Asymmetrical Information

If we all get upset about this sort of thing now, how will we have any energy left to rip each other's throats out with our bare keyboards in November 2008?

I think you're suffering from the "lump of vitriol" fallacy. The amount of vitriol is not a fixed quantity - in fact, any surplus that goes unused is wasted.

More seriously, I think DeLong (somewhat correctly) recognizes that articles like this establish a baseline for future political caricatures and baseless, but popular, attacks.

People are probably getting frustrated by the increasing length of campaign seasons.

Hey, I know a Nigel and an Aiofe.

Though, my favorite Irish name is Siobhan.

(Pronounced "Chevon").

I also know a Shaughn and a Vaughn.

I know too many Vietnamese that give themselves American names because their Vietnamese names are difficult.

Haven't you ever heard of spring training? Got to get into shape before the regular season begins...

What is the point of a name(Siobhan-Chevon) pronounced NOTHING like it is spelt? Is it just to annoy?

People are getting stirred up over his name because it sounds vaguely Islamic and way too many Americans are totally scared s***less of Muslims.
Reality check: Islam is NOT going to Conquer the World. Time to put away our adult diapers.

Lee, I'm no expert on Celtic languages, but Siobhan is pronounced like it's spelled. The Welsh and Irish rules of phonetics are just a little different. Very roughly si=ch, bh=v, etc. Those are only approximate pronunciations, because the exact sounds probably don't exist in English. Different languages not only have different words but different phonemes. You can see the start of the process in regional accents within one language - separate people for a century and many sounds come to be pronounced differently. Over a thousand years (the time since English and Low German were the same language) the languages can develop phonemes so different that most adults who start learning a foreign language cannot learn to pronounce them well enough that speakers of the other language will hear them as the proper phoneme instead of something else. E.g., a native German-speaker speaking English not only subtly pronounces all the vowels slightly differently, but pronounces "th" as "b", "ch" and soft "g" as (perhaps) "sh" and "zh" - and I'm sure that even fresh from the last German class I took 30-some years ago, I did even worse with their umlauted vowels, and never really learned to pronounce the guttural consonant (as in "ach!") without choking myself on mucus...

The German and Celtic languages supposedly have a common ancestor (along with Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit), but they diverged something like 5,000 years ago, so expect the phonemes to be up to five times as different as German and English. (Yes, I know that English was influenced by Latin, French, and Norse - but so was German.)

Barack and Obama are both strange names to Americans - although I've met Americans with even stranger names derived from Polish, Finnish, etc. I suppose one could make a "he's not one of us" argument from those names, but it's a weak one if that's all you've got. Most of us are descended from immigrants whose names sounded unamerican at the time they stepped off the ship (and that includes the very Teutonic names of some of my ancestors); some people are too ignorant of their own family history to know that, but far more do and would be offended if opponents try to make it a real issue. However, I think that if Obama lasts long enough for the campaign to get serious, the issue isn't going to be his names, but his past political positions - unless you're really a socialist, those will prove he's not one of us.

By the way, I hear his middle name is "Hussein." Can anyone confirm or deny that? Not that it matters; no one is responsible for what his parent's named him, nor was Saddam anyone you'd have heard of when he was born. OTOH, the Arabic names do point out something about Obama's background that might actually be significant...

I know too many Vietnamese that give themselves American names because their Vietnamese names are difficult.

I'm not sure what his nationality actually is, but there's a supplier of metal chasses, server racks, and CNC power supply gear on the East Coast whose legal name is "Ytsuin Ngo."

He signs all of his business paperwork as John Ango.

I think Brad has drunk the Obama kool-aid and will from now on throw a hissy fit whenever anyone suggests that the Thin Beige Duke is not, in fact, the messiah. It will be amusing to see to the fits of apoplexy and cognitive dissonance that result when the Clinton machine squashes the Pretender Obama like a bug:

"But... but... how could the Clintons, source of all that is good and holy, spread these distortions and lies? It... it... must be Karl Rove! That's it! Rove is behind it!"

Is not Swahili an Arabic Creole, developed from contact between Arab slavers and East Africans?

Swahili is indeed a creole-esque language, although it has become a full-fledged language (according to linguistic definitions) with its adoption as a first language and the fact that it is not mutually intelligible with its forebears in the Bantu family and in Arabic. Its structure is Bantu in the main part of grammar, but a good part of its vocabulary and some points of grammar come from Arabic as well.

There are a lot of parallels to names coming from other words and languages, such as my own name "Neal" showing up in Scandinavia despite its origins in Ireland, due to cultural cross-fertilization when the Vikings started Dublin and raided the Northeast coast of Ireland. A similar, although more peaceful, historical situation is probably where "Barack" shows up from as a Swahili name. And Hussein is another example (its the name of many Arabs whether last or first) that is really innocuous, but happens to belong to two influential Arab leaders one, the king of Jordan, not usually rabidly anti-American, the other a man who was obviously seeking to be a hegemon in the middle east.

Thanks for the tutorial, Markm.

Jane:

Brad is angry -- properly so, I would say -- because Mike Allen challenged Obama's integrity by pointing out that he had at various times explained his name as the Arabic for "blessed" and the Swahili for "blessed of God." In fact, it's both. Of course "Barack" is exotic: no one doubts that. Brad's point was merely that Allen could have discovered the Semitic origin of the name by asking any Jew: "baruch" ("blessed") is the first word of most Hebrew prayers.

That's not the only point at which Allen falsely accuses Obama of duplicity: brings up the silly business about the memoir, as well. Overall, Allen's post looks like a badly done hit piece, cobbled together from some oppo research team's talking points.

(P.s. Would you consider asking "jimbo" to wash his racist mouth out with soap, or alternatively to start commenting on LGF or somewhere else where his brand of humor would be less out of place?)

What we likely are seeing here, pace Jimbo, is the "Kennedyization" of Obama. In the 60's and into the 70's, the Kennedy clan was pretty close to royalty so far as the press was concerned. Criticizing the Kennedies, especially after the death of St. John the Martyr, became more than bad taste, it became simply off-limits. Some of that lingers to this very day.

By declaring anything to do with Barack Obama's background to be off limits, including his odd-to-many-Americans name, it looks to me that DeLong is attempting to make it pretty much impossible to criticize Obama from any angle.

We'll know the Kennedyization process is pretty much complete when the tinfoil hat left begins muttering about assassination plots ("He's too good! Those rightwingfascists will have to kill him, just like they did Doctor King!"). Perhaps Obama's campaign can revive the old pop tune "Abraham, Martin and John" as icing on the cake.

Kleiman's understanding is mine: the piece implies Obama plays ffast and loose with his name's origin.

Wow, a site which takes issue often with DeLong and Kleiman, and gets comments from both. Isn't it not alloed on a blog to be that civil and healthy?

The notion that "Barack" isn't and exotic name because Jews say "Baruch" is just stupid.

Americans say "blessed" and "amen" on a regular basis, but "Blessed Amen Smith" would still be a weird name for an American.

Perhaps "Blessed Amen Smith" would be a good alternative name for the Ford "Supremely Evil Land Yacht"?

Comments are Closed.