Failure Is Not an Option

22 July 2005

On 20 July, the Reuters news service reported that some members of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) in Britain have called for the banning of the word fail in classrooms. Instead, the term deferred success should be used.

The organization as a whole will consider the proposal next week.

In Passing: Charles Chibitty, 83

22 July 2005

The last of the Commanche code talkers, who used the Commanche language to communicate sensitive information over the radio during World War II, died on 20 July.

The Navajo code talkers were more numerous and more famous. Navajo code talkers served in the Pacific Theater. Their lesser known Commanche comrades served in Europe. Choctaw Indians also served as code talkers. Both groups used their native languages, supplemented with coded terms for military jargon that did not exist in those languages, to send indecipherable messages faster than by using conventional codes.

The "code" spoken by the code talkers was not very complex and could have been broken had someone with knowledge of the language been listening, but the fact that almost no non-native speakers of those languages existed and the information they transmitted was tactical in nature and only useful for hours at best, the code talkers proved a very secure way to communicate.

"It’s strange, but growing up as a child I was forbidden to speak my native language at school," Chibitty said in 2002. "Later my country asked me to. My language helped win the war, and that makes me very proud."

Moonshot Terms

22 July 2005

This past Wednesday was the 36th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, what is likely to be considered, in centuries to come, the most historic event of the latter half of the 20th century. On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin landed their lunar module, Eagle, in the Sea of Tranquility, while the third member of the team, Michael Collins, orbited the moon in the command module Columbia. The next day, Greenwich Mean Time, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on our planet’s closest neighbor.

Historic events are usually accompanied by historic words, if not at the moment in question, then sometime afterwards. In the case of the first lunar landing, many of the most famous words were scripted in advance. The most famous of these the famous sentence of Neil Armstrong’s spoken when he first stepped onto the lunar surface:

That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.

But even the best script cannot overcome the speaker making an error in delivering the lines and in this case, Armstrong misspoke. It was supposed to be a "small step for a man." Armstrong omitted the indefinite article and in doing so omitted most of the significance of the phrase. Some say he said the word, but static in the transmission obscured it. But this is not the case; there is no static on the recording of the event. We can, however, forgive Armstrong for such a small error in the excitement of the event.

And even carefully written and edited statements can contain errors. A more official pronouncement of the event was the statement on the plaque that was placed on the base of the lunar lander (which remained on the lunar surface):

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D.

William Safire, then a White House speechwriter, wrote this line. In an attempt to insert a reference to God, Safire included the abbreviation A.D., or anno domini, meaning in the year of our Lord. Safire claims that with this line he made the "first mistake made by an earthling on an extraterrestrial body." Safire’s self-admitted error was that A.D. should come before the year, not after. There are few, however, that would consider this to be a mistake, so Safire isn’t admitting to much. And Safire also erred in assessing his mistake, as he was most decidedly earthbound when he made the error, if error it was.

The third famous line from the mission was also spoken by Armstrong:

Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

These weren’t Armstrong’s only firsts in linguistic history. He is credited with two first citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, for the words postflight, "There was some suspicion, lingering in the postflight shock of the first Sputnik, that this was the road the Soviet Union had chosen," and topo, "The best we can do on topo features is to advise you to look to the west of the irregularly shaped crater." Of course, he is unlikely to have actually coined these words, rather they were probably common in NASA jargon at the time. Armstrong gets credit because he used them in is 1970 book First On The Moon. 67 other words in the OED are given citations from this book by Armstrong, among them A-OK, hypergolic, lift-off, lunar, non-flammable, pitch, playback, preflight, psych, read-out, rocket, rog, selenocentric, slingshot, smack-dab, spaceship, splashdown, transearth, umbilical, undock, and zero-G.

(There is also this quote from the 1974 work Collector’s History of Fans, "Women...carried small fans with mounts of white gauze, silk or net, embroidered with garlands or Neo-classical motifs." Undoubtedly this is a different N. Armstrong.)

In comparison, Buzz Aldrin only gets a single citation in the OED, a quote for multi-engine from his 1973 Return To Earth, "He wanted me to go to a multiengine flight school and I wanted to be a fighter pilot." Collins gets no citations at all. These two have always been in Armstrong’s shadow because Armstrong made that first small step, and it is no different here. They co-authored First On The Moon with Armstrong, but the big dictionary doesn’t even list them as authors.

Tour de France Terms

15 July 2005

The Tour de France, or Le Tour, is without a doubt the most famous, and the most grueling, bicycle race in the world. Held each July since 1902 (with breaks during the world wars), this is the 92nd riding of the Tour. This year’s tour is 2,237 miles (3,600 km), broken up into 21 stages or daily rides. The tour’s route changes from year-to-year, running through different regions of France and with some stages in neighboring countries (this year it’s Germany). Of course, this year’s Tour is eagerly watched by many because it is Lance Armstrong’s last year riding the race. Armstrong has won the last six Tours, the only man to have won that many.

Traditionally, the race starts with short time trial of less than five miles called the prologue. A time trial is a stage where the cyclists ride individually, against the clock alone, without the assistance of teammates. Some time trials are team time trials, where each team rides as a group, but not alongside the other teams. This year, the prologue has been replaced with a longer, 12 mi (19 km) time trial. The final stage of the race is always along the Champs Elysees (literally the Elysian Fields), the famed Parisian avenue. Riders do three circuits of the street, each one about 15 kilometers long at very fast speeds. Winning this final stage is considered quite an honor.

Perhaps the most distinctive cycling term is peloton, the mass of riders in a race. The peloton is also informally called a bunch. Attack is both a noun and a verb meaning an aggressive move to break away from the peloton and take the lead in the stage. The attacker and the riders who jump and escape the peloton with attacker form a break or breakaway. When a rider takes a flyer, his teammates will block the chasers, or other riders attempting to catch up, so they can’t bridge or bridge the gap and catch the attacker. One kind of attack used at the end of the stage or in the sprint competition is for a teammate to leadout another rider, riding as fast as possible and allowing the second rider to draft behind him and then slingshot out in front and finish first. An attack by a group of riders just before a stage’s finish line is called a field sprint, or sometimes bunch sprint or pack finish. Cyclists who cross the finish line in a group are all awarded the same time for the stage.

Cyclists on the tour burn an astounding number of calories, 5,900 on average. To keep their energy up, they eat over 5,000 calories when in the saddle. Food is passed to riders by soigneurs (literally welfare man) in musettes, or cotton bags. Food can only be passed to riders in designated feed zones. Stages of the tour can be four or five hours long and, being human, the riders at times have to heed the call of nature. When one stops off the side of the road, he is said to be taking l’au naturel.

A large number of automobiles, called the caravan, follow the cyclists. Each team has a team vehicle that carries spare tires, spare bikes, food, water, and mechanics to assist with flat tires and mechanical problems. There are cars for race officials and for journalists. The SAG wagon or broom wagon (voiture balai) is the car that follows the caravan and picks up (sweeps up) riders who have dropped or fallen off the back. And in front of the riders is a publicity caravan of cars who drum up spectators for the race.

To bunny-hop is to jump over curbs and small obstacles, such as rocks, by lifting both wheels off the ground at the same time. In a road race like the Tour, catching air, even with a little bunny-hop is risky and usually a bad strategy, often resulting in a crash.

There are any number of words for crashing. They include auger in, biff, dump, and endo (a crash where the rider goes over the handlebars, end-over-end). Riders who crash usually end up with road rash, from scraping their skin along the pavement.

Crashing isn’t the only hazard. The Tour is a three-week race and endurance is key. When a cyclist reaches the limits of his endurance and is on the verge of collapse, he is said to blow up or bonk.

To draft or slipstream is to ride behind another cyclist, reducing the wind resistance and conserving energy. Drafting behind vehicles is prohibited. When there is a cross-wind, riders will often ride in echelon, or behind and to the side of the rider in front of them, drafting without being directly behind. Sometimes a team will form a paceline, riding in a line with the leader periodically pulling off to the end of the line, and the next rider pulling into the lead.

A rider’s cadence is the rate of pedaling, usually measured in revolutions per minute of one foot. A rider who is blocking others, will soft pedal, pedaling in a lower gear so he maintains cadence but is not applying power.

Many don’t realize it buy cycling is a team sport, with each team of nine riders focused on assisting one its riders to win the race. The team’s coach is called the Director Sportif. The team’s lead rider has a lieutenant, who rides close to him, chases down breakaways to keep riders from outpacing the leader, and allowing the leader to draft behind him. Lance Armstrong’s lieutenant is this year’s race is George Hincapie.

The standings in the Tour are called the General Classification or GC. Riders are ranked in the General Classification by the total amount of time it took them to ride all the stages. One can be first in the GC and win the tour without winning any of the stages. In addition to competing for the fastest times in the individual stages and the overall tour, there are also sprinting and climbing competitions.

Points, or primes (pronounced / preem /) are awarded to the riders who jam the fastest in designated sprinting zones and those who hammer on climbs. Hills are ranked into five categories, designated 4 through 1 and HC (hors categorie, beyond category). The harder the climb, the more points it is worth, with HC hills earning the most.

The rider who is number one in the GC is awarded the prestigious yellow jersey (maillot jaune). The yellow color was chosen because it was the color of l’Auto, the original corporate sponsor of the tour. The opposite of the yellow jersey is the lanterne rouge (red lantern), signifying the rider who is last in the GC. The term comes from the early days of the Tour when a car with a red lantern would follow the last rider. Other jerseys are the green jersey, awarded to the leader of the sprint competition, the polka-dot jersey, worn by the King of the Mountains or the leader in the climbing competition, and the white jersey, worn by the rider under 25 years of age who is highest in the GC.

So if you catch any of the coverage of this year’s race, you’ll now be a bit more familiar with the lingo of the sport of cycling and its greatest race.