Learning the Lingo
In a few months, give or take, I will begin my new job as site manager/linguist liaison in Iraq. Where in Iraq? I’m not quite sure of that yet, but if one of the first items they issue me is a Kevlar umbrella, I am assuming I will be in an area that could best be described as, um, “in transition,” which is New Military Posi-Speak for “enemy territory.”
New Military Posi-Speak is the lingo that changed the terms “threat condition” or THREATCON, to “force protection condition” or FPCON…which doesn’t roll nearly as trippingly off the tongue as THREATCON, but does sound a lot less threatening. Or force-protectioning, as the case may be.
Posi-Speak is short for “positive-sounding speaking.” It’s how we got from “shell shock” in World War I – the war to end all wars which unfortunately did not actually end all wars – to “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” from the current unpleasantness. I guess the military figures that if you are spending all your time trying to pronounce all those extra syllables, the condition doesn’t sound quite as threatening…oops, I mean “force protectioning.”
Guy #1: “Hey, how’d you like to get shell-shocked?”
Guy #2: “Uh, no thanks.”
Guy #1: “OK then, how about we go get Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?”
Guy #2: “Uh, I don’t know, sure, why not? It doesn’t cost too much, does it?”
Of course, I am an old hand at New Military Posi-Speak, having done a hitch in the Air Force and countless years supporting the forces in a civilian capacity. It doesn’t surprise me at all to see that wars have become “police actions” or “conflicts,” that “casualties” is a nicer way of saying “wounded”, “shot” or “dead,” or that instead of fire-fights or battles, we have “altercations.”
Heck, even the word “bomb” has been replaced by IED. IED, by the way, stands for Improvised Explosive Device, but when you just use the acronym, it sounds like a bunch of people got hurt by an exploding contraceptive device.
But it is not enough for me to be familiar with Military Posi-Speak. That is all well and good for the Army and government folks I will be working with on my new job, but what about the other people I will be working with? As you may recall, my new position involves working as a liaison for linguists…translators, that is, or interpreters. These are folks to whom Arabic is a first language, English is second, and New Military Posi-Speak is…well, untranslatable.
Though not a requirement for the job, I have decided to learn to speak Arabic. I feel it will help me bond with my charges, and also make it tougher for them to say nasty things about me to my face in another language. I can’t control what they say behind my back, but I can’t wait to see the look on the face of the first guy who tries to insult me in Arabic when I reply that his mother wears even larger combat boots than mine.
Of course, that is a contingent on me knowing more Arabic than just the words for “army boots”, and I don’t actually know those yet. Well, I know that hathaya (sic) is Arabic for “shoes” and umi is Arabic for “mother”, but that’s as far as I have gotten.
Anyway, I am using Rosetta Stone software, which teaches you foreign languages by a technique they call “immersion.” That is, the only actual English language you see is when they are showing you the subject of your next lesson or the score of your last exercise. The rest is all pictures and the foreign language of your choice. It’s like a foreign-language movie without subtitles, except that instead of a movie you get a bunch of still pictures…so it’s really more like a boring slide-show at your aunt’s house, except nobody speaks English.
It kind of reminds me of when I was a teenager and I worked summers for a farmer who would take me to his mother’s house everyday for lunch, and then the two of them would converse in German. Of course, I didn’t find out until years later that with all that German he was telling his mother what an incompetent farmhand I was, and he was probably telling her that right in front of me.
Well, I learned my lesson. Those Arabs may call me a lot of things, but “incompetent farmhand” won’t be one of them. At least not after find out what the Arabic words for that actually are. I’m getting there.
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