Misused Words

The fashion for misusing particular words comes and goes, but there are always at least a few with us. EFFICIENCY is a long-standing favourite, but the current one is SPRING, as in ARAB SPRING. The Prague Spring of 1968 really meant something, even though in the event it proved to be no more than a temporary thaw in a long winter. But can journalists compare rifles being fired into the air (at best) and the exchange of one dictatorship for another at a cost of hundreds or thousands of lives with this?

By the way, Blair believes...

With the tenth  anniversary of the World Trade Centre murders coming up, the BBC had Blair on the radio this morning to be interviewed. I had the misfortune to hear it.

I found the way Blair repeated 'by the way' literally dozens of times very irritating. No, Mr Blair, it's not 'by the way' that the world has taken such an ugly turn of events over the last ten years. You bear a major part of the responsibility for this, just as you bear a major part of the responsibilty for the deaths of half-a-million people.

But what really infuriated me was the way Blair met every sensible point put to him by the interviewer by saying things like 'I fundamentally disagree...' or 'I believe...' As if this made everything all right! Why was this man given air-time?  I blame:

• the BBC for taking the lazy way out and wheeling Blair out for 'interview' at this time
• all the Labour and Tory MPs (especially the members of the Labour Cabinet) who allowed themselves to be taken in by Blair's words. 
• all the people (this includes me) who put Blair in power in 1997.    

TWO MEETINGS WITH JORGE LUIS BORGES

The fact of living in the same city as a writer we admire does not mean a huge advantage in relation to the possibility of meeting him beyond what his pages offer.

In the event, Icould only see him a couple of times, both very briefly. The first occasion,was  in 1975, when he unexpectedly showed up at an art gallery I attended. He was extremely polite and even shy in his social behaviour. I do not remember who introduced us but he told me something about his latest book La rosa profunda (The Deep Rose), just published. He was very reticent in talking about himself or his work unless directly asked. By that time. I had not read him thoroughly nor was I particularly interested in his poetical or narrative work. Six years later I had devoured his complete works and had the chance of meeting him again at the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentinian Society of Writers).

As I had published my first book — in which Dylan Thomas had left a deep trace — I wanted to give Borges a copy with an inscription. I remember he took my book very politely. Listening to the reading of my inscription  —Borges had been blind since 1955 — he told me he did not deserve those words of sincere admiration; nobody did. When I told him I also admired Dylan Thomas and that the Welsh poet had had a powerful influence on my first book, he said that if I liked Dylan Thomas so much, I would also like Walt Whitman, "an author of other epiphanies", as he then defined it. I answered that I had read Whitman — with that certainty only allowed by the age of 20 and a first book published — and was not too enthusiastic about him.

Borges retorted that something similar had happened to Ezra Pound, who only came to appreciate Whitman's great work at an older age and that, if Pound had had that perception, it was probable the same would be happening to me: that I might be needing some more time to enter Whitman's poetics.

 I never saw Borges again but I kept on reading and re-reading his poems and narrations. Later these became a major influence in my writing. By then I already believed that a new author should try to premeditatively seek the influence of other writers, to counterbalance the influence received from one author with the reading of another.  LUIS BENITEZ

Rumania vs. Romania

At the peak of his political career, Ceausescu (does the name ring a bell?) decided that the name of his country - Rumania - should be spelt differently - Romania, to make sure everybody realised the Romanian people was the result of the blending of two civilizations: the Roman and the Dacian (the Roman Empire invaded Dacia at the beginning of the second century A.D. and the following centuries witnessed the emergence of the Romanian people and the Romanian language, a process similar to what happened in England after the Norman Conquest). Only nobody knew at the time that the gypsies in the country and elsewhere would get a politically correct name - the Roma/Romani - and thus cause an embarrassing (at least for the true-born Romanians) confusion: nowadays many people believe that Romania is the country of the gypsies! Given the troubles many Roma people tend to get into wherever they go, Britain included, and hence their bad reputation, a Romanian MP recently proposed a bill that was supposed to draw the line between the Romanians proper and the Roma ethic group by giving back the latter its former name. The bill was voted against, in spite of the growing pressure from a great number of Romanians who were scandalised both by the evil doings of some of the Roma people who travelled to the West and by the anathema cast on the whole Romanian nation just because of a linguistic confusion. Although officially the issue seems to have been solved, controversy among the ordinary people is still going on.

Petru Iamandi (Rumania/Romania)

Universal Language

About a century ago, ESPERANTO made a bid to be the universally-understood language. More recently, it's looked as if ENGLISH would be the de facto universal language.

Now a clear winner has emerged with the ascendancy of BULLSHIT. Only this morning I heard a fine example on the radio. Some twonk was describing Bahrain as a 'quasi-democracy'.

BULLSHIT has a clear advantage over the pretenders. ESPERANTO is an artificial language that has to be learned. ENGLISH can only be understood by non-English-speakers when you shout. BULLSHIT makes it sound as if you're saying something clever and wise when you're only talking - well, bullshit.