Sometimes the bureaucratic hoop jumping that comes with trying to fill a simple need becomes its own hurdle and curse. The result? The kind of egg-on-the-face reaction that produces the inevitable snickering sure to accompany this article: http://rss.thesmokinggun.com/documents/bizarre/justice-department-seeks-ebonics-experts.
Words mean something, however. And inflating terms to give them greater legitimacy comes with a price. A garbageman is now a sanitation engineer. A dog catcher is an animal control officer (apparently without even working up from private or corporal). And a contractor who must occasionally come up with a way to decipher urban street slang picked up via wiretap is now a "linguist" specializing in "Ebonics." Balderdash.
To say that Ebonics is its own language because it follows a predictable grammar is a deceptive half-truth. Every human utterance recognizable to some fellow human does the same. Descriptive linguistics taught this lesson long ago. But this does not make a slang variation of Standard American English any more a separate language that it would for the halting speech of two-year-olds or immigrants from one country who impart unrecognizable pronunciations to common English words that only their in-group readily comprehends. None of these variations is a separate language. They may qualify as a dialect or a creole or even a pidgin, if one wants to be precise. Nor are its decoders "linguists." They are translators or interpreters.
Somewhere, beneath the controversy, there's a poor DEA agent trying to get the resources to get a necessary job done, and none of this nonsense is helping her. Imagine a DEA field agent trying to get approval to spend, say, $50 to have a streetwise kid of a shopkeeper help interpret some undecipherable passages of a recorded plot. Her boss tells the agent, "No. Go through the system." She then finds herself caught up in red tape and a labor-intensive swirl of contracting processes that force putting out a competitive bid for language translation services that become artificially inflated to the point of being only vaguely connected to the original requirement. The system is validated. Someone makes money on the deal. Meanwhile, the DEA agent has probably dipped into her lunch money to pay for the kid to deliver the needed information in real time in order to thwart a drug deal and accompanying shootout. Somewhere in this process, there is a tail wagging the dog it is supposed to serve.
- Nick Catrantzos
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Nick Catrantzos + Tom Goff
- All Secure
- NICK CATRANTZOS is the lead author of the All Secure website and is the emeritus security director for a large public organization. He has also managed security aspects of corporate takeovers, response to international hostage situations, and finding and keeping secrets. He has been board certified in security management, licensed as a private investigator, and certified as an incident commander. He worked as a case officer for a discreet branch of public service. He protected stealth technology at Lockheed and, later, as a consulting security director for both Kroll and Control Risks, he assisted executives with workplace violence cases and with protecting VIPs and critical assets globally in volatile areas. Nick's partner, TOM GOFF, was a captain in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve and has a law degree from the University of California at Davis. He is a former reporter for Fortune Magazine, was senior editor at New York Magazine and Esquire, and has provided crisis and communications counsel to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, including Lockheed, ARCO, Microsoft, Nissan, and Sony Pictures.