Notes & Asides - Brief Article - Column

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: In a recent column, you wrote: "The Taliban has taken unmarried women detected in pregnancy and buried them to neck level before execution." Your sentence reminded me of an unrelated problem with English.

To mean "unmarried pregnant women," why is English so infecund as to need three words? You appear to have grappled with "unmarried pregnant women" before conceiving five words, "unmarried women detected in pregnancy," as if you could avoid propagating adjectives by begetting precision.

In the weaker sex of both genders, you may have created righteousness for unmarried women detected in pregnancy, illegitimacy for unmarried women detected as pregnant, and pariahdom for unmarried pregnant women.

James V. Stallings

Sikeston, Mo.

Dear Mr. Stallings: Why should you not need three words to designate three conditions (one of them an attribute)? 1) It is a she; 2) She is unmarried; 3) She is pregnant. Now if she is ostracized, that is the activity of others, she being the object of the ostracism. The weakness of the sex implies nothing, unless you want to get into the unostracizeability of pregnant men, and that ends you up with pregnant men in your calculations.

I would give up, if I were you. I do.

Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: William Dornburgh asked (Dec. 17), "If Arabs are Semites, why is the term 'anti-Semitism' applicable only to Jews?" Your reply, "Just usage," is wrong.

Wilhelm Marr coined the term "anti-Semitism" in Germany in 1879 to give traditional anti-Jewish bigotry a more "scientific"-sounding, and therefore more acceptable, name. In origin and subsequent usage, it had and has nothing to do with Arabs.

The term Semite was introduced, also in Germany, a century earlier, to identify a family of related languages-Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and others-not a people. The scholar A. L. von Schlozer derived it from the Biblical Shem, one of Noah's sons. Genetic testing indicates that Jews in general and Israelis in particular share a common ancestry with Syrian and Palestinian Arabs. But by conquest, forced marriage, and minority-to-majority assimilation, the direction has been one-way: Many non-Jews in today's Middle East have Jewish ancestors; few Jews have Arab progenitors. Historically, religiously, socially, and culturally, Arabs and Jews are not the same people.

At the anti-Israel, anti-American hate fest known as the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban last year, Arab-Islamic delegates attempted to diminish the impact of the term "antisemitism" (since there is no "Semitism," the hyphen and capital are misleading) by redefining it to include alleged "Zionist anti-Arabism."

Just usage, indeed!

Sincerely,

Eric L. Rozenman

Fairfax, Va.

Dear Mr. Rozenman: Very interesting, and many thanks. But what does it have to do with usage?

Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: Mr. Joe Kunkel (Dec. 3) suggests we give a portion of California to the Israelis for their New Israel in order to end the squabbling in the Middle East.

A great idea, but he thinks small. I say, let's give them all of California, even put up a sort of Chinese Great Wall along the borders. That would end much of the squabbling, both in the Middle East and in our own country, and raise the collective IQ of our remaining 49 states as well. And rather than Santa Barbara for the New Jerusalem, I suggest Berkeley or Hollywood. If this works, we could request the U.N. to move its headquarters to our former West Coast. We could subsidize the moving costs through voluntary fund-raising in the remaining states. Hell, North Carolina alone would likely raise 50 percent of the money.

T. R. Busard

Bradenton, Fla.

-WFB

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