the face of it, nothing positive was accomplished, just a few hours of snail-slow connection times.   And the attackers lost the element of surprise as regards a next such attack:  defenders now know that, in estimating the power of the next DDOS attack, they must reckon-in the gadget-bot army.    But it might have been worth it to the attacker, to see how vulnerable a crucial node like a DNS would be.   The sally would thus be the cybernetic equivalent of a ferret flight.

(3)  From a conspiratorial standpoint, the beauty part is:  it is not even necessary actually to manage to hack the vote -- merely providing plausible reasons for people to imagine you might have, poisons national confidence.   Cf. the ridiculous episode of the Nigerian Underwear Bomber, who failed to bring down the plane he was riding on, managing only to boil his balls:  still, AQAP rejoiced, since it was enough to get TSA’s knickers in a twist.   Already burdensome security become more burdensome still -- though unlike the case of the Shoe Bomber, the incident did not lead to the targeting of a specific garment -- no Skivvies Inspections at the airports as yet.

[Update 28 October 2016]  And now, sailing in from left field, the bizarre carom-shot off  Anthony Weiner’s computer, announced today  out of nowhere  by a po-faced FBI director, somehow supposed to link up with the  in principle unrelated Hillary-computer-emails brouhaha.  Nothing substantive yet, nor will there be (he conceded) until after the election;  as Trump said recently in another connection, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”  (As a mysterywriter, I would hesitate to concoct so far-fetched a plot;  but reality recks not verisimilitude.)

Thus, it is not only Trump voters who have reason to question the legitimacy of this electoral season.

Note, though, that anyone maintaining that the timing of the announcement was calculated to maximize the damage to Mrs Clinton, should consider the fact that it was made at the least sensitive time in the news-cycle, Friday afternoon, the hours at which any business or administration prefers to release embarrassing news.

Marine on the “fuite en avant”

Today’s New York Times published an op-ed  notable in two respects:   One, it is written by the head of a conservative/populist group  normally marginalized by the goodthink media (here, the Front National;  similarly AfD, UKIP, FPÖ, Swedish Democrats, etc.), Marine Le Pen.  Two -- remarkably -- it is offered (along with a translation) in the original French:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/opinion/marine-le-pen-apres-le-brexit-le-printemps-des-peuples-est-inevitable.html

[Onomastic/orthoëpic note:   The surname Le Pen  is not pronounced by dropping the -n and nasalizing the preceding vowel.   The vowel is oral, the nasal fully sounded:  rhyming with reine, saine, pleine, and other nice words.]

And within her essay, she uses a favorite phrase that we elucidated earlier -- “fuite en avant”.  Here we find it in its natural habitat:

Une chose est certaine : le départ de la Grande Bretagne ne rendra pas l’Union européenne plus démocratique. La structure hiérarchique des institutions supranationales va souhaiter se renforcer car comme toutes les idéologies mourantes, l’Union européenne ne connaît que la fuite en avant.

(So far that prediction has proved true, with the incredibly bullying responses by Juncker and by Ayrault.)

The Times translated that  thus:

Like all dying ideologies, the union knows only how to forge blindly ahead.

For the full treatment of “fuite en avant”, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/06/phrase-of-day-fuite-en-avant.html

~

[Sprachpolitische Bemerkung]  The Times’ language stunt was a novelty and a courtesy;  it was not an illustration of the absurd meme that has suddenly sprung up (like weeds at the spot where a bear has pooped) in the columns of uncritical journalists, to the effect that “the English language may be endangered” owing to the proposed Brexit!   Umm… Neither the USA, nor Canada, nor Australia, nor New Zealand, nor for that matter India or the other countries that use English as an official language, nor those many countries (e.g. Hungary, Poland, …) whose only hope of conversing with Joe Random Citizen (from Eritrea or Japan or wherever), are members of the EU, and English is flourishing.   It does so purely democratically, by practical free choice.    The fact that certain Eurocrats and their mouthpieces are muttering about disenfranchising the language, shows simply the authoritarian pettiness that led to widespread disgust with Brussels in the first place.