Thursday, August 12, 2004

Loves Me Like Iraq My fluency in Arabic is confined to a single sentence, to be recited only under duress: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."  It's debatable whether this would cut me any slack with Islamic terrorists or kidnappers once they discovered a Jewish name on my passport. I do, however, know that Arabic, like Hebrew, is equipped with relatively few vowel sounds (compared to, say, French) and, in fact, the vowels are usually omitted in the written language. Perhaps this accounts for the variety of pronunciations I continue to hear on radio and cable news broadcasts too numerous to cite. For example, is it the Mahdi or Mehdi Army?  And is its leader's last name Sadr (pronounced like solder, a popular item at Home Depot), Satyr (a competitor in x-rated events at the ancient Greek Olympics), or Sader (a variant of Sadist)? Is the nation's former leader called Suh-daam (rhymes with The Bomb), Sodom (along with Gomorrah, part of the Biblical Axis of Evil), or Sa-damn (rhymes with Sha-zam!, an apocryphal Middle Eastern incantation popularized by Jim Nabors)? Finally, is the name of the nation in question Ee-Rock, or, as so many in the military and most southerners say it, Eye-Rack (an opthamologist's storage space)? A Modest Proposal: Anyone who uses the latter pronunciation should be immediately discharged from military service.  That's as workable an exit strategy as anything I've heard from Bush or Kerry. 2:59:20 PM