Well, the Base Realignment and Closure report came out on Friday. If you live in a military town, you have by now learned what will happen at your local base. Some cities and states will make out like bandits; some will get taken by the same bandits. Maine and Connecticut, in particular, will be hard-hit; Maryland is crowned king.
Of course, much still remains unknown here. This is merely the DOD's recommendations. If they had their way, this is what they'd do. But we now embark on a four-month process whereby the BRAC commission will visit all the bases that are to be closed or substantially realigned and decide whether they think the DOD's recommendations are any good.
I don't know about this. As little respect as I have for the military's ability to differentiate good from bad, I have even less respect for the ability of a politically selected group of people who don't know anything about the military to do so.
(Readers may make whatever logical leaps they wish from that statement and rest assured that I probably intended them.)
Folks from Maine and Connecticut can rest assured that there will be quite a fight to save their bases. And the true cynics among us can argue that BRAC may not even happen at all if Congress has any say in it. Which they do, in a round about sort of way.
As a public service for those not aware, I'll close this post with the actual order of events for the BRAC process. But first, I would like to note that the Air Force, on their discussion of BRAC, has managed to turn the word "robust" into a verb. I'm not a linguist, but, even if this isn't the first time this usage has ever occured, it is a stupid usage and should be discontinued.
Anyway. Forthwith, the way forward:
July 1: the Comptroller General sends a cost/benefit analysis of the DOD's BRAC list to Congress for their... review.
September 8: the BRAC Commission sends a report to the prez detailing how the DOD's BRAC list makes them feel and what the president should do about it.
September 23: The president gives a thumbs up or thumbs down on the Commission's version of the BRAC report.
45 days later: The BRAC findings become legally binding, and work begins.
Of course, if the Prez gives the thumbs down, then nothing happens. And, if he says yes, then the Congress can enact a joint resolution in the next 45 days saying they disagree.
3 comments:
As a sort of linguist myself, I can say that verbing of "robust" has been happening for a while, along with a lot of other nouny verbs and other grammatical class-ish alterationitivity.
If you google "robusting" you'll find all sorts of instances, including a US News & World Report article suggesting that it's a buzzword on the up for 1995. I don't want to risk inserting a link but you can find it by googling "the language that will shape our world in 1995".
I'm not sure why "strengthening" isn't good enough, though.
Interesting...and yet, still disturbing. I'm not a fan of "verbing," though as long as it's a going phenomenon I guess the one verbed word I can't complain about is "verb." To verb: to make a verb out of a word that rational people would not seek to make a verb out of.
I don't get it. Do we not have enough verbs already? Did "robust" need to be verbed? I can't but think so.
Of course as you'd expect we military types are among the worst at this sort of thing. Military Linguistics should be a masters' level class.
I am reminded of Calvin and Hobbes. Quoth Calvin, "Verbing weirds language."
We have plenty of verbs, but the number is growing (I guess they're replacing verbs like "fletch", "bonify" and "think" which are becoming obsolete). The technical term for this is "deadjectival verb" (ie, a verb derived from an adjective), and its companion the "denominal verb" (google these for some frightenly technical Linguistics papers).
Why is "robust" so bad as a verb? I think it's probably because a lot of deadjectival verbs require some sort of derivational morpheme to make them into verbs (e.g. strengthEN, beautIFY), and those without them look bad. Would you have responded so negatively if they used "robustify"? It might be unwieldy but to me it's a perfectly good verb (by the way, "strengthing" and "beautying" both show up on Google, not always by native English speakers though).
cheers,
Dunce
Post a Comment