Infinitive Splitter

This is true: I watched Babel last night and liked it a lot, but I did not learn until this evening that the film’s non-English parts are meant to be subtitled.

Before I get to the explanation, though, here’s a section of Genesis 11, which, like most of the Bible, I had never read, and which contains the story of Babel:

[5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
[6] And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
[7] Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
[8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
[9] Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
[10] These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood:
[11] And Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters.
[12] And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah:
[13] And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.
[14] And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber:
[15] And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters.
[16] And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg:
[17] And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.

It goes on like that for a while. Like I said, I’m no expert on the Bible, but I don’t really see how a book whose first chapter comprises interminable lists of implausible genealogies got to be the best-selling volume in all of human history. I didn’t get past the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code, either, though, so maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, here’s my story of Babel.

When the DVD started and no subtitles appeared during the first non-English conversation, I thought it was interesting but not cause for alarm. The movie is called Babel, so I expected some language-related confusion.

As I got into it, I was surprised by both how much untranslated dialogue there was and how much of it I could understand anyway. Communication is whatever percent nonverbal, and I was following all of the stories despite not understanding any of the words. In a film whose characters have trouble making themselves clear to each other because of language differences, I thought it was neat that language differences between the characters and me didn’t turn out to be much of an obstacle. That made the movie better than anyone had given it credit for, I thought.

Some scenes felt a little weird, including some long conversations involving an isolated, deaf Japanese girl, her father and another man. But in those cases I thought that the filmmakers were taking risks with the audience; I never guessed that I was missing something I shouldn’t.

So it was with some surprise to find out this evening, during my second conversation of the day about the film, that the movie is meant to be subtitled. (The first discussion lasted about 20 minutes and never clued me in.)

I don’t plan to watch with the subtitles. The story details that tipped me off seemed kind of gratuitous and I don’t think knowing more of them would add to the experience.

The LA Times editorializes today about the silliness of recent efforts to force dictionaries to remove entries that corporations deem offensive — most recently by McDonald’s, which bristled at the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of McJob:

The dictionary currently defines the popular term as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector.” David Fairhurst, “chief people officer” for McDonald’s in Northern Europe, called for a new definition to “reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime.”

Presumably, Fairhurst is semi-joking. Unless he’s some kind of Orwellian villain, he can’t possibly believe he can, by decree, get people to hear “McJob” and think “awesome gig!”

If McDonald’s really wants to change the public perception of employment in its restaurants, perhaps it could begin with improving the conditions of employment in its restaurants. This may yield only limited improvement, since fast-food production will never come with the benefits of, say, software development for Google, but a PR campaign and some strongly worded letters to dictionary editors certainly won’t suffice.

I’m observing St. Patrick’s Day in the traditional way this afternoon — drinking a few cases of Guinness with the roommates while the college basketballers do their thing on TV — and something about the situation reminded me that the latest Oxford English Dictionary quarterly additions were due out. Some of the more entertaining rookies:

• asswipe, n.
• cryptozoology, n. (the search for animals that are rumored to exist)
• fricking, adj. and adv.
• fuck-off, n.
• irritainment, n.
  
• shit-eater, n.
• tighty-whities, n.

I’ve written about this twice before, and I’ll certainly do it again, since the additions provide such a great window into our societal development.

The English major in the room noted that it seems to have been a downward trend.

This is how the home screen for ESPN’s 2007 Men’s [NCAA Basketball] Tournament Challenge game looked yesterday afternoon (I saved it because I had a feeling I’d be writing about it today). Read it carefully:

There are more than 3 million active brackets in the game, and players are allowed up to five entries, which means at least 600,000 people (but probably more like 2 million, since lots of people only do one) have been repeatedly logging in through that page for almost 24 hours.

Here’s how it looks this morning:

As you can see, they have recognized the problematic text but made only two changes: “see if you will win $10,000″ in the first sentence and boss’s to boss’ in the last one. The first change helps, but still doesn’t totally fix the sentence; the second change is wrong.

Nobody cares, of course, unless their (my) brackets aren’t doing well and they (I) need something to complain about.

Big news today is Khalid Sheik Mohammad’s claim of responsibility for 31 acts of terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks, which he claims to have masterminded “from A to Z,” and the decapitation of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; the New York Times has a list:

1. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
2. The 9/11 attacks, from A to Z.
3. The shoe bomber operation to down two American planes.
4. A 2002 shooting in Kuwait that killed an American marine.
5. The Bali nightclub bombing that killed more than 180 in 2002.
6. Planning attacks against several prominent American skyscrapers.
7. Planning to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers.
8. Planning to bomb the Panama Canal.
9. Planning to assassinate several former American presidents, including President Carter.
10. Planning to bomb several New York landmarks, including the stock exchange and suspension bridges.

…and more.

The Times’ front-page story notes that it is “not clear how many of Mr. Mohammed’s expansive claims were legitimate,” and, indeed, the first thing I thought when NPR awoke me with the news this morning was how similar this sounds to the scene at the end of the first season of The Wire where, in order to avoid the death penalty (and help his friends) Wee-Bey falsely confesses to a series of open murders.

Khalid Sheik Mohammad is a preemptively convicted enemy combatant in a military tribunal and obviously not a candidate for a plea bargain to reduce his sentence, but how is major skepticism not everyone’s first reaction?