Tuesday, March 23, 2004

The International
A redeeming feature of the New York Times is the weekly column On Language penned by William Safire. This past Sunday he wrote about the nonargument over "outsourcing":
Forget international. This soporific modifier has been rejected by naming committees not on ideological grounds but because it is too long a word to fit in a one-column headline. It remains in old and revered institutions, like the International Monetary Fund and the International House of Pancakes, but is not being used in the newest nomenclature.
The International Socialist Organization comes to mind. They've been compared to Star Trek's Borg, the cybernetic species whose MO is to "assimilate" other species into the "collective."

The Swedish sextet The (International) Noise Conspiracy rocks pretty hard.

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