August 26, 2004 - 'Hatchet Jobs & Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang'

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: August 26, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a guide to some political talk in America.

This week, reporters asked President Bush about a television commercial that attacked the Vietnam War record of his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. The message was sponsored by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, though in political lingo this organization is known as a 527.

PRESIDENT BUSH: "I can't be more plain about it, and I wish -- I hope my opponent joins me in saying -- condemning -- these activities of the 527s. It's, I think they're bad for the system."

Five-twenty-sevens get their name from section 527 of the federal tax code. Organizations defined under this section can donate money for political causes without being taxed. But they must be unaffiliated with any candidate or party. Still ...

GRANT BARRETT: "If the 527 organization is promoting a popular point of view, they really can do a great deal to support a candidate without being specifically affiliated with that campaign. Of course, there's been congressional hearings about this, there's been accusations on both sides, but for the time being it continues."

AA: Grant Barrett is editor of a new book called "Hatchet Jobs & Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang." We asked him about a number of terms in the news right now, including all the talk about color-coded states.

GRANT BARRETT: "This year because of what happened in the 2000 presidential election, red states and blue states is something that you keep hearing about. Red states are those states which supposedly will go Republican, or conservative. And the blue states are those states which supposedly will go to the Democrats because they're liberal or from the left.

"These terms come out of the maps of the electoral votes from the 2000 election where during those weeks after the election and then the drama that ensued, the map always came up on the screen as television journalists were talking about how the voting went, particularly in Florida.

"So the colors have come to kind of represent the tendency of those people to vote a certain way. Of course, then we have purple states, which is red plus blue, which are the states that are right on the line. These are also called the swing states, where no one quite knows how the vote is going to go until the day after the election."

RS: "So how did they get these colors -- was it just purely TV?"

GRANT BARRETT: "Completely arbitrary."

AA: "These swing states are also called battleground states."

GRANT BARRETT: "Yes."

AA: "We keep hearing that term."

GRANT BARRETT: "Knife-edge states, as well. If you go back to pre-2000, you'll actually see people talk about red states and blue states but they're switched the other way around." RS: "There are three phrases that I see constantly now, and I'd like for you to give us some quick definitions, all right? ABB."

GRANT BARRETT: "'Anybody But Bush.' Actually it was first used against the first President Bush. It's just a shorthand. So much of slang is a shorthand, just a quicker way of saying something that everybody understands."

RS: "Here's another one: 'hook and bullet crowd.' What's that mean?"

GRANT BARRETT: "That's a fun one. The strategists always try to define a target audience who's underserved or whose politics are so broad that they can be easily focused upon in campaign advertisements. The hook and bullet crowd are the fisherman and the hunters. And it's not just people who like to fish and hunt. It also overlaps with people who own guns, people who probably live in rural settings, people who see themselves as being traditionalists. So they are seen as a favorable target, somebody to throw money at and try to persuade."

RS: "And 'no-carb diet' has nothing to do with losing weight."

GRANT BARRETT: "No, it doesn't. But the pun there is the well-known Atkins diet in the United States which tries to rid your food intake of carbohydrates. So 'no-carb diet' kind of rides along that wave. But what it stands for is 'No Cheney, No Ashcroft, No Rumsfeld, No Bush.'

"There are, and I don't have any numbers for this, but there are a number of people who don't mind President Bush. They like him, they like his politics, they find him an appealing fellow, but they don't like some of the people such as [Attorney General John] Ashcroft, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld or [Vice President Dick] Cheney that he has put into office."

AA: "Now the last question I want to ask you is about the expression 'it's the economy, stupid.'"

GRANT BARRETT: "During the first Clinton campaign in 1992, Democratic strategist James Carville was a part of that. There was a story that appeared in the August 3rd, 1992, edition of the Washington Post where they described this being written on the chalkboard: 'it's the economy, stupid.'

"And it wasn't a message that they [the Democrats] were directing outward to their opponent and it wasn't a message that they were trying to get across to voters or to the media. It was a message for themselves, because they found that again, again and again they were straying from the core issue that they felt would make Americans vote for them, and that was the economy."

AA: Grant Barrett is editor of "Hatchet Jobs & Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang," being published in September. And that's all for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

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August 19, 2004 - Linguistic Diversity in Action

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: August 19, 2004

A new map released by the Modern Language Association shows which languages are spoken where in the United States. According to the MLA map, a 33-square-kilometer area south of Los Angeles is one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the country. The communities there are home to speakers of everything from Navajo to Hmong. Though the variety provides cultural diversity, it can also create challenges for the residents. Alex Cohen filed this week's report for WORDMASTER:

ALEX COHEN: The city of Artesia (are-TEE-zhuh) is just 4 square kilometers, but nearly 40 languages are spoken within its borders.

SOUND: [Montage of prayers in Korean, Tagalog, Portuguese and Dutch]

At a recent prayer breakfast, blessings were offered in Korean, Tagalog, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish, Portuguese and Dutch.

Artesia Mayor Sally Flowers delivered the state of the city address at this breakfast in English, though she also speaks Spanish. She says she wanted the prayers to represent the many immigrant communities and reflect the cultural diversity in this city of 17,500 people.

SALLY FLOWERS: "Governor Gray Davis when he was in office had said that Los Angeles was the most diverse city in the world, and within LA County, Artesia is one of the most diverse cities."

Just down the road from the prayer breakfast is Seoul Soon-dae, a Korean restaurant that specializes in beef bone and knuckle soup. Owner Annie Kahng says in order to communicate with her Hispanic employees and a wide range of customers, she's picked up several languages over the years.

ANNIE KAHNG: "I speak mostly Korean and second English and I speak a little bit of Spanish and a little bit just Chinese and Japanese, just greeting. [laughs]"

Speaking several languages is pretty much par for the course in this area. According to the U.S. Census bureau, of the 40 most common languages spoken in this country, 39 of them can be heard in Artesia and neighboring cities like Cerritos and Bellflower.

Annie Kahng says she once moved to a city about an hour away, but quickly got homesick.

ANNIE KAHNG: "I didn't like it there. There aren't many places to go, as far as food goes. So I lived there about half a year and then I moved back here again."

Not far from Ms. Kahng's restaurant is Sona Chaandi, a clothing store and beauty salon where patrons can buy saris and gold jewelry and get Indian henna tattoos. Owner Mala Malani introduces herself in her two native tongues - Fijian and Hindi.

MALA MALANI: "Bula. Ni Samoday. And in Hindi, it's like Mira Nam Mala Hay."

Ms. Malani says she uses Hindi and English to communicate with most of her customers. But she's also hired staff from all over the world to accommodate the store's multicultural clientele.

MALA MALANI: "It's really good because the more the merrier, we do more business because all people comes here. That's why in my beauty salon I have Japanese, I have Chinese, I have Filipinos, so more people come. Because it's not just only for Indians, you know. We want everyone to come here."

Despite the multitude of languages heard throughout the area, English is still the primary language used to communicate.

TEACHER: "Everybody repeat, 'ah.'"

CLASS: "Ah."

TEACHER: "Again, 'ah.'"

Class: "Ah."

Jae Chun Oh is studying English as a second language at the local Adult School. During the 23 years he's spent in the United States, Mr. Oh has spoken mostly Korean. But lately, he says, he's realized the need to master English, even in an area as diverse as this.

JAE CHUN OH: "I want to expand my horizon in my career. Sometimes I need to contact someone outside of the Korean community, so I need the tool -- which is fluent English - to communicate."

Business isn't the only area where fluency in English is important. According to Juliet Stone with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, non-English speakers face many challenges in their day to day activities.

JULIET STONE: "Things like going to the doctor and explaining what hurts. Going to get your driver's license, going to vote."

As Artesia's city manager, Maria Dadian (DAY-dee-in) understands these challenges well… She says ideally, Artesia would provide documents like building permits, ballots for city elections and public notices in all of the many languages spoken in the city. But, she says, given Artesia's small staff and budget that's just not feasible.

MARIA DADIAN: "We have people who are of the Portuguese culture, people who are of the Cambodian culture, we also have Spanish speaking individuals here. Unfortunately, we can't cover every ethnicity that's out there."

But she acknowledges one advantage to being in such a small city: almost everyone in Artesia knows someone who speaks English. And so when the city is unable to provide services in a given language, officials can usually find someone within the community who can translate. For Wordmaster, I'm Alex Cohen in Los Angeles.

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August 12, 2004 - Lida Baker: Present Perfect Tense

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Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: August 12, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: practice makes perfect.

RS: With us from Los Angeles is English teacher Lida Baker to explain a part of grammar that makes English learners tense.

AA: It's the verb tense known as the present perfect. First of all, Lida says don't be misled by the archaic meaning of perfect.

LIDA BAKER: "In Latin it has to do with whether something is complete or incomplete. In linguistic terms, the present perfect tense is pretty unique, pretty unusual, and it's something that students always wrestle with. So the present perfect tense is formed by using the auxiliary verb 'have' and the past participle of a verb. And if that terminology is a little bit too confusing, I'll just give you some simple examples: 'I have eaten breakfast already' or 'he has seen that movie three times.' So the present perfect is that form that uses either have or has, followed by the past participle form of the verb."

RS: "That's the form. Now we need to focus on how you use it."

LB: "Well, that's the interesting part. One of the basic meanings of the present perfect tense is to talk about things that began in the past and continue up to the moment of speaking. An example of that would be something like 'I have lived in Los Angeles for 25 years,' 'she's been a teacher since she was 25 years old.' So cases where the action began in the past and continues until this moment, that's one way in which we use the present perfect tense.

"Cases like that do not give students difficulty, though. Maybe it's because with that meaning we often pair the sentence with a phrase that starts with 'for' or 'since.' So, 'for 16 years' or 'since I was 12 years old,' those sorts of things are not hard for students to learn.

"We use the past tense when something occurred in the past and we know exactly when it happened. So, 'I visited my grandmother three days ago' or 'he graduated from college last month.' When the time that the event occurred is given, then according to the rules, we have to use the past tense, OK?

"In contrast to that, if something occurred in the past but there is no specific time stated, that's when we use the present perfect. So we would say something like 'I have finished my homework,' 'I've seen that movie' and so on. And, according to the strict rules of grammar, if you take a sentence like 'I've seen that movie' and you use it with the word 'yesterday,' in American English strictly speaking that sentence is incorrect. It would be wrong to say 'I have seen that movie yesterday.' But in reality -- "

RS: "Instead you would say 'I saw that movie yesterday.'"

LB: "That's right."

AA: "Now, like in the homework example, if a kid comes up to you and says 'I have -- I've finished my homework,' they're talking about like in the past few minutes as opposed to 'I finished my homework -- "

RS: "Two days ago."

AA: " -- two days ago,' or something like that, is that what you're ... "

LB: "That could be one explanation. But another explanation could be that the student is handing me his paper, you see. So this is how the relevance to the present is established. He says, 'I've finished my homework, and here it is.' You see? Sometimes the link is established by means of the context, OK? Sometimes we've had some kind of an experience in the past that has relevance for the present, in a sentence something like, 'I've used that machine lots of times, so I can teach you or help you with it now.'

"Another way that this relevance to the current moment is established is if something has happened in the past, but there's a good probability that it might happen again. So a sentence like, 'I've been to the Hollywood Bowl twice this summer.' The Hollywood Bowl is a large outdoor concert arena here in Los Angeles. So, 'I've been to the Hollywood Bowl twice this summer ... '"

RS: And the use of the present perfect indicates she might go again -- although at the present moment, Lida is busy with a new group of students.

AA: Lida Baker teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. All her previous lessons with us are on our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster.

RS: And if you'd like to send Avi and me an e-mail, the address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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