Spencer seems to think that putting "jihad network" in quotes calls it into question. He's wrong. There are a number of reasons for putting a phrase into quotes. Doubt about the validity of the characterization is one of them, but it is by no means the only one, or even the most common or default. Another reason is that the phrase is someone else's and is not a standard term. That's almost certainly what the AP intended here.
What is especially strange here is that although the quoted phrase itself admits of ambiguity as to the AP's intended meaning, the passage as a whole does not. The relative clause "who participated in what the government called a 'jihad network' that used paintball games in the Virginia woods in 2000 and 2001 as a means to train for holy war around the globe." is factive, that is, it is a clause that may only be felicitously uttered if the speaker believes the proposition it expresses to be true. The AP article therefore asserts as true the proposition that the men trained for holy war, which refutes Spencer's claim that the AP is casting doubt on the government's position.
Age Of Empire 3 Highly Compressed Only 49mb 100 Work
Benkahla was one of only two defendants who were acquitted in the government's prosecution of a dozen Muslim men who participated in what the government called a "jihad network" that used paintball games in the Virginia woods in 2000 and 2001 as a means to train for holy war around the globe.
So let's consider some of the social context. Suyat, asecond-generation Filipino, was born and raised on the island ofMolokai, which then had a population of about 12,000--a backwater area.Most of the inhabitants of the island worked in the cane fields orfactories. Suyat was in a class of about a hundred students whograduated from the island's only high school. He then became acarpenter for seven years before taking the job as one of his union'sbusiness agents. Like his fellow Molokaians, he spoke Hawaiian PidginEnglish. And like most of the rest of us, he little understood thediscourse routines and genre found in a court trial. But he had enoughschooling to know that he needed to listen carefully to what was askedof him and to answer carefully. So when the prosecutor put forth aninaccurate definition of what union business agents do, Suyat thoughthe was answering truthfully. Union business agents do NOT organizecontractors. Most dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, agreewith him:
(That [sic] is mine -- the Dogfish Head folks spell it more conventionally as "green raisins" in their description of Raison d'Etre Ale. There's a joke in there somewhere about green raisons steeping purposefully, if I only had time to work it out.)
A look at the ProQuest American Periodicals Series database confirms that this has been happening for almost 200 years. The APS has 315 hits for "whom much is given". I only had to look at four of these, working backwards from 1915, to find a botched version (The Rev. William Barnes Lower, "The Suburban Church Problem", New York Observer and Chronicle, Mar. 2, 1911):
A comment by Leigh Klotz from a while ago on Slashdot recalls that the Lisp Machine editor had a special check in the error routine that adjusted the message when the undefined command Meta-Beta was entered. The team was split about half and half on whether that was funny. I believe I have the only space-cadet keyboard with a working USB interface. In addition to showing that message in the CADR emulator, it really will enter an uppercase lambda (into XEmacs) like the jargon file implies it should. The Lisp Machine character set had the SAIL characters, but was still only eight bits, so there wasn't room for everything.
In response to this problem some years ago a consortium was formed tocreate an open standard for exchange of documents. The standards groupbegan work in 2002 and completed its work in 2005. The resultwas the Open Documentstandard, which you can read for yourselfhere. The official version of the standard is that produced by theInternational Organization for Standardization (ISO), available here, but they'll charge you 342 Swiss francs($274). Open Document is open in the sense that anyone may read itand anyone may use it without obtaining a license or paying royalties. Part of being openin this sense is being sufficiently specific that someone wishing to implement the standardhas all of the information he or she needs. If you write a word processor that exportsin ODF, I can, using only the specification, without any other information about your program, write a word processor that will import your document perfectly, and of course,conversely.
Yes, the list is short, but the words in it share certain crucial things in common that are at the root of what I hate about them, so I can imagine expanding the list to include other, similar words. What I hate about these words is perhaps specific to works that I've read with these words in their titles. Call me crazy, but I think that when I pick up a paper or book with a title like "The status of such-and-such" or "The nature of such-and-such" or "The rôle of such-and-such", it is reasonable for me to expect to learn something about the status, nature, or rôle, respectively, of such-and-such -- namely, what the author(s) think(s) the status, nature, or rôle of such-and-such is, and what arguments they will put forth to support their thinking. Invariably, though, I come away from reading works with these kinds of titles feeling quite unsure of what I've learned about the status, nature, or rôle of such-and-such. I think this is because there's a sense in which anything you say about such-and-such says something about the status, nature, or rôle of such-and-such, and authors who use these kinds of titles know this. But in that case I wish they'd use more specific words in their titles: if you're only going to say one thing about such-and-such, say what that one thing is in your title. Don't give me this promise that you're going to say everything about such-and-such when you're really only saying one thing.
Even setting this aside (after all, there are many other highlyvague predicates), the quasi-archaic syntactic weirdness of the phrasemakes my teeth itch. The phrase seems mincingly awkward to me in syntacticterms. The idea is to have a syntactic work-around so that the notion ofnot having pale pink-colored skin can be expressed without any appearanceof going back to the 1960s uses of "colored". So colored personis replace by person of color. But there is no regular processthat yields the pattern person of X for X-edperson: if you try the same thing with other -edadjectives it sounds utterly insane: you can't refer to someone who isfreckled as a person of freckles, or a person who is dazed as a personof daze. Batman, the caped crusader, is not a person of cape.[Update: Coby Lubliner tells me:"the process by which 'colored people' (which in US English has historically referred only to black people) became 'people of color' is through a retranslation from the French gens de couleur, at a time when the writings of Frantz Fanon et al. were popular." This is interesting.So is the fact that Jesse Sheidlower tells me the Oxford EnglishDictionary people have found a use of the phrase from as earlyas 1781.But of course these facts do not alter my aesthetic dispreference at all. That's what aesthetic dispreferences tend to be like.]
Update: No Happy New Year fromWorking Languages, where a very irritable post insists that inpractice it's very different. The above "calculates, without forsome reason attempting to find out what the actual situation is," it says; but in reality, because of multiple competences amongtranslators and chaining (translate A to B and then B to C), about70 types of specialist suffices, it says.In the first version of this post Imentioned in passing (following an article inThe Economist) that only English,French, and German were working languages; but there isdispute about this: apparentlyall of the languages are working languages, at least in principle,so I took that statement out. 2ff7e9595c
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