This post could also be called the “word of the day,” for the many students who are brushing up for standardized tests. From Merriam-Webster:
Entry: sprock•et
Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1886
1 : a toothed wheel whose teeth engage the links of a chain 2 : a cylinder with teeth around the circumference at either end that project through perforations in something (as motion-picture film) to move it through a mechanism (as a projector)
Martin Lukacs, Features editor and reporter for The Daily, invents a new definition –
3 : the forelock of someone’s hair
Mooning over Tariq Ali, the editor of New Left Review, Lukacs writes:
His appearance fits the cut [of a celebrity] – his dress is stylish, and while his shock of hair has whitened, a distinct black sprocket still springs over his forehead.
“A distinct black sprocket still springs” … Hmm… Lukacs either doesn’t know the meaning of the word “sprocket,” or has a bad capacity for visual metaphor. Imagine a segment of this metal wheel, but instead, composed of hair:
There might be three people in the world who have tufts of hair that do such an amazing thing, and Tariq Ali, for whatever his faults and virtues, is not one them. Lukacs was probably looking for a sufficiently showy word to describe hair and muddled up “sprig” and “lock.” Nice try.
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Lukacs also displays his linguistic flexibility elsewhere in this issue, since his Daily colleagues have given him a unique opportunity to respond to his critics in The Letters area. [Note to the Public Editor: The Daily does not usually publish authors' retorts to readers' letters like in monthly or biweekly periodicals such as the New York Review of Books, or The New Republic. The last thing The Daily needs a new mechanism of self-protectiveness.] Lukacs ends his retort:
What remains obvious from the proper translation in its proper context, is that Ahmadinejad was not pledging war, never mind “incitement to genocide.”
Actually, in context, Ahmadinejad exactly said Iran and the Muslim world were currently in a war with Israel that would not end until it was out of the Middle East, so he didn’t have to “pledge” a war, just reaffirm it:
[...] the current war in Palestine is the front line of the Islamic world against the World of Arrogance [the West], and will determine the fate of Palestine for centuries to come. [...] Is it possible that an [Islamic] front allows another front [i.e. country] to arise in its [own] heart? This means defeat, and he who accepts the existence of this regime [i.e. Israel] in fact signs the defeat of the Islamic world. [...] The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.
About two weeks ago, the President of Iran noted that his nation hates killing but reaffirmed the war as ongoing and necessary. At the annual Al-Quds Conference–instituted by Khomeini to remind the Muslim world that Israel is “the Little Satan” and the United States “the Great Satan”–Ahmadinejad told us,
The Iranian people and other peoples will not stop until all of Palestinian territory [including what is called "Israel"] is liberated. They [world powers] should not think that the Iranian nation and other nations in the region will take off their hands off the throat of the Zionists and their supporters.
But, OK, here are two situations:
(A) An Arab military commander in East Sudan gives a speech and passes out literature to his soldiers where he promotes the eventual killing of ALL black Darfurians who want to remain close to West Sudan–every man, woman and child.
(B) An Arab military commander in East Sudan gives a speech and passes out literature to his soldiers where he promotes violence to drive out of Sudan and Chad VIRTUALLY ALL black Darfurians who want to remain close to West Sudan. He says they should move to the Congo, or preferably to the U.S., Europe and Canada [--"Give these vast lands of Canada and Alaska to them to create a country for themselves"]. He tells his friends in Khartoum that they should give long-range missiles and training to Arabs around West Sudan in preparation for war.
Q: Which situation, A or B, would constitute “incitement to genocide”?
If you said, “Both,” you would be correct according to the UN, EU and general understanding of the word “genocide.” However, according to Lukacs’ response to Monday’s letters, the second scenario does not count as “incitement to genocide” … and what’s happening in Darfur does not count as “genocide.”
… On the front page, The Daily has a story about McGill’s Faculty of Law hosting the Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide. The Conference missed out, since Lukacs wasn’t invited to present on how he likes to describe the world without fidelity to what words mean. If we could just do that, our view of the world and its many problems would become simpler.
