Adam Jacot de Boinod is a seeker of obscure but colorful English expressions. It all began when he was working for a BBC program called QI with Stephen Fry. He was asked to find interesting words beginning with an A. So he picked up an Albanian-English dictionary and found 27 words for moustache and 27 words for eyebrow. That research eventually spawned two books, The Meaning of Tingo and Toujours Tingo. The two books list foreign words and phrases for which there are no direct translations, and they are favorites of this podcast, especially as source material for the Eating Sideways segment. Of course, books that list words for which there are no English equivalents would seem to suggest that English has some deficiencies. And it does, but it also has more than its fair share of wonderfully inventive, if obscure, expressions. That’s where de Boinod’s new book, The Wonder of Whiffling, comes in. Read it, and you’ll know whether you prefer to muppet shuffle or dwile flunk. You’ll know if you are a pozzy-wallah. Some of expressions are brand new, others long gone. Some are from Britain, but many hail from former colonial outposts where English is re-invented with the help of local languages and customs. It’s almost impossible to choose a favorite, so I’ll pick three:

Charientism (c.1589): an insult so gracefully veiled as to seem unintended.

Bend-down plaza (Jamaican English): a row of roadside peddlers, specializing in items that are hard to get in stores, because of import restrictions.

Dulosis (Greek) : the enslavement of ants by ants.

Also in this week’s pod, the meaning of the word peace. Barack Obama is the latest public figure to tweak its definition when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and made the case for “just war”. His arguments weren’t especially new. But in making them as he collected the world’s foremost peace prize, Obama forced us to question our our settled sense of what peace is. He invited us to re-imagine it — or at least as it presents itself in the 21st century — as something that might be achieved only after vanquishing those who oppose peace. Before Obama got to talking about just wars, he acknowledged that he was no Gandhi or King . But he also pointed out that those figures were not heads of state when they espoused their theories of non-violence. Did Obama’s speech echo Psalm 85 and the painting on the left, the Kiss of Justice and Peace? (photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto) Or did it re-cast peace as the bastard offspring of war and justice? After we hear from Obama in the podcast, The World’s Alex Gallafent takes us through several alternative definitions of peace.

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• BBC coverage
• Jeb Sharp put the President’s award into historical perspective (Oct 9)
• Text of the President’s acceptance speech
• The award ceremony in pictures

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  As we mentioned earlier, President Obama’s speech today in Oslo examined the idea of “a just war.”  We’re going to talk about that with political philosopher, Michael Walzer.  He’s Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  Thanks very much for being with us.

MICHAEL WALZER:  Thank you for having me.

WERMAN:  Now, what I heard today, Professor, was a talk about the relationship between war and peace; and that war is sometimes the way you get to peace.  Let’s first listen to Mr. Obama’s central theme:  “I do not bring with me, today, a definitive solution to the problems of way.  What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago.  And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.  We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth:  ‘We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.  There will be times when nations, acting individually or in concert, will find the use of force not only necessary, but morally justified.’”  Professor Walzer, you have spent a lot of time considering the justifications for war.  How do you respond to Mr. Obama’s comments in Oslo about “just war,” and peace in the world today?

WALZER:  Well, he’s certainly right to say that sometimes (this is obvious to anyone who grew-up as I did, during World War II); sometimes, the way to a just peace is through a terrible war.  I think his defense of the use of force, within a lot of constraints which he talked about, is especially important in Europe, where even more than in the United States, there is a growing reluctance to use force at all—even in cases like Bosnia or Kosovo or Darfur, where it would seem, to me, obviously necessary.

WERMAN:  I mean, the notion that we cannot eradicate violent conflicts (those were his words) in our lifetimes.  I mean, that was something that really struck me.  I mean, a lot of history is, as you know, is “history repeating itself;” and I guess I’d want to know, “Why isn’t it possible to see violent conflict end in our lifetimes?”

WALZER: That’s not an easy question, but there have been many, many lifetimes in which it wasn’t possible to end violent conflict.  We are not “the first lifetime” in which that possibility doesn’t exist.  There are people in the world ready to use force on behalf of religious crusades or ideological crusades or imperial ambition, and those people have to be opposed if there is ever to be a [SOUNDS LIKE] decent peace; and that need just repeats itself, and is likely to go on repeating itself.

WERMAN:  Well that dovetails nicely into another clip from Mr. Obama’s speech, Michal Walzer.  Let’s listen to it:  “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.  For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world.  A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.  Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.  To say that force may sometimes be necessary, is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man; and the limits of reason.  I raise this point …  I begin with this point, because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today—no matter what the cost; and at times, this is joined by a [SOUNDS LIKE] reflex of suspicion of America, the world’s sole, military superpower.”  So, Michael Walzer, I mean you were alluding to this earlier.  Mr. Obama is speaking about when military action is justified; and two things come to mind–the current fight in Afghanistan, for which Mr. Obama committed 30,000 more troops last week; and I also think of Rwanda in 1994, when the U. S., and a lot of the world did not show-up to help.  It feels like this speech is trying to kind-of set a benchmark for what is justified; but how do you determine when military action is justified or not?

WALZER:  Well, the primary determination is one of self defense.  The first example of “just war” that comes to everyone’s mind is self defense, and it’s modeled on domestic analogy.  If somebody attacks me on the street, and I fight back defending myself, that is a miniature version of a just war.  And I think Afghanistan fits that model.  But one of the occasions that President Obama was referring to (and that you just referred to, as the example of Rwanda), is the case of when people are being massacred—when mass murder is occurring inside the borders of a country—we are not defending ourselves, we are defending other human beings who are at risk.  And that’s a new doctrine—the Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention, which implies that sovereignty does not extend, as I think it obviously should not extend, to mass murder.

WERMAN:  How strange is it, do you think, that this is a person; a man receiving a peace prize, and he’s making a speech talking about the moral justifications for war?

WALZER:  Well he had to do that, since he had just announced the extension of a military effort.  But it’s also the right thing to do, and I think especially-so in Europe today, to tell people that if you want peace in the Balkans or peace in East Africa or Southeast Asia, you may have to use force to get there.”

WERMAN:  So you don’t think it was just a coincidence that he was in Oslo?  This was really intended for European ears?

WALZER:  I think the speech he made (in fact, he said so explicitly when he talks about the aversion to the use of force), it’s intended for those European countries whom he is also asking to send more troops to Afghanistan.

WERMAN:  Political Philosopher, Michael Walzer, is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  He’s also the Co-Editor of the quarterly, Dissent, and the author of Just and Unjust Wars, among other books.  Thanks very much for speaking with us.

WALZER:  Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Romanian born German writer, Herta Muller, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Muller grew up in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu and in the shadow of World War II. She later emigrated to West Germany. Her work reflects those experiences depicting what the Nobel committee called the landscape of the dispossessed. The World’s Jeb Sharp has this profile.

JEB SHARP: You may not have heard of Herta Muller but she’s well known in the German speaking world. Her life and writing span many of the most terrifying experiences in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of what makes her so interesting is that she’s German but not German. She grew up a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority.

BRIGID HAINES: She writes in German but she always says that her writing is very influenced by the Romanian language in way more poetic and has lots of lovely metaphors which she incorporates into German.

SHARP: That’s Brigid Haines, head of modern languages at Swansea University in the UK.

HAINES: Her father was an SS officer and that’s something that’s always disturbed her because she never quite knew what he did in the war. So she had to deal with the legacy of the German guilt. But at the same time she was growing up in a totalitarian regime.

SHARP: And not just any totalitarian regime but that of the hard line Nicolai Ceausescu. Not surprisingly one of Muller’s big themes is dictatorship. By the time she was a student she was in trouble with the authorities as an intellectual and dissenter. Later she was fired from her job as a translator because she refused to collaborate with the Romanian secret police. Muller draws continually on her life in Romania in her writing says Haines.

HAINES: This is an experience that she can’t leave behind. It’s taken hold of her and she writes extraordinarily well about it.

SHARP: Haines got to know Muller a few years ago when she was a writer in residence at Swansea. She says she was great with the students especially in bringing to life what it was like to leave Romania and come to the west – in her case Berlin in the late 1980s.

HAINES: One of her books was reviewed in Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, and she wanted copies of this review. And so she went out and bought 20 copies of Die Zeit. What she didn’t know was that you can photocopy in the west. Because in her experience the only photocopiers in the country, in Romania, were owned by the secret police. She’s a very good ambassador for … . Well for keeping alive the sense of horror and terror and the lasting trauma of dictatorship.

SHARP: But what sets Muller apart is her use of language. She writes novels, essays, poems, and even creates collages out of words and pictures. Poetic is the word that comes up most to describe even her prose. Lyn Marven of the University of Liverpool says her German is infused with Romanian imagery.

LYN MARVEN: The novel that was translated as The Passport is actually called Humans are a Pheasant in the World. And the pheasant in German, she says the pheasant is; well you can picture a pheasant. You know it’s proud. It struts its stuff. It walks in front of cars on the road. It rules the place. But in fact in Romanian the pheasant is a loser. And so it’s one that can’t get off the ground. And that, the dual language, you know the two different backgrounds and that to me seemed very striking. That on the one hand you’ve got this beautiful bird but on the other hand it can’t fly.

SHARP: Marven says Muller often draws her metaphors from nature and the countryside. Her best known work in English is The Land of Green Plums.

MARVEN: The Land of Green Plums uses the image of the unripe plums as something that makes her feel sick. It might even be dangerous. And that’s a metaphor for the knowledge that’s inside her about her father’s past.

SHARP: Marven and other fans are celebrating Muller’s prize today despite a bit of grumbling that the Nobel literature committee is too Eurocentric.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.