Mikhalkov’s brown nose

Nikita Mikhalkov, cinematographer, boasts about how he rubs shoulders with the high and mighty, and what enormous mutual respect there is between him and Mr President.

It is my belief that God himself sent us Putin. Yes, Putin was sent by God! Putin gave me respect for Russia again!… Incidentally, when I filmed “Twelve”… a brutally honest movie… But I filmed it as a man who is true to his relationship  with Putin. God forbid my relations with Putin and Medvedev should affect my art! If they said just one word to me [to influence my art], the friendship would be over! The whole point of our trust is that I can tell either of them exactly what I think, at any time.  I can do that anytime I like, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

A few years ago Putin, when addressing the nation, quoted Ilyin. Well, that was an idea he got from me: seven years earlier, it was I who told him about Ilyin, the great Russian philosopher. Likewise, today you have Medvedev quoting Stolypin…

But that’s of course not to say that I’m the one who’s educating them.

Can’t you just picture him doing a “S dnem rozhndenia tebiaaa” — “Happy birthday, Mr Presideeeeeent!” —  à la Marilyn Monroe? I can. His two greatest contributions to film will come posthumously, when he (a) stops filming and (b) becomes the subject of a great farce in which a megalomaniac apparatchik poses as an artist and gets away with it.

The interesting thing is that the interview from which I have translated the quotes above used to be at the Izvestia site, but the URL now points to a completely unrelated article, and the original interview isn’t to be found on izvestia.ru. Somebody there correctly decided that, however good Mikhalkov’s intentions, too much brown-nosing is, well, just too much. It looks bad, it smells bad. So they removed it, presumably in hopes of limiting the damage to the reputation of the brown-noser and the brown-nosee.

The link you see at the top is a re-posting. Thank goodness for the Internet.

Astroturfers caught in the act

After posting fake software endorsements masquerading as consumer reviews, being caught, and then dragged before the Federal Trade Commission in the USA (who knew the US government still has a functioning regulatory function?), a company called Reverb quickly buckled, but put a brave face on it, the spokeswoman saying:  “Rather than continuing to spend time and money arguing, and laying off employees to fight what we believed was a frivolous matter, we settled this case and ended the discussion,” she said.

That’s like the pickpocket getting caught and then saying, “I didn’t steal your wallet, this is my wallet! But since I don’t want to waste any more time in pointless recrimination and create more bad blood, I’ll let you keep it and we can both just forget about this very unpleasant incident.”

In Today’s Financial Times, Chris Giles writes about the weekend G20 meeting, saying that fancy language is being used in an attempt to “make up for a lack of gravitas”.

What he means, I think, is “a lack of substance”. (I think anyone who thinks about writing the word gravitas, then thinks hard about an alternative, and uses it instead, should get a cooky. Anyone who uses it in spoken speech should just be gently restrained and taken away.)

Essentially, it seems that people wanted to hide the lack of substance by putting in strong-looking words like “very” and “very significantly”. The Brits took exception because the latter is ungrammatical, according to Giles. Their suggestion was “very substantially”.

Either way, those are weasel words:  you want to indicate that you’re serious about something, but you don’t want to say just how serious (100%? 2%? ) so you just say you’re “very serious”.

Giles also points out another weasel word:  “appropriate”. If you want to say that you will always be faithful to your wife, but you’re worried that you may slip, and upon being caught you don’t want to be hung by your bollocks, you can say “always faithful, in an appropriate manner”.  So that if you get caught, you can claim that spousal inattention, hormone imbalance, domestic squabbles or whatever meant you couldn’t be faithful in an appropriate manner.

He also points out the “‘Was it worth it?’ test”.  (For someone writing about language, he really doesn’t have much of a gift for naming things.) This test appears to mean:  does the communiqué have anything to say that will lead to action, or change? I.e. will people be leaving the G20 thinking about the things they will have to change when they get back to their home country?

But you have to be careful about reading too much into the wording, at these international meetings. The author claims that the French minister, Christine Lagarde, was the only one who acknowledged that there were serious differences between the participants, as she said that there had been “a debate”. But of course in French “débat” often just means “discussion”. While she may speak excellent English, there’s a strong chance that when she said “debate” she meant “débat”, i.e. she meant to say “discussion”.

Hello world!

Words can be used to say things.

Notwithstanding the above, where circumstances justify and hierarchical responsibilities with respect to one’s engagement so dictate (full disclosure: I have been in the employment of international organis/zations, IOs, in a linguistic capacity for a bit over 10 years), alternative communication strategies may be implemented for optimising the ratio of overall effect produced versus actual content.

You decide! But be warned:  choose wrong, and it’ll be tough on ya.

Let’s see what kind of BS we can dig up, shall we?

Start with a valuable service provided by the BS-meter at <grani.ru> (in Russian). Read it while it’s hot! If it gets any hotter, it’ll get closed down.