How could you forget the weasel TuckerCarlson ?
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Nail. Coffin.
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Yep, next time we will make sure the person on the call can’t speak the language. We can’t make shit up if they understand what the hell is said. I have never retaliated but there is always a first time and this is it. I’m also asking the DOD to force the Col to retire and if possible with a reduction in rank.
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Yeah…it’s all OBAMA’S fault…why am I NOT surprised?
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Sure presidents are entitled to have people on the NSC that they trust. The problem is that Trump trusts no one.
“So everyone who’s detailed at the NSC, people are going to start going back to their own departments and we’ll bring in new folks.”
Should read: We are going to have a Purge. Then bring in incompetent sycophants. Just like Guiliani has been awesome in his cybersecurity role.
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Proving once again the saying: “No Good Deed goes unpunished.”
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Canned because he can’t be trusted to LIE for the POTUS. Sounds right.
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Just as I thought…
The Vindman story is still being read and talked about 48 hours before the Open Hearings. And the reactions are remarkably similar among readers.
And talkers.
Great Timing, TrumpTeam…
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I dislike that message so much that I resist the impulse to add responses. (And now I will get my own cheery little welcome back. Sigh.)
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Watch and assess what they do, not what they say.
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I’m hoping the uniformed military prove you wrong, but if trump’s civilian appointees have anything to say about the matter, then I’m afraid you’re definitely correct.
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You might have an idea of how proud I’d be if the military took him in to custody and shut this administration down. But that will never happen.
There is nobody left with sufficient integrity to resign. That is by design. It’s how trump ensures that he’s surrounded by yes-men and toadies. Not a single shred of decency, honesty or shame is left in the WH - or anywhere within the trump administration. We expected all political appointees would eagerly do trump’s bidding. But the middle-level managers within those agencies never expected to face the decision to quit their jobs over principals. Too many, I’m afraid, are failing the test. That, too, is by design. The longer this goes on, the deeper the rot.
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I expect that Mr Parnas has been thinking quite a lot about Mr Epstein.
Trump’s loyalty test is publicly lying on his behalf.
Thanks for this. My English professor son tells me it’s no big deal, too. Still, it sounds so wrong to my ear. C’mon, the responder is one person, and to call that singular person a “they” sounds like you simply don’t want to commit the him/her offense. And what about in other languages such as French?
It sounds wrong to you because it was drilled into you at school that it was incorrect. So you grew up thinking it was “bad” to use they in a singular sense.
However, I’m quite certain that you do not have issues with you referring to a single person and you referring to multiple people. Because you learned that was okay. In fact, English has a singular form for you which is thou. Over centuries that has fallen out of use, although it still appears in specified stylized uses: “thou” refers to God (e.g., “Thy will be done”), the Ten Commandments (e.g., “thou shalt not steal”) and “I take thee” in wedding vows.
There are also subtleties with the singular thou and singular you – thou implies intimacy (which is why you talk to God using thou – everyone has a personal intimate relationship), and if you are marrying someone (and sleeping with them) it is to be expected you would refer to them using the more intimate thou. You, when used for a single individual, carried the implication of respect and distance. (The Quakers used thou because they believed that nobody was better than anybody else).
Although English has dropped thou in daily usage, it is alive and well in many other languages: the French use tu as a singular for familiar or lower-ranking (wife, mother, kids, for example – or a pet) but vous in both singular and plural. The singular vous would be used with strangers (no intimacy) or with people of higher rank (boss, etc. – although, IIRC, Giscard d’Estaing was said to say vous to his wife to show high respect for her).
Similarly in German there is the singular du (thou), the singular and plural Sie which is used, again, to express respect or distance (“I don’t know you”), but German goes one better: there is a plural of du which is Ihr (“you guys” – people I know and am familiar with).
Now, what is really interesting is that, while English selected you (singular and plural formal), the Germans are now heading in the other direction and the (singular and plural formal) Sie is disappearing slowly because younger people are no longer using it with each other – when I make contact to business or organizations that anticipate a younger clientele, I will be addressed as du instead of Sie even though they do not know me, because their clientele is cool with it (and don’t want the musty old Sie). Similarly, instructions for things oriented to a younger market are written using du, whereas anything for an older clientele is written using Sie…in another generation or two, Sie is probably going to be left only to certain formal, stylized usages (laws, for example), similar to the English thou.
Also, the plural Sie is often substituted by Ihr simply because if you use Sie people don’t know if you are referring to an individual or to the group as a whole, whereas Ihr is clearly plural. I use it often when I want to be sure that people understand I am talking to the group and not to an individual, even though I may use Sie to any individual of that group. (You can compare this to folks in the southern parts of the US who use y’all to indicate multiple people…)
Note: the capitalization of pronouns in German goes way back hundreds of years to when there were even more pronouns in German than there are now, but that’s a lecture for another day… But note that we capitalize the pronouns referring to the Christian God for the same reason…
So, after that slight detour, back to the they issue – in German, as in French, nouns have genders (German has masculine, feminine and neuter, French has masculine and feminine), so any references to the noun would have gender endings attached to them, so the he or she thing is resolved based on that. For example, the word for girl in German is (das) Madchen, the das indicates it’s a neuter noun (actually caused by the diminutive ending -chen). So when you refer back to das Madchen you would use es (sort of equivalent to the English it) rather than sie (she) because you have used Madchen to start your tale. My dog Lizzy is er (he) because she is ein Hund (masculine noun). Now, if I want to make sure you understand that Lizzy is female, I can use the feminine form die Hündin (the bitch). If I want you to know that my brother’s dog is male, I would say der Rüde (the dog – interestingly, the English “dog” actually refers to a male animal). But if I just use der Hund to refer to a dog, you don’t know if it’s male or female. (Germans would never refer to a dog as it – which is what we do in English if we don’t know the animal’s gender.) Likewise, my cat Simon is male, but the main word for cat is die Katze (feminine), so I often use der Kater (the tomcat) to let people know he’s a he.
(My German husband consistently refers to Lizzy as he and Simon as she…because the gender lies in the noun, not the critter.)
English has long ago jettisoned things like gendered articles, adjective endings, etc. (and we are slowly killing off gendered words like “actress”), so our problems with he/she are not resolvable through other mechanisms – although that may be a blessing in disguise as you will see below when I describe how the Germans are approaching the gender-equality problem.
Language changes with time and needs of the speakers. Singular they has made a resurgence in recent years (after a couple of hundred years of prescriptive purists stupidly trying to beat it out of us) because, among other things, it quite elegantly solves the he/she issue, which has become a major social issue over the past decades. (German is heading the other way to deal with gender equality issues by making life much, much more complicated by developing feminine forms of things like job titles – again, another lecture – whereas we have gone a more simplified path by collapsing gender-based forms to a single form and using the singular they to achieved gender neutrality. BTW, the Germans have just legalized a third gender designation of “diverse” – to deal with non-binary people. As of yet, as far as I know, they haven’t yet begun the struggle to figure out what to do to come up with other non-binary forms. They may wish they’d gone down a route that we have in the US!)
You could say that by reinvigorating the singular they we have, indeed, gone back to early roots of English – its use is about 700 years old after all.
(BTW: if you found this interesting, here’s a quick link to Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language” – he talks about some of these issues in a very humorous, if quite over the top, way. His speech starts on page 9.)
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Thanks for that, lizzymom. You are truly a linguist! And, geez, I’m so glad I’m not trying to learn German. French is bad enough. I spoke with my son and he laughed about my not being in the know about the pronoun debate going on. He pointed out that transgendered people have an issue with it, too.
BTW, I’m from the South–y’all is very familiar.
And now I’m noticing discobot removing the double spacing at the ends of my sentences. Aargh!
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Yeah, full disclosure: PhD in lingustics. German is my day-to-day language now (work and home) so it’s the one I am most familiar with after my native (American) English. Enough French to get by on…smatterings of other stuff.
The current gender debate is a huge one, as your son pointed out. Non-binary people are choosing their preferred non-binary pronouns and it will continue to upend our understanding of pronoun designators in the coming years.
BTW, back to the idea that the choice of pronoun reflects status and/or respect: one thing I forgot to mention is that Queen Elizabeth refers to herself as “We” (singular we) to indicate that she is, figuratively, at the top of the heap – another (centuries-old) remnant of the English pronoun system.
What this all shows is that language is fluid and adaptable to new needs and demands. Kinda cool, if you think about it!
ETA:
Sadly, discobot is a pain in the patootie.
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