1 May 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
A new, because literal, meaning can now be given to the old phrase "traduttore -- traditore."
3 May 2008
HS
This is typical of America's national aversion to foreign language study, as well as our real cultural blindness, all at a time when we are encouraged to be "multicultural." The situation is doubtlessly similar vis-a-vis China. It is worth pointing out that, in the days when Britannia ruled the waves, it had a supply of loyal subjects who knew the languages of the empire's trouble spots and were intimate with their cultures. I would recommend our leaders read _Gentlemen Spies_, a history of Arab-speaking British agents in the same region as Iraq a century ago.