Vocabulary > Language

Illustration: Noma Bar

Letters

Sounding out our literacy problem

The Guardian        p. 35

Saturday December 3, 2005
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,11032,1656775,00.html
 

letter        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/us/12Y.html

letter > British Post Office
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/06/ian-jack-post-office-stamps

letter writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/09/etiquette-letter-writing-dear-sir

printing letters
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/oct/17/type-letters-typefaces-simon-garfield

letterpress
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/oct/17/type-letters-typefaces-simon-garfield

typefaces
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/oct/17/type-letters-typefaces-simon-garfield

Doyald Young        1926-2011
logotype designer and teacher whose three monographs on letterforms and alphabets,
including the provocatively titled “Dangerous Curves,”
reintroduced classical design principles to designers
at a time when inelegant lettering was in vogue
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/arts/design/07young.html

typography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/typography

Paul Stiff        1949-2011
typographer and teacher
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/06/paul-stiff-obituary

literacy

linguistics
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/linguistics

language
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/asylumseekers/story/0,7991,1068119,00.html

this is very strong language

dying language > centuries-old Ayapaneco tongue > Nuumte Oote
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/13/mexico-language-ayapaneco-dying-out

English language
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/31/nicholas-ostler-my-bright-idea

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Johnson was an English writer and critic,
and one of the most famous literary figures of the 18th century.
His best-known work is his 'Dictionary of the English Language'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/johnson_samuel.shtml

USA > dispute over English being the national language        2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-19-english-immigration_x.htm

 conlanger - a person who constructs new languages        2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/arts/television/in-game-of-thrones-a-language-to-make-the-world-feel-real.html

Galeic
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,5500,1314735,00.html

body language
http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSN2332448820071130

sign language
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/signlanguage/4697554/Sign-language-week-37.html

plain English
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/adam-davidson-european-finance.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2008/dec/10/plain-english-letters
http://society.guardian.co.uk/glossary/story/0,11811,671488,00.html

Plain English Campaign
Campaigning against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/

gobbledygook
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/technology/business-computing/12pc.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/glossary/story/0,11811,671488,00.html
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/gobble.htm

Gobbledygook of the week        3 March - 7 March 2008
"By aggregating a range of public and commercial datasets,
including global addressing and Directory Enquiries,
voter databases, commercial data and documentation
including dates of birth, and voice-based verification solutions,
192.com Business Services delivers
the most comprehensive global online ID verification solution available. "

pigeon English

broken English

bad language

foul language / rude language

dirty words
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/washington/18scotus.html

vulgarity
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/washington/18scotus.html

vulgar speech
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/washington/18scotus.html

expletive
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/washington/18scotus.html

utter an expletive
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Joe-McCain-911.html

profanity
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2289072,00.html

curse

swear

Clip joint: swearing and insults
let's get profoundly profane with the best curse-filled film gobbets on the web
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/feb/12/clip-joint-swearing

profane
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/us/09milblogs.html

offensive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/poll/2009/jan/14/prince-charles-prince-harry

derogatory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/poll/2009/jan/14/prince-charles-prince-harry

grammar
http://money.guardian.co.uk/workweekly/story/0,,2093240,00.html
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/after-deadline/

grammar and usage        USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/english_language/grammar/index.html

The New York Times > After deadline > Favorite Grammar Gaffes: Who/Whom Confusion
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/for-whom-the-bell-tolls/

The New York Times > After deadline > cliché
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/cliche-watch-business-edition/

The New York Times > After deadline > split-infinitives
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/more-faqs-on-style/
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/to-boldly-go/

The New York Times > After deadline > overstuffed sentences
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/overstuffed-sentences/
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/simplify-simplify/

The New York Times > After deadline > Metaphor Trouble
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/metaphor-trouble/

The New York Times > After deadline > Words We Love Too Much
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/words-we-love-too-much/

The New York Times > After deadline > When Spell-Check Can’t Help
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/when-spell-check-cant-help/

The New York Times > After deadline > Ill-Fitting Phrases
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/trouble-in-parallel/

The New York Times > After deadline > Describing ethnicity
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/hispanic-latino-or-what/

The New York Times > After deadline > Tangled Passages
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/tangled-passages-2/

The New York Times > After deadline > Tangled Passages > Period
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/tangled-passages-4/

The New York Times > After deadline > Quiz
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/red-pencils-ready-3/
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/red-pencils-ready-2/

The New York Times > After deadline > Misplaced phrases
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/prepositions-on-the-loose/

The New York Times > After deadline > Using words precisely > Missing the nuance
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/missing-the-nuance/

The New York Times > After deadline > Save the Subjunctive!
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/save-the-subjunctive/

The New York Times > After deadline > Prepositional phrases
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/location-is-crucial/

The New York Times > After deadline > Colloquialisms and slang
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/kids-moms-n-stuff/

The New York Times > After deadline > Colons, Dashes and Trouble / punctuation problems
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/colons-dashes-and-trouble/

The New York Times > After deadline > More Weary Words
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/more-weary-words/

The New York Times > After deadline > Murky Passages
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/murky-passages/

The New York Times > After deadline > Subject, Meet Verb
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/subject-meet-verb-2/

 The New York Times > After Deadline Quiz
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/red-pencils-ready-5/

The New York Times > After deadline > Ambiguous antecedents and dangling modifiers
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/loose-connections-2/

The New York Times > After deadline > Spelling Check
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/spelling-check/

The New York Times > After deadline > When Spell-Check Can’t Help
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/when-spell-check-cant-help-4/

The New York Times > After deadline > What Readers Expect
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/the-little-things-2/

The New York Times > After deadline > A Bit About ‘That’
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/a-bit-about-that/

The New York Times > After deadline > Colloquialisms
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/news-not-chatter/

The New York Times > After deadline > The Trouble With ‘Like’
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/the-trouble-with-like/

The New York Times > After deadline > Parallel Problems
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/parallel-problems/

The New York Times > After deadline > Number trouble / Tripping over singular and plural
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/number-trouble-2/

The New York Times > After deadline > Bright passages / Sparkling prose
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/bright-passages-4/
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/bright-passages-5/

The New York Times > After deadline > The Chitchat Patrol / Slang and colloquialisms
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/the-chitchat-patrol-2/

The New York Times > After deadline > Phrases We Love Too Much
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/phrases-we-love-too-much-2/

The New York Times > After deadline > Bright Passages / Sparkling prose
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/bright-passages-8/

The New York Times > After deadline > Subject, Meet Verb
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/subject-meet-verb-3/

The New York Times > After deadline > Some proofreading tips culled from years of journalism tip sheets
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/the-readers-lament/
 

humor

joke
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/nov/19/telling-jokes-comedy-standup

crack a joke

funny

punch line
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/us/politics/15humor.html

double entendre

tongue-in-cheek

The Guardian        Work        p. 1

2.6.2007

weblish

weblish abbrevations (CYA, gr8, luv, want2tlk)

speak

management speak

elderspeak        2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/us/07aging.html?hp

1984 > newspeak
http://www.ecoglobe.org.nz/ecostory/newspeak.htm

doublespeak / double-speak

Cheneyspeak
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0623-02.htm

articulate

write

the lost art of letter writing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/17/sue-perkins-letter-writing

accent
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/04/6

twang
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/04/6

tell

say

talk

talk

careless talk
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/alice_miles/article4339416.ece

blabbermouth
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/technology/22lost.html

mean

meaning

euphemism

semantics
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/robert-fisk-semantics-cant-mask-bushs-chicanery-808171.html

semantic
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16pubed.html

texting

text message

sentence

The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented (...)
by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y.
His book, published in 1847, was called
“A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified
According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/a-picture-of-language/

clause

syntax

phrase
http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/phrases-we-love-too-much-2/
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/palin-defends-use-of-blood-libel-phrase/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/nyregion/11slogan.html

phrase finder
http://www.phrases.org.uk/index.html

catchphrase
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/27/aleksandr-meerkat-collins-dictionary

set phrases

rant
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/oliver_miles/2006/08/gwot_another_lookingglass_war.html

dictionary

Dictionary of American Regional English
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/books/dictionary-of-american-regional-english-reaches-last-volume.html

online dictionary
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1374741,00.html
http://www.collins.co.uk/wordexchange/

entry

slang

jargon
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/5011843/Swat-the-bureacrats-swarm-of-buzz-words.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1592169,00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/queensspeech2004/story/0,15521,1357696,00.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,7843,381528,00.html

drivel

glossary
http://society.guardian.co.uk/glossary/0,11637,646397,00.html

lingo

rhetoric
http://www.guardian.co.uk/greatspeeches/story/0,,2062495,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/greatspeeches/story/0,,2062480,00.html

speech
http://www.guardian.co.uk/greatspeeches/0,,2056516,00.html

coin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/quiz/2009/sep/24/referenceandlanguages
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1264167,00.html

newly coined, or revived, words and phrases

phrase

native tongue

sharp tongue
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29judge.html

slip of the tongue

tongue-in-cheek

verbal slip-up
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/movies/24loop.html

irony
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/13/law-press-and-publishing-elton-john-libel-guardian

humour
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1891583,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1584632,00.html

innuendo
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/sep/08/michael-billington-critics-notebook
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/29/shopping-and-fcuking-inuendo
http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,1876724,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1584632,00.html

pun
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1584632,00.html

double entendre

Bushisms
http://www.guardian.co.uk/quiz/questions/0,5961,387782,00.html

spell

spelling
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1353871,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/quiz/questions/0,5957,1303707,00.html

 Scripps National Spelling Bee        USA
http://spellingbee.com/

dyslexia
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-upside-of-dyslexia.html

Andy Singer

NO EXIT

Cagle

30 December 2008

polite

politeness

condescendingly
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/l12elderly.html

demeaning, condescending appellations
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/l12elderly.html

address someone in a patronizing way
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/l12elderly.html

skulduggery
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2008/dec/03/rsc-theatre-hamlet-david-tennant-skull

serendipity
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2008/jun/30/whitereadandstephenssouthb

polymath
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/world/europe/20obrien-conor-cruise.html

Athhilezar? Watch Your Fantasy World Language

December 11, 2011
The New York Times
By AMY CHOZICK

At his best friend’s wedding reception on the California coast, David J. Peterson stood to deliver his toast as best man. He held his Champagne glass high and shouted “Hajas!” The 50 guests raised their glasses and chanted “Hajas!” in unison.

The word, which means “be strong” and is pronounced “hah-DZHAS,” has great significance for Mr. Peterson. He invented it, along with 3,250 other words (and counting), in the language he created for the HBO fantasy series “Game of Thrones,” called Dothraki.

Some people build model railroads or re-enact Civil War battles; Mr. Peterson, a 30-year-old who studied linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, is a “conlanger,” a person who constructs new languages. Until recently, this mostly quixotic linguistic pursuit, born out of a passion for words and grammatical structures, lived on little-visited Web sites or in college dissertations.

Today, a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations.

In “Game of Thrones,” Dothraki-speaking characters greet each other by saying “M’athchomaroon!” (hello) give each other commands like “Azzohi haz khogare” (put down that cask) and occasionally utter sentiments like “Vezh fin saja rhaesheseres vo zigereo adoroon shiqethi!” (the stallion that mounts the world has no need for iron chairs!) that don’t seem to make sense in any language. And this being an HBO show, there’s also a fair bit of “athhilezar” (sex).

“The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over,” said Paul R. Frommer, professor emeritus of clinical management communication at the University of Southern California who created Na’vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in “Avatar.” Disney recently hired Mr. Frommer to develop a Martian language called Barsoomian for “John Carter,” a science-fiction movie to arrive in March.

The shift is slowly transforming the obscure hobby of language construction into a viable, albeit rare, career and engaging followers of fantasies like “Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones” and “Avatar” on a more fanatical level.

At “Game of Thrones” viewing parties in San Francisco, fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. Last October, a group of Na’vi speakers from half a dozen countries convened in Sonoma County, Calif., for a gathering known as “Teach the Teachers.” Mr. Frommer gave attendants tips on grammar and vocabulary and fielded any questions they had about the language. The rural, wooded setting felt “almost like being on Pandora,” he said. At a question-and-answer session in July that he participated in, at least a dozen attendants rattled off their questions in fluent Na’vi.

“There’s been a sea change in Hollywood. They realize there’s a fan base out there that wants constructed languages,” said Matt Pearson, a linguistics professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He created Thhtmaa (pronounced tukhh-t’-mah), the language of termite-like aliens in the short-lived NBC series “Dark Skies.”

“Game of Thrones,” based on the best-selling series of novels “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin, may be the biggest television showcase for an invented language. The books, which primarily follow feuding kingdoms in the fictional land of Westeros, had a scattering of Dothraki words, but the show’s executive producers wanted a fully formed language.

Several scenes in the first season of “Game of Thrones” take place entirely in Dothraki with English subtitles. In one episode the shirtless tribal leader Khal Drogo delivered a monologue for two and a half minutes in Dothraki, with its subject-verb-object structure and no copula, or linking verb.

There have been many attempts to create languages, often for specific political effect. In the 1870s, a Polish doctor invented Esperanto, meant to be a simplified international language that would bring world peace. Suzette Haden Elgin created Láaden as a language better suited for expressing women’s points of view. (Láaden has a word, “bala,” that means “I’m angry for a reason but nothing can be done about it.”)

But none of the hundreds of languages created for social reasons developed as ardent a following as those created for movies, television and books, says Arika Okrent, author of “In the Land of Invented Languages.”

“For years people have been trying to engineer better languages and haven’t succeeded as well as the current era of language for entertainment sake alone,” Ms. Okrent said.

The motivation to learn an auxiliary language is not so different from why people pick up French or Italian, she said. “Learning a language, even a natural language, is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It’s about belonging to a group,” she said.

Richard Littauer, a 23-year-old linguistics graduate student at the Saarland University in Germany, maintains Dothraki.org, complete with an English-Dothraki dictionary and grammar guidelines. “I was raised watching Pocahontas speak fluent English,” Mr. Littauer said. “Linguistic diversity is one of the main ways you feel like you’re in a new culture.”

The watershed moment for invented languages was the creation of a Klingon language by the linguist Marc Okrand for “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” (on the original “Star Trek” television series, Klingons spoke mostly English). That led to a Klingon Language Institute (a registered nonprofit), a Klingon version of Monopoly, an official dictionary and a published translation of “Hamlet.” (The Klingon race does not worship in the traditional sense, so instead of Hamlet going to pray, he goes to do calisthenics.)

Klingon, with its throaty, harsh sound, is notoriously tough to pick up. Even the creator has problems. (“I’ll admit, I’m not a very good speaker,” Mr. Okrand said in an interview.) Fewer than 20 people are fully fluent in Klingon, he estimated, though thousands more know enough to get by.

In 2007, Mr. Peterson helped found the Language Creation Society, the first professional organization for people who create languages. He won an open call to create a language for “Game of Thrones.” He submitted a 180-page proposal complete with a dictionary and audio files of spoken Dothraki judged by a double-blind committee of other language creators and finally, by the executive producers. It’s not the first language Mr. Peterson has come up with. Before Dothraki, he invented 12 others. His personal favorites: Zhyler, inspired loosely by Turkish, and Kamakawi, which nods toward Hawaiian.

Dothraki came with its own challenges. Mr. Martin’s books described the Dothraki people as nomadic warriors who live in grass fields and survive mostly on horsemeat.

“First you say, should this word exist at all?” Mr. Peterson said. He decided that the Dothraki, with their long braids, or “jahaki,” wouldn’t have a word for toilet, cellphone or even book since that implies they have a printing press. The Dothraki do however have more than 14 words for horse (including “hrazefishi” for a teeny-tiny horse).

Next, Mr. Peterson tried to establish words that would be native and basic (meaning they are not derived from another Dothraki word), toying with letter combinations and sounds he liked. His favorite sound is “JH” as in “genre,” so he made the word for man in Dothraki mahrazh.

“I said to myself, if I won the right to coin the word “man,” it better be cool,” Mr. Peterson said.

After he amassed a small vocabulary, Mr. Peterson tested out basic grammar. He adored the 18 noun classes in Swahili and the negative verb forms in Estonian, both influences in his created languages. He scribbled sample sentences and added suffixes and prefixes to expand the vocabulary.

He aims to eventually expand Dothraki to around 10,000 words — or about the equivalent of college-level foreign language proficiency. In addition to the Dothraki site, there is an official Na’vi grammar guide run in part by William Annis, a 42-year-old who works in information technology in Madison, Wis. He occasionally consults with Mr. Frommer, Na’vi’s creator.

But as with any language, there is a certain snob appeal built in. Among Dothraki, Na’vi and Klingon speakers, a divide has grown between fans who master the language as a linguistic challenge, and those who pick up a few phrases because they love the mythology.

“There are the language nerds, who just find grammar interesting, and the Na’vi folks, who paint themselves blue and go to conventions,” Mr. Annis said.

    Athhilezar? Watch Your Fantasy World Language, NYT, 11.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/arts/television/
    in-game-of-thrones-a-language-to-make-the-world-feel-real.html

William Safire,

Political Columnist and Oracle of Language,

Dies at 79

September 28, 2009
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Martin Tolchin, a friend of the family.

There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: There was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

He was a college dropout and proud of it, a public relations go-getter who set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow, and a White House wordsmith in the tumultuous era of war in Vietnam, Nixon’s visit to China and the gathering storm of the Watergate scandal, which drove the president from office.

Then, from 1973 to 2005, Mr. Safire wrote his twice-weekly “Essay” for the Op-Ed page of The Times, a forceful conservative voice in the liberal chorus. Unlike most Washington columnists who offer judgments with Olympian detachment, Mr. Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay.

Critics initially dismissed him as an apologist for the disgraced Nixon coterie. But he won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and for 32 years tenaciously attacked and defended foreign and domestic policies, and the foibles, of seven administrations. Along the way, he incurred enmity and admiration, and made a lot of powerful people squirm.

Mr. Safire also wrote four novels, including “Full Disclosure” (Doubleday, 1977), a best-seller about succession issues after a president is blinded in an assassination attempt, and nonfiction that included “The New Language of Politics” (Random House, 1968), and “Before the Fall” (Doubleday, 1975), a memoir of his White House years.

And from 1979 until earlier this month, he wrote “On Language,” a New York Times Magazine column that explored written and oral trends, plumbed the origins and meanings of words and phrases, and drew a devoted following, including a stable of correspondents he called his Lexicographic Irregulars.

The columns, many collected in books, made him an unofficial arbiter of usage and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

Behind the fun, readers said, was a talented linguist with an addiction to alliterative allusions. There was a consensus, too, that his Op-Ed essays, mostly written in Washington and syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, were the work of a sophisticated analyst with voluminous contacts and insights into the way things worked in Washington.

Mr. Safire called himself a pundit — the word, with its implication of self-appointed expertise, might have been coined for him — and his politics “libertarian conservative,” which he defined as individual freedom and minimal government. He denounced the Bush administration’s U.S.A. Patriot Act as an intrusion on civil liberties, for example, but supported the war in Iraq.

He was hardly the image of a button-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

His last Op-Ed column was “Never Retire.” He then became chairman of the Dana Foundation, which supports research in neuroscience, immunology and brain disorders. In 2005, he testified at a Senate hearing in favor of a law to shield reporters from prosecutors’ demands to disclose sources and other information. In 2006, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush. From 1995 to 2004, he was a member of the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes.

William Safir was born on Dec. 17, 1929, in New York City, the youngest of three sons of Oliver C. and Ida Panish Safir. (The “e” was added to clarify pronunciation.) He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and attended Syracuse University, but quit after his second year in 1949 to take a job with Tex McCrary, a columnist for The New York Herald Tribune who hosted radio and television shows; the young legman interviewed Mae West and other celebrities.

In 1951, Mr. Safire was a correspondent for WNBC-TV in Europe and the Middle East, and jumped into politics in 1952 by organizing an Eisenhower-for-President rally at Madison Square Garden. He was in the Army from 1952 to 1954, and for a time was a reporter for the Armed Forces Network in Europe. In Naples he interviewed both Ingrid Bergman and Lucky Luciano within a few hours of each other.

In 1959, working in public relations, he was in Moscow to promote an American products exhibition and managed to steer Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev into the “kitchen debate” on capitalism versus communism. He took the photograph that became an icon of the encounter. Nixon was delighted, and hired Mr. Safire for his 1960 campaign for the presidency against John F. Kennedy.

Starting his own public relations firm in 1961, Mr. Safire worked in Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s 1964 presidential race and on John V. Lindsay’s 1965 campaign for mayor of New York. Mr. Safire also wrote his first book, “The Relations Explosion” (Macmillan, 1963).

In 1962, he married the former Helene Belmar Julius, a model, pianist and jewelry designer. The couple had two children, Mark and Annabel. His wife and children survive him, as does a granddaughter, Lily Safire.

In 1968, he sold his agency, became a special assistant to President Nixon and joined a White House speechwriting team that included Patrick J. Buchanan and Raymond K. Price Jr. Mr. Safire wrote many of Nixon’s speeches on the economy and Vietnam, and in 1970 coined the “nattering nabobs” and “hysterical hypochondriacs” phrases for Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.

After Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of The Times, hired Mr. Safire, one critic said it was like setting a hawk loose among doves. As Watergate broke, Mr. Safire supported Nixon, but retreated somewhat after learning that he, like others in the White House, had been secretly taped.

Mr. Safire won his Pulitzer Prize for columns that accused President Jimmy Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance, of shady financial dealings. Mr. Lance resigned, but was acquitted in a trial. He then befriended his accuser.

Years later, Mr. Safire called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar” in print. Mrs. Clinton said she was offended only for her mother’s sake. But a White House aide said that Bill Clinton, “if he were not the president, would have delivered a more forceful response on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.”

Mr. Safire was delighted, especially with the proper use of the conditional.

    William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79, NYT, 28.9.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/us/28safire.html

Some 'Longitude' for Speller No. 1 at National Bee

May 27, 2009
Filed at 9:02 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- With a touch of geography, the oral rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee are under way.

Thirteen-year-old Lindsey Zimmer of Notasulga, Ala., stepped to the microphone early Wednesday morning as speller No. 1. The eighth-grader who likes to play the flute correctly spelled the word ''longitude.''

A record 293 spellers -- including one from China -- are taking part in the 82nd annual bee, which culminates with a nationally televised finish Thursday night. The winner gets more than $40,000 in cash and prizes.

The competition began Tuesday, when all the spellers took a written test. The scores from that test will be combined with the results from the oral rounds Wednesday morning to determine who advances.

------

On the Net:

Scripps National Spelling Bee: http://spellingbee.com/

    Some 'Longitude' for Speller No. 1 at National Bee, NYT, 27.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/27/us/AP-US-Spelling-Bee.html

Shorter and sweeter

The kind of acronyms that have spiced up our language
are something Victorians sorely missed

Monday 6 April 2009
The Guardian
David McKie
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.01 BST on Monday 6 April 2009.
It appeared in the Guardian on Monday 6 April 2009 on p25 of the Comment & debate section.
It was last updated at 00.12 BST on Monday 6 April 2009.

This newspaper had a feature on Saturday on "the problem with G20 Wags".

How ever did we survive all those years without the acronym Wags? - short for wives and girlfriends, though in the case of G20 all the women were guaranteed wives. We rarely know who invented any acronym, but in this case we probably do: a writer named Niamh Bugler is credited with having invented the term in 2004, two years before it started to swamp the media in England's doomed football World Cup campaign of 2006, in a process that one dictionary calls acronymania. Some websites claim to list 4m or more of these creatures, but many do not deserve the title of acronym, which the Chambers dictionary defines as "a word formed from the initial letters of other words, as radar", and Collins as a word of this kind that must be pronounceable. So BBC is not an acronym; nor is MI5 - or G20.

We do know when the term itself was invented - in 1943, by a researcher at Bell Laboratories who wanted a word to describe the short-form name they had given to their Sound Navigation and Ranging System: Sonar. The world of warfare was full of the terms: Radar, Pluto, Salt, Awol (Absent Without Leave), Snafu (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up). But some peaceable sectors of life also adore them. The financial word is littered with Peps and Isas, as well as institutions like Gatt and taxes like VAT. Scuba (for underwater diving) and Laser are acronyms too.

They're a raging addiction in amateur theatre, where sometimes companies call themselves by names that others may not regard as alluring. The Clare Amateur Dramatic Society, Suffolk, is happy to be known as Cads, a fate its counterpart in Claygate, Surrey, has avoided by calling itself the Claygate Dramatic Society. The Biggleswade Amateur Theatrical Society is glad to be Bats, and the Tipton Operatic And Dramatic Society is proud to call itself Toads. Medicine is fond of these practices too, displaying an ingenuity that ranges from Aids to the clever, but ultimately disqualifiable, Caduceus for Committee Advocating Development and Use of Chymopapain to Eliminate Unnecessary back Surgery.

The remarkable spread of the acronym though the later years of the last century and into this one is all the more surprising in the light of its very thin previous history. Perhaps the happiest and most ingenious of the breed dates from the reign of Charles II, when some of his lieutenants constituted a political sub-group whose members were Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale. The initial letters of their names happily constituted the word "cabal", which with even greater serendipity had a slightly sinister echo of the word cabbala (a secret mystical tradition of Jewish rabbis uncovering hidden meanings in the Bible.)

One might have thought that with such an example before them the Britain of subsequent years would have hit on many more such ingenious formulas. Yet even the famously ingenious Victorians failed to follow this lead. The 19th century swarmed with well-meaning societies. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; the Society for the Improvement of the Labouring Classes; the Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing-Boys in Cleansing Chimneys; the Society for Bettering the Conditions and Increasing the Comfort of the Poor; the Association for the Aid and Benefit of Dressmakers and Milliners - founded after a 20-year-old woman died at the end of a 26-hour shift; and my own particular favourite, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which the celebrated wit Sydney Smith said should have been called the Society for Suppressing the Vice of Persons Whose Income Does Not Exceed £500 per annum. There was, it is true, a Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, but it never, I think, asked to be known as Spew. By inserting an "immediate" before "rescue" and an "ostensibly" before "not yet", the Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence could have arrived at the catchy title of Sirbonycaco. But somehow, nobody spotted it.

Once you've started to note the proliferation of acronyms, there's a tendency to suspect that one of these beasts may be lurking behind quite ordinary words. Leg: Locomotion Enabling Gadget. Hat: Head Adornment Technology. And Acronym? Artifice for the Compacted Reduction of Names Yawningly Multisyllabic, perhaps. But I'm sure Niamh Bugler could come up with something much niftier than that.

    Shorter and sweeter, G, 6.4.2009,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/06/british-acronyms-wags

Op-Ed Contributors

The I’s Have It

February 24, 2009
The New York Times
By PATRICIA T. O’CONNER and STEWART KELLERMAN

WHEN President Obama speaks before Congress and the nation tonight, he will be facing some of his toughest critics.

Grammar junkies.

Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using “I” instead of “me” in phrases like “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “the main disagreement with John and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.”

The rule here, according to conventional wisdom, is that we use “I” as a subject and “me” as an object, whether the pronoun appears by itself or in a twosome. Thus every “I” in those quotes ought to be a “me.”

So should the president go stand in a corner of the Oval Office (if he can find one) and contemplate the error of his ways? Not so fast.

For centuries, it was perfectly acceptable to use either “I” or “me” as the object of a verb or preposition, especially after “and.” Literature is full of examples. Here’s Shakespeare, in “The Merchant of Venice”: “All debts are cleared between you and I.” And here’s Lord Byron, complaining to his half-sister about the English town of Southwell, “which, between you and I, I wish was swallowed up by an earthquake, provided my eloquent mother was not in it.”

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that language mavens began kvetching about “I” and “me.” The first kvetch cited in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage came from a commencement address in 1846. In 1869, Richard Meade Bache included it in his book “Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech.”

Why did these 19th-century wordies insist “I” is “I” and “me” is “me”? They were probably influenced by Latin, with its rigid treatment of subject and object pronouns. For whatever reason, their approach stuck — at least in the rule books.

Then, why do so many scofflaws keep using “I” instead of “me”? Perhaps it’s because they were scolded as children for saying things like “Me want candy” instead of “I want candy,” so they began to think “I” was somehow more socially acceptable. Or maybe it’s because they were admonished against “it’s me.” Anybody who’s had “it is I” drummed into his head is likely to avoid “me” on principle, even when it’s right. The term for this linguistic phenomenon is “hypercorrection.”

A related crime that Mr. Obama stands accused of is using “myself” to dodge the “I”-versus-“me” issue, as when he spoke last November of “a substantive conversation between myself and the president.” The standard practice here is to use “myself” for emphasis or to refer to the speaker (“I’ll do it myself”), not merely as a substitute for “me.” But some language authorities accept a looser usage, and point out that “myself” has been regularly used in place of “me” since Anglo-Saxon days.

Our 44th president isn’t the first occupant of the White House to suffer from pronounitis. Nos. 43 and 42 were similarly afflicted. The symptoms: “for Laura and I,” “invited Hillary and I,” and so on. (For the record, Nos. 41 and 40 had no problem with the objective case, regularly using “Barbara and me” or “Nancy and me” when appropriate.)

But an educated speaker is expected to keep his pronouns in line. Here, then, is a tip, Mr. President. Nobody chooses the wrong pronoun when it’s standing on its own. If you’re tempted to say “for Michelle and I” in tonight’s speech, just mentally omit Michelle (sorry, Mrs. Obama), and you’ll get it right. And no one will get on your case.

Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman are the authors

of the forthcoming “Origins of the Specious:

Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.”

    The I’s Have It, NYT, 24.2.2009,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24oconner.html

Its Native Tongue Facing Extinction,

Arapaho Tribe Teaches the Young

October 17, 2008
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

RIVERTON, Wyo. — At 69, her eyes soft and creased with age, Alvena Oldman remembers how the teachers at St. Stephens boarding school on the Wind River Reservation would strike students with rulers if they dared to talk in their native Arapaho language.

“We were afraid to speak it,” she said. “We knew we would be punished.”

More than a half-century later, only about 200 Arapaho speakers are still alive, and tribal leaders at Wind River, Wyoming’s only Indian reservation, fear their language will not survive. As part of an intensifying effort to save that language, this tribe of 8,791, known as the Northern Arapaho, recently opened a new school where students will be taught in Arapaho. Elders and educators say they hope it will create a new generation of native speakers.

“This is a race against the clock, and we’re in the 59th minute of the last hour,” said a National Indian Education Association board member, Ryan Wilson, whom the tribe hired as a consultant to help get the school off the ground. Like other tribes, the Northern Arapaho have suffered from the legacy of Indian boarding institutions, established by the federal government in the late 1800s to “Americanize” Native American children. It was at such schools that teachers instilled the “kill the Indian, save the man” philosophy, young boys had their traditional braids shorn, and students were forbidden to speak tribal languages.

The discipline of those days was drummed into an entire generation of Northern Arapaho, and most tribal members never passed down the language. Of all the remaining fluent speakers, none are younger than 55.

That is what tribal leaders hope to change. About 22 children from pre-kindergarten through first grade started classes at the school — a rectangular one-story structure with a fresh coat of white paint and the words Hinono’ Eitiino’ Oowu’ (translation: Arapaho Language Lodge) written across its siding.

Here, set against an endless stretch of windswept plains and tufts of cottonwoods, instructors are using a curriculum based on one used at the Wyoming Indian Elementary School to teach students exclusively in Arapaho. All costs related to the school, which has an operating budget of $340,000 a year, are paid for by the tribe and private donors. Administrators plan to add a grade each year until it comprises pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade classes.

“This environment is a complete reversal of what occurs too often in schools, where a child is ridiculed or reprimanded for speaking one’s heritage language,” said Inée Y. Slaughter, executive director of the Indigenous Language Institute, a group in Santa Fe, N.M., that works with tribes on native languages.

“I want my son to talk nothing but Arapaho to me and my grandparents,” said Kayla Howling Buffalo, who enrolled her 4-year-old son, RyLee, in the school.

Ms. Howling Buffalo, 25, said she, too, had been inspired to take Arapaho classes because her grandmother no longer has anyone to speak with and fears she is losing her first language.

Such sentiments are not uncommon on the reservation and have become more pronounced in the five years since Helen Cedar Tree, at 96 the oldest living Northern Arapaho, made an impassioned plea to the tribe’s council of elders.

“She said: ‘Look at all of you guys talking English, and you know your own language. It’s like the white man has conquered us,’ ” said Gerald Redman Sr., the chairman of the council of elders. “It was a wake-up call.”

A group of Arapaho families had sent their children to a pre-kindergarten language program for years, but it was not enough. Heeding Ms. Cedar Tree’s words, the tribe began using Arapaho dictionaries, night classes, CDs made by the tribe, and anything they could find to help resuscitate the language. In the end, “we knew in our hearts that immersion was the only way we were going to turn this around,” said Mr. Wilson, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe.

He was referring not just to the potential for the Arapaho language’s extinction but to a host of other problems that have long plagued the vast reservation, which the tribe shares with the Eastern Shoshone.

“Language-immersion schools offer an environment that goes beyond teaching the language,” Ms. Slaughter said. “It provides a safe place where a child’s roots are nurtured, its culture honored, and its being valued.”

According to tribal statistics and the United States Attorney’s Office in Wyoming, 78 percent of household heads on the reservation are unemployed, the student dropout rate is 52 percent and crime has been rising.

Most recently, in June, three teenage girls were found dead in a low-income housing complex. The F.B.I. has not yet released autopsy results, but many tribal members think drugs or alcohol were involved. The deaths left the reservation reeling. Officials here hope that the school will herald a positive change, just as programs elsewhere have helped native youth become conversational in their tribal languages, enhancing cultural pride and participation in the process. A groundswell of language revitalization efforts has led to successful Indian immersion schools in Montana and New York.

Studies show that language fluency among young Indians is tied to overall academic achievement, and experts say such learning can have other positive effects.

“Language seems to be a healing force for Native American communities,” said Ellen Lutz, executive director of Cultural Survival, a group based in Cambridge, Mass., that is working with the Northern Arapaho. At a recent ceremony to celebrate the school’s opening, held in an old tribal meeting hall, three young girls sang shyly in Arapaho. Behind them, a row of elders sat quietly, their faces wizened and stoic, legs shuffling rhythmically as familiar words carried through the building.

“They are the ones who whispered it on the playground when nobody was looking,” Mr. Wilson said, referring to the elders. “If we lose that language, we lose who we are.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 20, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about a new school in Wyoming that will teach students in Arapaho in hope of preserving the language described similar schools in Hawaii incorrectly. They are native Hawaiian language schools; they are not Indian immersion schools like ones in Wyoming, Montana and New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 23, 2008
An article on Friday about a new school in Wyoming that will teach students in Arapaho in hopes of preserving the language referred incorrectly to the school’s curriculum. The curriculum, which will be taught in the Arapaho language, is based on a curriculum used at the Wyoming Indian Elementary School, a public school that teaches its students in English and adheres to Wyoming state education standards. The state did not specifically approve an Arapaho curriculum for the new school.

        Its Native Tongue Facing Extinction, Arapaho Tribe Teaches the Young, NYT, 17.10.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/us/17arapaho.html

Watch the body language at next job interview

Fri Nov 30, 2007
10:14am EST
Reuters
By Vivianne Rodrigues

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tilt your head to the right side in a job interview and you may get the job. Tilt it to the left side and you may end up getting ... a date.

People who tilt the head to the right while talking to someone can appear more trustworthy, according to body language expert Tonya Reiman. In turn, a slight tilt to the left is seen as a sign of attractiveness and desirability.

Such nonverbal cues are subtle but have a dramatic impact on the way people are perceived, Reiman writes in her first book "The Power of Body Language" (Pocket Books, $25). The book offers advice on how to become aware of those messages and use them in the boardroom as well as the bar.

"Most people are completely unaware of what their bodies are telling others, and how it ends up influencing their careers and love lives," Reiman told Reuters in an interview.

According to Reiman, about 90 percent of our interpersonal communication is nonverbal. How bodies move, what expressions a face makes, how fast one speaks, and even where we sit in a business meeting, send messages far more convincing than any words spoken.

The problem, she said, is that many people have conditioned themselves not to pay attention to such signals, labeling them as unreliable, irrational or just superficial.

As a result, according to the book, "we end up getting duped, swindled, jilted, misled."

For starters, Reiman recommends readers pay special attention to the most common and usually the first form of physical contact between strangers: the handshake.

The handshake is one of the most critical opportunities to establish rapport and may be as crucial for job applicants as a strong resume, Reiman said.

Her book lists no less than 12 "wrong" ways to shake hands including the submissive handshake, the overly affectionate, the sweaty, the forward lean, but none as dreaded and as dreadful as the limp handshake.

"The limp handshake feels like you're holding a lump of room-temperature chicken," she said.

The right way that will work with any person in any situation, according to Reiman, is to go toward the person, lean slightly forward, look them in the eye, extend the right hand and simultaneously introduce yourself. The whole handshake should not last more than two to three seconds.

The book moves forward to more "advanced" lessons, such as how to manipulate perceptions of your status with different sitting positions in a meeting that go beyond the traditional head-of-the-table spot. And even where to place your desk in an office in order to avoid a virtual downgrade in rank.

Reiman writes that once while working for a Fortune 500 company, her desk was moved from the middle cubicle in a row of three to the end of the row. In her new spot, people would constantly stop by her desk and interrupt with random and administrative questions."

"By shifting my desk a mere eight feet, I'd gone from being a mid-level professional to an administrative assistant," she wrote.

While you may not be able to determine your place at the next desk reorganization in the office, Reiman says some of the worst body language flaws in the corporate arena are easily fixed: Getting into others' personal space, slumping onto a chair instead of sitting up straight, not enough or too much eye contact, looking angry, adjusting clothes during the interview, or perhaps, a woman adjusting her panty hose.

And what about that head tilt?

"If you are going for a job in accounting, law, medicine, or another field bound by a strict code of ethics, tilt your head to the right," she said. "Trying to become America's next top model? Tilt to the left."

(Editing by Eddie Evans)

    Watch the body language at next job interview, R, 30.11.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSN2332448820071130


 

A revolution in teaching

promises the solution to dyslexia

Published: 13 November 2007
The Independent
By Richard Garner, Education Editor
 

A ground-breaking project which has had extraordinary success in helping hundreds of dyslexic children and others struggling to read and write at primary school is poised for a major expansion across Britain.

Springboard for Children, an education charity which now has the enthusiastic backing of the British Dyslexia Association, has achieved a 90 per cent success rate in returning children with severe literacy problems to mainstream classrooms. The revolutionary scheme is being used in a dozen schools in Manchester and London, and the plan is now to set the scheme up in 10 other inner-city areas – bringing a lifeline to around 10,000 children suffering from dyslexia and other difficulties with reading and writing.

Experts say there would be no shortage of volunteers for the programme, with estimates putting the number of dyslexic pupils in state schools at more than 300,000. In addition, national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds show around 120,000 youngsters a year leave primary school failing to reach the required standard in English. A recent survey by the National Union of Teachers showed the majority of teachers (77 per cent) believe they are not well enough trained to teach dyslexic pupils.

The secret of the scheme's success is getting immediate help to youngsters once a reading problem is identified in their first term in primary school. Pupils helped by the unit are normally selected by their schools by the end of their first term.

Dyslexia is thought to be neurological in origin although there is also growing evidence of a genetic link. Tens of thousands of parents have only realised that their child may suffer from the condition when he or she falls behind in school. The Springboard project, which has also transformed the reading and writing skills of non-dyslexic children suffering severe literacy problems, relies on intense one-on-one tuition for up to two years, during which a host of innovative techniques are employed to improve the child's skills.

Volunteers are recruited to read and work with the children. Springboard also uses a mixture of games and quizzes as well as reading to children to encourage a love of learning among the pupils it helps.

In one session, children take part in a card game – matching up the names of animals and objects on a dozen cards with those on a tray. If they get them all right, the tray flips over to form a perfect pattern.

It works because pupils like eight-year-old Rachel Lomas, who has dyslexia, finally get a sense of joy from reading if they succeed in making the pattern after years of frustration and anguish in the classroom, experiencing at last a sense of progress.

The most startling success has been achieved in Oliver Goldsmith primary school in Peckham, south London – which serves one of the most deprived inner city areas in the country – and was once on the "hit list" of failing schools compiled by Ofsted, the education watchdog.

The scheme was launched by a local resident, Jane Hastings, who had become concerned about literacy problems in the area and volunteered to teach at the school. The school's pupils come mainly from a tough council estate nearby.

The school, which has 530 pupils, was in "special measures" – the phrase used to describe those that have failed their inspection, but has now been taken off the list. In their latest report on Oliver Goldsmith, inspectors concluded: "The school has improved considerably since the last inspection."

One of the reasons for the success story has been the setting up of the Springboard unit in the school – which now provides a guaranteed 70 hours of one-to-one reading a year for 75 pupils singled out by the school as being in need of special help.

Inspectors said of the unit: "Pupils respond well to the support given by the Springboard charity which provides help in English and enjoy working in classes and individually."

Mark Parsons, the school's headteacher, said: "It has made a significant contribution to enabling us to improve educational standards and come off special measures." Volunteers on the project now receive extensive training and it is assisted by the British Dyslexia Association.

Springboard for Children is now launching a fund-raising drive to spread its work to other inner city schools – called the "10/10" campaign because it aims to start the project in 10 more cities within the next 10 years.

Brian Basham, a former journalist and management PR consultant who has worked to improve resources for dyslexic pupils for years, is spearheading the funding drive. He himself suffered from dyslexia while at school – a condition which many teachers did not recognise at that time. He is planning to approach leading city institutions for financial support within the next few months.

Springboard already receives financial aid from a variety of trusts and charities – including some set up by businesses including HSBC in the Community and the Company of Actuaries Charitable Trust Fund.

In a document outlining its plans for expansion, the charity says: "Children develop peer group awareness at around age eight. It then becomes progressively more difficult for them to learn almost anything that will help them make their way in the world and hugely more expensive to provide teaching and support."

The end result of failure, Springboard for Children argues, can be seen in prisons where 70 per cent of offenders are functionally illiterate. Children who are functionally illiterate, it adds "stand a great risk of failing to gain decent employment and of drifting into a life of poverty, anger against their lot in life, addiction, crime, imprisonment and social alienation".

According to Janet Bristow, education director of the charity, referrals can be made for a number of reasons. "Most of our schools have seen improved standards," she said. "Ten years ago it was just in three schools. Now it is in 12.

"Children come and ask us if they can join. There is no social stigma attached to coming to the unit – as might have been the case in the past with some provision for those struggling to read".

The scheme that strips away fear and stigma

Eight-year-old Rachel Lomas's natural inclination is to read and write words backwards – a symptom of her dyslexia.

She was selected for the Springboard unit at her school, Oliver Goldsmiths primary in Peckham, south London, for specialist help.

Rachel is slightly older than the average pupil at the unit – but her tutor, Claire Collins, is in no doubt that it has been able to help her to catch up on her reading and writing skills.

She receives two hours of one-to-one tuition a week. She most enjoys the use of games to stimulate her interest in learning.

She is given 12 cards with the names of animals or objects which she then has to marry with 12 different images on a tray – and is asked by her tutor to spell out the name of the image that she is placing on the tray.

If she gets all 12 correct, she can flip the tray over and find a perfect pattern has been formed. If any of her answers are incorrect, then she can try again until she does form the perfect pattern.

The scheme strips away the fear and stigma, to the extent that children at the unit are proud enough of their achievements to have their photographs taken while learning in it.

    A revolution in teaching promises the solution to dyslexia, I, 13.11.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/education/education_news/article3155062.ece

Regions of Dying Languages Named

September 18, 2007
Filed at 2:44 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to.

Native Australian Charlie Mangulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction.

From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America -- Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia -- as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

''When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.''

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.

That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.

Harrison is associate director of the Living Tongues Institute based in Salem, Ore. He and institute director Gregory D.S. Anderson analyzed the top regions for disappearing languages.

Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.

The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new generation of speakers. He said the institute worked with local communities and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the endangered language.

Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people. Languages are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.

The hot spots listed at Tuesday's briefing:

-- Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages, in part because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers. Researchers have documented such small language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, the three Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker of Amurdag.

-- Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia -- 113 languages. The area has extremely high diversity, very little documentation and several immediate threats. Small and socially less-valued indigenous languages are being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant indigenous languages in most of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.

-- Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the states of Washington and Oregon in the U.S., 54 languages. Every language in the American part of this hotspot is endangered or moribund, meaning the youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon.

-- Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan -- 23 languages. Government policies in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages and, as a result, some have only a few elderly speakers.

-- Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico -- 40 languages. Oklahoma has one of the highest densities of indigenous languages in the United States. A moribund language of the area is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world. As of 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were fluent.

The research is funded by the Australian government, U.S. National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society and grants from foundations.

-----

On the Net:

www.languagehotspots.org

www.livingtongues.org

www.nationalgeographic.com/enduringvoices

    Regions of Dying Languages Named, NYT, 18.9.2007,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Endangered-Languages.html

A Language to Air News of America to the World

July 31, 2006
The New York Times
By HOLLI CHMELA

WASHINGTON, July 29 — Voice of America, the government-sponsored news organization that has been on the air since 1942, broadcasts in 44 different languages — 45 if you count Special English.

Special English was developed nearly 50 years ago as a radio experiment to spread American news and cultural information to people outside the United States who have no knowledge of English or whose knowledge is limited.

Using a 1,500-word vocabulary and short, simple phrases without the idioms and clichés of colloquial English, broadcasters speak at about two-thirds the speed of conversational English. But far from sounding like a record played at the wrong speed, Special English is a complicated skill that takes months of training with a professional voice coach who teaches how to breathe properly and enunciate clearly.

Mario Ritter, a Special English writer and producer, arrived at Voice of America five years ago with many years of experience. Mr. Ritter has been training for six months to be a Special English broadcaster. In August, he said, he will be ready to go on the air live.

“It’s kind of ironic that I normally speak slowly, but it doesn’t give me a leg up in being a Special English broadcaster,” Mr. Ritter said.

Shelley Gollust is chief of Special English at Voice of America. “People in this country have likely never heard of Special English,” Ms. Gollust said, “and, if they have, they often don’t understand the significance of it to people in other countries. They hear it and make fun of how slow it is.”

A 1948 law prohibits Voice of America from broadcasting in the United States, but audio and text files of Special English are on the Voice of America Web site, www.voanews.com/specialenglish.

Students and teachers in other countries say Special English is a good learning tool. “I like that the program is based on 1,500 words,” Sarah Paulsworth said in an e-mail message from Azerbaijan, where she works as a journalist and a volunteer English teacher. “It is a very tangible goal for students. I can literally see some of my students counting the words they know.”

A vocabulary of 1,500 words is adequate for news reporting, but for features and biographies, more words are allowed if they are explained in the context of the sentence.

Words can be added or dropped from the vocabulary. “Sabotage,” a word used often in the World War II era, may be dropped because it is rarely used in news stories today.

Jim Huang Jiwen, a 69-year-old mechanical engineer from Hangzhou, China, said he had listened to Special English on the radio for more than 20 years and, more recently, on the Internet. He said it had helped him improve his ability to write and understand English.

“The pronunciation is beautiful, the sentence is sweet and short, and the content is interesting and friendly to our daily life,” he said in an e-mail message, adding that he particularly liked technical programs.

François Rennaud, 56, a teacher at a vocational school in Paris, has found Special English useful in his business and economics classes. “It closes the gap between textbook English and traditional broadcasts such as BBC or CNN, which are too difficult for the average student,” Mr. Rennaud said.

A Special English editor at Voice of America, Avi Arditti, said: “There is a fine line between simplifying and simplification. It’s not so much simplifying, but clarification. Simplifying can seem somewhat demeaning. You’re not dumbing it down, but you’re making it understandable to your audience whether they have Ph.D.’s or are in middle school.”

But some listeners, like Ali Asqar Khandan, 36, an assistant professor from Tehran, said Special English seemed like “a special program for advertising American life and culture, not a simple radio station for broadcasting news or teaching English.”

“We hear this message everywhere: not even in education reports and culture reports, but in science reports and agriculture reports,” Mr. Khandan wrote in an e-mail message.

The link between learning English and learning about America has been a constant thread in the debate in Congress this year about revising immigration policy.

But at home, the Special English branch at Voice of America would support the use of its programming for recent immigrants in a bilingual model if the law did not prohibit it.

“If new immigrants could turn on their radios at 8 o’clock and listen to a half-hour of Special English to listen to the news, it would be very beneficial,” Ms. Gollust said.

Mr. Ritter added, “That would be a great use of a resource that already exists.”

    A Language to Air News of America to the World, NYT, 31.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/washington/31voice.html

Soldiers’ Words May Test PBS Language Rules

July 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH JENSEN

The PBS documentarian Ken Burns has been working for six years on “The War,” a soldier’s-eye view of World War II, and those who have seen parts of the 14-plus hours say they are replete with salty language appropriate to discussions of the horrors of war.

What viewers will see and hear when the series is broadcast in September 2007 is an open question.

A new Public Broadcasting Service policy that went into effect immediately when it was issued on May 31 requires producers whose shows are broadcast before 10 p.m. to adhere to tough editing requirements when it comes to coarse language, to comply with tightened rulings on broadcast indecency by the Federal Communications Commission.

Most notably, PBS’s deputy counsel, Paul Greco, wrote in a memo to stations, it is no longer enough simply to bleep out offensive words audibly when the camera shows a full view of the speaker’s mouth. From now on, the on-camera speaker’s mouth must also be obscured by a digital masking process, a solution that PBS producers have called cartoonish and clumsy.

In addition, profanities expressed in compound words must be audibly bleeped in their entirety so that viewers cannot decipher the words. In the past, PBS required producers to bleep only the offensive part of the compound word.

Since May 31, bits of dialogue have been digitally obscured about 100 times in four PBS programs, most often in two episodes of the music documentary “The Blues.”

Mr. Burns, in an interview, said he was not worried that his work, which he called a “very experiential take on the Second World War,” would be affected by the policy, noting that while the series includes some “very graphic violence,” there are just two profanities, read off camera.

But several other senior public broadcasting executives said “The War” was likely to become a test case for PBS and the F.C.C.

The series includes language for which the F.C.C. has previously issued fines, said a PBS spokeswoman, Lea Sloan. “At this point, the only thing we can do, and fit the guidelines as they are laid out, is to make sure the series airs after 10 p.m,” outside the F.C.C.’s “safe harbor” zone of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., when children are most likely to be watching, Ms. Sloan said.

Mr. Burns, perhaps best known for his prize-winning series “The Civil War,” insisted that “The War” would be shown in the preferred time slot of 8 p.m. He said he was “flabbergasted” that F.C.C. policy was being applied to documentaries, particularly when President Bush himself was inadvertently heard using vulgar language, broadcast on some cable newscasts, at the recent Group of Eight summit meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia.

He added that he hoped PBS and public television stations could unite and “stand our ground” in opposing the self-censorship sought by F.C.C. policy, but he noted that “we’ve also experienced as a family the devastating consequences, and it is not something that any station or any executive wants to see repeated.”

In March, the PBS station KCSM in San Mateo, Calif., was fined $15,000 over profanities in “The Blues.” That fine is being appealed.

Ms. Sloan said PBS had to institute the policy after successive F.C.C. rulings steadily narrowed what is permissible. Moreover, legislation signed into law last month by President Bush increased by a factor of 10 the fines for broadcast indecency, to $325,000 a station for each instance.

That was “a real deal breaker,” Ms. Sloan said. “For many of our stations, a single fine of that magnitude would put them into bankruptcy.”

PBS plans to ask the F.C.C. to re-examine its policies regarding documentary programming. “We believe that there is a place for documentary filmmaking that uses language in context,” Ms. Sloan said.

The F.C.C. declined to comment. An F.C.C. official, who did not want to be named because the issue is the subject of litigation, noted that “there aren’t any cases where the commission has fined a broadcaster when an obscenity has been inaudible” but not digitally obscured, adding that “the commission’s analysis always takes context into account.”

Margaret Drain, the vice president for national programs at WGBH in Boston, said her station was already examining how it would probably have to edit references to sexual activities in a coming “Masterpiece Theater” production, “Casanova.”

She said that while she understands how PBS arrived at its policy for documentaries, the station might not adhere to it for series like “Frontline” and “The American Experience,” particularly when tackling war topics where strong language reflects reality.

“The decisions we make in the future, to pixelate or not, may put us in the position of negotiating with or telling PBS about our position,” she said.

Ms. Sloan of PBS said, “This is an unhappy situation for all of us and we’re very concerned about the situation,” but added that producers are required to submit F.C.C.-compliant material.

In mid-June, shortly after the PBS edict, “Frontline” scheduled a last-minute rebroadcast of an episode on the Iraqi insurgency and digitally obscured the mouth of a soldier. Ms. Drain said that the same decision might not be made today, “now that we’ve had time to absorb everything.”

Producers are in a difficult position, she said. “What we’re trying to do is do our work and bring the same kind of high-quality broadcast programs to the public. We don’t want to overreact, and we don’t want to self-censor.”

As for “The War,” Ms. Drain called it “the perfect test case for the F.C.C., because who’s going to take on veterans of this country who put their lives at risk for an honest, just cause?”

“It’s not pornographic; it’s not scatological,” she said. “It’s an emotional expression of a reality they experienced, and it’s part of the historical record.”

    Soldiers’ Words May Test PBS Language Rules, NYT, 22.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/arts/television/22pbs.html

Long-Scorned in Maine, French Has Renaissance

June 4, 2006
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

SOUTH FREEPORT, Me. — Frederick Levesque was just a child in Old Town, Me., when teachers told him to become Fred Bishop, changing his name to its English translation to conceal that he was French-American.

Cleo Ouellette's school in Frenchville made her write "I will not speak French" over and over if she uttered so much as a "oui" or "non" — and rewarded students with extra recess if they ratted out French-speaking classmates.

And Howard Paradis, a teacher in Madawaska forced to reprimand French-speaking students, made the painful decision not to teach French to his own children. "I wasn't going to put my kids through that," Mr. Paradis said. "If you wanted to get ahead you had to speak English."

That was Maine in the 1950's and 1960's, and the stigma of being French-American reverberated for decades afterward. But now, le Français fait une rentrée — French is making a comeback.

The State Legislature began holding an annual French-American Day four years ago, with legislative business and the Pledge of Allegiance done in French and "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung with French and English verses.

Maine elected its first openly French-American congressman, Michael H. Michaud, in 2002. And Gov. John E. Baldacci has steadily increased commerce with French-speaking countries and led a trade delegation to France last fall, one of the first since tension with France began after the Sept. 11 attacks. In an interview, the governor, who is of Lebanese-Italian descent and studied Russian in high school, added, "I've been working on my French."

The Franco-American Heritage Center, opened in Lewiston a few years ago, fines guests at its luncheons up to a dollar if they lapse into English — jovial retaliation for the schools that once gave students movie tickets or no homework if they squealed on French speakers.

"Reacquisition classes" and conversation groups have sprung up at places like the South Portland Public Library, giving people a chance to relearn their mothballed French. Census figures show Maine has a greater proportion of people speaking French at home than any other state — about 5.3 percent.

And in South Freeport, there is L'École Française du Maine, a French-immersion program that began as a preschool in 2001 and proved so popular it has added a grade each year. Many students have French-American parents who were estranged from the language, and some commute long distances to the school.

"My dad grew up speaking only French and went to school and got teased by other kids, and he wanted to spare his kids that experience, so both my wife and I are kind of a generation that got skipped," said Bob Michaud, whose son, Alexandre, attends second grade at L'École Française, 45 minutes from home. "I'm doing it because I want Alex to learn more about our heritage and background."

The school has made Anna Bilodeau, 8, and her brother Markus, 7, so fluent that they routinely speak French with their grandmother Arlene Bilodeau, 68, who regrets that she did not ensure her own children were well versed in French.

"It made me feel sad — this was our language," Ms. Bilodeau said. "When I hear Anna and Markus speaking, I just admire what they're doing."

People of French descent poured into Maine and other New England states from Canada beginning in the 1870's and became the backbone of textile mills and shoe factories. But resistance developed, and people began stereotyping the newcomers as rednecks, dolts or inadequate patriots. In 1919, Maine passed a law requiring schools to teach in English.

French-Americans had a saying: "Qui perd sa langue, perd sa foi" ("Who loses his language, loses his faith"). But many assimilated or limited their children's exposure to French to avoid discrimination or because of a now-outmoded belief that erasing French would make learning English easier.

"There was just a stigma that maybe you weren't as bright as anybody else, that you didn't speak English as well," said Linda Wagner, 53, of Lewiston, who takes classes to reclaim language lost as a child.

Suzanne Bourassa Woodward, 46, of South Portland, who recently joined a conversation group and enrolled her 10-year-old daughter in French classes, said "my French went underground" in fourth grade because "I was ridiculed, the dumb Frenchman jokes came out."

"After that," she said, "my parents would always speak to me in French, but I always responded in English."

As recently as the early 1990's, a character named Frenchie, who caricatured French-Americans, was a fixture on a Maine radio show until protests drove him off the air.

The stigma was compounded by the French-American dialect, which can differ from French spoken in France in idiom, pronunciation, vocabulary — like British and American English.

French-American French, derived from people who left France for Canada centuries ago, resembles the French of Louis XIV more than the modern Parisian variety, said Yvon Labbé, director of the French-American Center at the University of Southern Maine.

French-Americans may say "chassis" instead of "fenêtre" for window, "char" instead of "voiture" for car. Mr. Labbé said many French-Americans pronounced "moi" as Molière did: "moé." A saying illustrated French-Americans' inferiority complex about their language: "On est né pour être petit pain; on ne peut pas s'attendre à la boulangerie" ("We are born to be little breads; we cannot expect the bakery").

"We were always told that we spoke bad French, that we were worthless as people because we spoke neither French nor English," said Ms. Ouelette, 69.

Indeed, when Jim Bishop, son of Fred Bishop (né Frederick Levesque), took high school and college classes to recapture French "it was just a nightmare," he said. "At times I would say words and they would turn out not to be real words."

Maine's French renaissance is partly due to the collapse of the mills and factories, which put French-Americans into the mainstream. It was aided by a group of legislators who in 2002 began holding weekly meetings in French.

The revival includes both French-American patois and culture, celebrated at places like the Lewiston center, and Parisian language and curriculum, taught at L'École Française. The government of France is also involved, seeing "very big potential" to "develop trade relations, tourism," said Alexis Berthier, a spokesman for the French consulate in Boston, which is promoting programs and events in Maine and working to establish sister cities.

Most Maine schools, like those elsewhere, teach considerably more Spanish than French. But for those like Norman Marquis of Old Orchard Beach, who takes reacquisition classes, the resurgence of his lost language is profound.

"It's almost like I found religion," said Mr. Marquis, 68, suddenly choking with emotion. "My religion, No. 1, was French. I have a personal movement in my heart for it."

Ariel Sabar contributed reporting from Augusta, Me., for this article.

    Long-Scorned in Maine, French Has Renaissance, NYT, 4.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/04french.html

White House Memo

With a Few Humble Words,

Bush Silences His Texas Swagger

May 27, 2006
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, May 26 — What happened to the Texas swagger?

Maybe it went the way of his poll numbers. Maybe this is a newly reflective President Bush. Or maybe the first lady had her say.

Whatever the case, when Mr. Bush said at a news conference on Thursday night that he regretted some personal mistakes, like declaring "bring 'em on" in 2003, he seemed a little like the chastened husband who finally admitted he had done something wrong. Whether it worked or not depends on whom you ask.

"Sad day in Crawford, they're hanging their heads," said William J. Bennett, the former education secretary and conservative radio talk show host. Mr. Bennett said many of his listeners expressed dismay at what they considered Mr. Bush's groveling.

"One of the attractive things about the president is that he talks Texas," Mr. Bennett continued. "But what broke my heart is when he said, 'I need to be more sophisticated.' What is this, Kerry talk? Is he going to use 'elan' the next time he speaks?"

Hold on a minute, said Kenneth M. Duberstein, President Ronald Reagan's last chief of staff. "The country loves mea culpas from the president," Mr. Duberstein said. "It makes them human. This is part and parcel of the influence of Josh — making sure you don't go out there and thumb your nose at the entire world."

"Josh" is Joshua B. Bolten, the new White House chief of staff, who was reared inside the Beltway, educated at Princeton and has never uttered a Texas colloquialism that anyone has heard.

Mr. Bush's Texas twang intensifies and recedes depending on the setting. But he has always prided himself on being plain spoken. When it comes to military and national security, he made the heaviest use of Texas talk in the first term, initially after the Sept. 11 attacks and then after the Iraq invasion.

On Sept. 15, 2001, Mr. Bush declared that he would go after the perpetrators of the World Trade Center attack and "smoke them out of their holes." On Sept. 17, 2001, Mr. Bush declared that he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." On July 2, 2003, Mr. Bush taunted militants attacking American forces in Iraq with "bring 'em on."

White House officials have defended his Texas talk as the kind of plain-spoken language Americans like to hear, but Laura Bush has at times tried to rein him in. In a widely reported comment at the time, Mrs. Bush sidled up to her husband after he said he wanted Mr. bin Laden "dead or alive" and asked, "Bushie, are you gonna git 'im?"

On Thursday, in response to a question about what he thought was his biggest mistake, Mr. Bush termed his words "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people." He added that "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner" and that "in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted."

White House officials would not say Thursday whether Mr. Bush's response had been planned, but they did say they had prepared for the question. In fact, they have prepared for the question ever since John Dickerson, then of Time magazine, asked Mr. Bush at a news conference in April 2004 if he could name the biggest mistake he had made, and Mr. Bush, struggling, said nothing popped into his head.

But Mr. Bush's comments were his most personal so far about mistakes he has made, and they mirrored, friends said, his private conversations.

"What he did last night, which was obviously thought out, was the most complete public expression of what's happened," said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire Republican with ties to the White House. "Anybody who has seen him talk about it privately has seen that he's been consumed with this for three years."

Others were less impressed and said Mr. Bush had made far worse mistakes. "If there were decisive mistakes, these were not them," said Paul Burka, senior executive editor of Texas Monthly, who closely followed Mr. Bush when he was Texas governor. "It's easy to say that he was popping off. But then you get to issues like should the Iraqi army have been disbanded, did Bremer know what he was doing?"

But Mr. Burka, who was referring to L. Paul Bremer III, the former top American civilian administrator in Iraq, said Mr. Bush's Texas talk was popular in the state.

"I don't think he ever had a self-reflective moment in Texas," Mr. Burka said. "And let me tell you, even worse, we liked it that way."

    With a Few Humble Words, Bush Silences His Texas Swagger, NYT, 27.5.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/washington/27lingo.html

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