What Is This Phishing of Which You Speak?

29 July 2005

Reuters reported this week that a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project asked online users about various internet buzzwords and jargon terms. It found that despite all the buzz, the words were not that familiar to most internet users.

Most users knew what spam was, but there the familiarity ended. Words like phishing (soliciting financial information about a person by pretending to be a bank or other trustworthy source), podcasting (audio downloads available over the internet), and RSS feed (a service that pushes blog entries to a user as soon as they are published).

Younger internet users fared better than older ones in recognizing the terms.

A Scandal of Errors

29 July 2005

The latest Washington scandal, that of presidential consigliere Karl Rove and vice presidential assistant Lewis "Scooter" Libby revealing the name of a C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to the press in an attempt to discredit her husband, suffers from not having a catchy name. Some have suggested Plamegate, using the –gate suffix that has been affixed to many a scandal since the original Watergate. Others have suggested the more unwieldy Rove v. Plame, a play on the court case Roe v. Wade.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the essence of the scandal is that Rove, architect of President Bush’s electoral campaigns for governor of Texas and president of the United States, and Libby, told reporters that Plame worked for the C.I.A. either for revenge because her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was critical of the administration or to discredit Wilson by implying that he was given a C.I.A. assignment by his wife. There are questions about what laws, if any, were actually broken, and one reporter has been sent to jail for refusing to reveal her sources even though she never wrote a story about the case.

The scandal centers on that venerable Washington institution, the leak. A leak is the revelation of a secret. Leak has been used in this sense since 1859. Of course leaks are usually made to reporters, who seek to protect their sources from exposure. 31 states and the District of Columbia have shield laws (1998) that do not require journalists to reveal their sources to police or official investigators, but the federal government does not have one. This is why the reporter, Judith Miller of the New York Times, was sent to jail.

Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper has given us double secret background, the terms under which Rove spoke to him. Cooper used the term in an email to his editor that was made public during the investigation. Background is a journalism term used to describe a source who is not to be quoted. There is also deep background, meaning that the source is not even to be referred to anonymously, the information is only provided to the reporter as a guide for finding more leads or other sources. Cooper jocularly dubbed this double secret background, a play on the term double secret probation, which was used in the 1978 movie Animal House to refer to a punishment inflicted on a fraternity by the university.

Another word that has gotten a lot of use in this particular scandal is the verb to out, meaning to reveal a hidden identity, as in "Rove outed C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame." Most recognize the word in the sense of publicly revealing that someone is gay, but some question its use in this, more general, sense. Both these senses are cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as early as 1990. The specific sense relating to gays is a variant of the reflexive verb phrase to come out or to come out of the closet. This older term dates to 1968, but it’s not the oldest related sense. Out has been used to mean to reveal a secret since the late 14th century.

In response to the scandal, Republicans have released their legions of spin doctors (1984) who loyally repeat the daily talking points (1920), or message, on television, the radio, and to print reporters. The Democrats have their spin doctors and talking points too, but the Republicans are better at message discipline (1993).

Finally, there is the word scandal itself. It’s from the Latin scandalum, meaning a cause of offense and ultimately from the Greek meaning trap or snare. English usage dates to the 13th century and originally applied to something that brought discredit upon a clergyman or a church. The OED’s first citation in a secular and general sense is from Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. This current scandal is chock full of errors, on all sides, but is hardly a comedy.

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.