New Avignon Captivity? General Schoonmaker. The Pope is still trying to make amends to Moslems for his remarks about violence and Islam. Alas, he made them in French, which is apparently the diplomatic language of the Vatican. Why?
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Many years ago, when I was young, I worked in the typing pool of the United Nations, English section, during a General Assembly. There I met a Franco-Ontarian who was fluently bilingual but worked in the English unit. I got a letter in French that I asked him to translate, and he had to laugh out loud at the deliberate vagueness in the letter. He observed, "That is why French is the language of diplomacy. You can never pin anyone down."
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But diplomacy should be about not evasion but a frank exchange of views to eliminate misunderstanding. French has not been the language of diplomacy in most of the world for decades. Rather, English, the most widely spoken international language, has assumed that role. It's time for the Vatican to come into the 21st Century and employ English in its international communications.
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General Schoonmaker. It seems that a Schoonmaker has become U.S. Army Chief of Staff, and has said the Army needs more money. I had not heard of a Peter Schoonmaker until today, tho I had heard, a few months ago, that there is a General Schoonmaker. I suppose we are very, very remotely related, because the bulk of Schoonmakers in America all derive from the same gent, who moved from Europe to Nieuw Netherland in about 1653.
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I don't know how he pronounces the name. Lou Dobbs on CNN said it the way my family says it, Skúen.maek.er, but a Senator he was interviewing said Skúen.mok.er (which is also the way one of my cousins says it). I think most of us say Skúen.maek.er and hope that General Schoonmaker says it that way. It will make my life a little easier if the name becomes well known so people stop mispronouncing it and I can stop having to spell it all the time.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,708 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:26 PM