While apologizing to someone this morning for having inadvertently but carelessly said something that wasn’t true, I caught myself about to use the word “misspoke” and then thought — Hang on, what does that word actually mean?

I realized that the word had come to mind because of Hillary Clinton’s having said that she “misspoke” when she claimed that she’d had to run across a tarmac airfield in order to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.

I then realized instantly that “misspoke” is a weasel word. Weasel words are derived from the weasel’s habit of sucking the contents out of an egg without destroying its shell, and are

deliberately misleading or ambiguous language used to avoid making a straightforward statement while giving the appearance that such has been made. Weasel words are used to deceive, distract, or manipulate an audience. (Wikipedia)

It’s a perfectly valid word in some contexts, of course. We all misspeak from time to time, by which I mean that we mean to say one thing but actually say another. In talking about something that happened last decade I say that it happened in the 1980’s, forgetting that we’re now in the 2000’s. Or I say “increase” when I clearly meant to say “decrease” or “Germany” when I meant to say France. Misspeakings are generally easy to catch, and usually another participant in a conversation can step in and correct the misstatement — because it’s obvious what was intended.

But what does it mean when someone claims to have “misspoken” in saying that she had to run across the tarmac in order to dodge sniper fire, when in fact she walked calmly across the tarmac months into a ceasefire and participated in a ceremony that included a young child? This is no slip of the tongue. To be generous it’s a gross exaggeration (the unlikely possibility of sniper fire did actually exist) and at worst it’s an outright lie intended to convince her audience that she has been tested under fire (literally) and that she has experience that she in fact lacks.

And as for the supposed retraction, in which she confessed only to having “misspoken” — that seems like the perfect example of a weasel word, intended to convey that her gross exaggeration (or lie) was merely a slip of the tongue, embarrassing, perhaps — like calling your wife by the name of an ex-girlfriend — but at heart innocently done.

The word “misspoke” has now in fact become the standard weasel word for politicians wishing to confess their sins while making it appear that they haven’t really done anything wrong.

Rudy Giuliani “misspoke” when he said he was at Ground Zero “as often, if not more than the workers” and “I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to.” (He wasn’t).

John McCain “misspoke” when he declared that his ability to walk freely in the marketplace was a sign of a significant improvement in security in Iraq — not mentioning the heavy security that surrounded him.

It’s time that politicians were challenged on the use of this particular weasel word.

Nick Kristof writes in the Times:

A Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee found that the sums spent on the Iraq war each day could enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start or give Pell Grants to 153,000 students to attend college. Or if we’re sure we want to invest in security, then a day’s Iraq spending would finance another 11,000 border patrol agents or 9,000 police officers.

Imagine the possibilities. We could hire more police and border patrol agents, expand Head Start and rehabilitate America’s image in the world by underwriting a global drive to slash maternal mortality, eradicate malaria and deworm every child in Africa.

All that would consume less than one month’s spending on the Iraq war.

At the risk of seeming to be obsessed with Obama, while looking for transcripts online I came across one where he mentioned that his given name, Barack, means “blessing” in Arabic.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to notice this, but that’s my daughter’s name as well. Maia’s birth name is “Bereket,” which also means “blessing” (in Amharic) as well as “abundance” or “gift.”

Michelle Malkin, the neoconservative blogger, and Maureen Dowd, the New York Times’ desperately cynical (and rather liberal) op-ed columnist have something in common today: both pass on misleading statements about Barack Obama’s use of the phrase “God Bless America.”

Malkin has a piece entitled “Newsflash: Obama says “God bless America,” in which she uncritically passes on a comment by the Baltimore Sun: “At a rally shortly before his press conference today, Obama uncharacteristically ended his remarks with the phrase ‘God bless America.’ ”

Dowd says “Newly alert to the perils of not seeming patriotic enough, he ended a speech in Pennsylvania the other morning with “God bless America!’ ”

These people have researchers. They have access to Lexis-Nexus and all those tools that allow you to examine everything that’s been said by anyone of note. So they must be right? Obama doesn’t end speeches by requesting God to bless the United States?

A couple of minutes on Google shows that they are inaccurate (or to put it another way, lazy and incompetent):

July 27, 2004: “Thank you, and God bless America.” (This was Obama’s keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention!)

Feb 25, 2005: May God Bless you, and may God Bless these United States of America.

January 20, 2008: May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.

Texas, March 5, 2008: “Thank you, San Antonio. God bless you. God bless America.”

Many of the transcripts available online are, moreover, the text of the prepared speech rather than what was actually said. It seems that Obama often invokes blessings spontaneously at the end of his talks, most often ending with “God Bless You.” This means that he may well have used that blessing more often than the available transcripts allow.

I rather like Obama’s unpremeditated approach; it suggests that his closing words are heart-felt rather than prepared and rote. I wish that for every time George Bush had mentioned God he had seriously reflected on what the New Testament actually teaches.

I often have critical words to say about Christians who practice hate or who distort the truth, but I’ll say now that I admire Obama’s Christianity, which strikes me as being compassionate and wise, and embodying the best of Christ’s teachings.

Arthur C. Clarke, Premier Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 90 - New York Times.

I wrote to a new friend in Sri Lanka just a couple of weeks ago, and expressed the surprise I experienced every time I read something about Arthur C. Clarke: “My god,” I would think. “Is he still alive?” Well, sadly, he is not.

When I was in my teens I became hooked on science fiction. The first I remember reading was Isaac Asimov, but i quickly took to Arthur C. Clarke’s writings. Rendezvous With Rama sticks with me as one of the most impressive accounts of an encounter with an alien craft imaginable. His Childhood’s End is another engrossing account of our species encountering an alien — and superior — civilization. I read and enjoyed many others, however, including more short stories than I can recall.

It strikes me that those two books, plus 2001: A Space Odyssey — based of course on his short story, The Sentinel — concerned imagined encounters with superior races. There was a sense of humility there: a sense of the unlikelihood that we are really that advanced a species, given the size and age of our universe. And there was also a sense of wonder: what would we learn about ourselves, how would we change, upon meeting another intelligent (more intelligent!) species?

Arthur C. Clarke was a staple of my juvenile reading, although I’m not sure whether I’d still enjoy his writing were I to return to it now with my undoubtedly more refined eye. But his work struck me at the time of reading as being a head above most of the other science fiction writing that I encountered. And he enlarged my world, and expanded my sense of what was possible. And he communicated a love of science. And I am grateful to him, and sad to hear that he has passed on at last.

After reading Obama’s speech on race, and hearing part of it as well

I was struck not only by his eloquence — his words seem to come from an earlier and better time — but by his balance and wisdom, and by the breadth and depth of his vision. I started as an Edwards supporter, thinking that John Edwards had the experience, the social compassion, the intelligence, and the charisma to be a fine leader of this nation, but I now think it would be a tremendous loss for the US to pass up the opportunity of having Obama as president.

This image (it’s by Adam Nieman / Science Photo Library) was on BoingBoing. It’s a great way of appreciating how few resources we have. We all (six billion of us) breathe this same air and drink that same water.

Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometers of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc.

Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

From Science Photo Library:

Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of water on Earth (left) and of air in the Earth’s atmosphere (right) shown as spheres (blue and pink). The spheres show how finite water and air supplies are. The water sphere measures 1390 kilometers across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometers. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometers across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense. Half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometres of the atmosphere.

I was away most of last week, helping out my wife’s grandpa while her father was on a trip to Canada. I had some internet access but much less time than usual, especially given that I had to keep making trips back home to take care of work. Oh, and I recorded a new CD — on the Six Element Practice. I’m hoping to launch that in May.

All things are impermanent, and I sometimes finding myself thinking that the US is doomed. First, a survey shows that US teenagers are woefully ignorant about basic history and literature (not knowing who Hitler was, for example), and then I consider that those badly-educated teens are shortly to join a workforce where they will underperform because they’re sleep-deprived, and there’s a good chance that those undereducated, underperforming workers will develop anti-rational and anti-intellectual attitudes, believing that ignorance and under-performing isn’t even a problem.

Truth is important. So’s sleep.

Here’s an interesting account of someone trying to step back from being online, in touch, and on call 27/7.

There are interesting lessons here for many people, including some meditators. It’s increasingly common these days for people to take laptops and cell phones on retreats. When I was a lad (even just ten years ago) it just wasn’t acceptable (not seen as necessary) for people to make phone calls when on retreat. Phones were definitely for emergencies. But now you get people disappearing “behind the bikeshed” in order to have chats or even to do work.

And as for laptops, although I’ve never taken one on a retreat I’ve been on as a retreatant, I have taken one when I’ve been teaching. In fact that seems to be pretty much standard these days — so many of our notes are in electronic form — but I think that more retreatants are taking their notebooks with them, which is a huge shame. Sometimes people are even checking email!

Making phone calls and being online on a retreat are just totally the opposite of what’s meant to be going on, which is an abandonment of the normal “opiates” of busyness and discursiveness that we use to keep from experiencing ourselves more deeply. But it’s getting harder and harder to convince people that it’s even possible to disconnect for a week or weekend. The same unacknowledged and untreated anxiety that drives them to be in touch 24/7 makes them think that something bad — something really, really bad — is going to happen if they’re out of contact.

There’s a level of magical thinking in there, of course, which takes the form of thinking that being in touch continually through electronic devices is going to keep everything all right. It’s certainly nothing quite as rational as “if my mother falls and breaks her hip I can drop everything and go to help her” because that could be achieved just as easily by giving the phone number of the retreat center as an emergency contact. The thinking seems to be more an unconscious assumption that the world will somehow run more smoothly if we’re in contact with it. In other words it’s egotism — the sense that we are so important to the running of the world that it can’t get by without us. It’s that egotism that gets fed by taking cellphones and laptops on retreat, and that’s why we need to unplug once in a while and just experience ourselves.