It is 38 degrees in Motihari this afternoon, the sun white and unrelenting above the bazaar, and I have been reading the cables from Washington. Heat of this kind has a useful effect on the mind: it strips away all but the essential. One cannot dress up a thought in this temperature, any more than one can dress up a corpse. The dust comes in at the windows. A boy outside is selling sugarcane juice for two rupees a glass. And in the wires from London and New York the same word, repeated like a prayer bead, is blockade.
The President of the United States has announced that he will not lift the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz "until a deal is made with Iran." The Iranian parliament's speaker, simultaneously, replies that there can be no negotiation "under the shadow of threats." Both men are, in their own languages, telling the truth. Both are also lying. This is the central feature of modern political speech: the sentence that means its opposite, the noun that conceals a verb, the soft euphemism wrapped around the iron object.
Consider the word blockade. In plain English it means: warships placed across a stretch of water so that other ships, full of grain or medicine or oil, cannot pass. People who would otherwise eat will not eat. Engines that would run will stop. The word blockade, however, has been replaced in much of the dispatches I have before me with the phrase naval pressure campaign, or simply with the elegant verb to interdict. An Iranian tanker has not been seized; it has been interdicted. This is precisely the operation Mr. Trump performs when he shoots a bird out of the sky and calls it conservation.
I read also that an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon took a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus and was photographed doing it. The Israeli military, faced with the photograph, "views with great severity" the soldier's actions. Mr. Netanyahu has expressed his "regret for any hurt caused to believers." Examine the construction of that sentence. It does not say: we are sorry that our soldier smashed your god. It says: we are sorry if you were hurt. The injury is relocated from the sledgehammer to the sensibilities of the offended. The statue itself, lying in pieces, is not mentioned. This is the perfect modern apology, and I commend it to the student of language as one might commend a particularly clean specimen to a student of anatomy.
Meanwhile in Hungary the incoming Prime Minister has stated that should Mr. Netanyahu visit Budapest, he will be arrested under the warrant of the International Criminal Court. Amnesty International has called Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump "predators" of human rights. The word is interesting. It is the word a child might use, and the report is the more powerful for it. After two decades of targeted operations and kinetic actions and enhanced interrogation, it is somehow refreshing to read a noun that smells of the jungle.
In Ukraine, where the war is now in its fifth year, soldiers are sending machines into the trenches in their place. Small armoured vehicles armed with rockets crawl forward; the operator sits in a cellar two kilometres back and watches a screen. In Beijing, a humanoid robot has just beaten the human world record for the half-marathon. I do not know if this is good news or bad news. I know only that the language already exists to make it sound good: the Ukrainian machines are force multipliers, the Beijing robot is a milestone in embodied intelligence. Neither phrase tells you that a man might soon be replaced in the trench and on the road, and that the men so replaced will need to eat.
I do not say this in the spirit of the village reactionary, who hates the railway because his grandfather hated it. I say only that when a thing is given a long Latinate name, you should ask what English word it is hiding. Force multiplier is hiding killer. Embodied intelligence is, at present, hiding very expensive toy. The honest description is always available, if anyone wishes to use it.
In London the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has told Parliament that he is furious at having been kept in the dark about Lord Mandelson's failure to obtain security clearance. The civil servants, he says, did not tell him. This is the modern version of the old defence: I was not informed. It used to be the property of corporals; it is now the property of Prime Ministers. Across the Atlantic, a Labor Secretary has resigned amid stories of drinking on the job and the spending of public money on private dinners. She is the third minister to leave Mr. Trump's cabinet in as many weeks. And in Cupertino, Mr. Tim Cook has stepped aside as the head of Apple, fifteen years after he took the chair from a dying man. He becomes Executive Chairman, which is to say he keeps the salary and surrenders the inbox.
In Riyadh, the great Vision 2030, that gleaming city of glass towers and ski-slopes in the desert, is being quietly recalibrated. The word recalibrated is doing some heavy work there. It means: we have run out of money. The Crown Prince, ten years ago, promised a future of marble and laser light. He is now promising less marble. This too is a lesson. Great visions, when they meet the price of oil, tend to shrink to the size of an accountant's column.
The afternoon is wearing on. The heat has not lifted; it never lifts here in April, only deepens. From the courtyard I can hear a radio reciting in Hindi the same news I have been reading in English: the same blockade, the same talks-about-talks, the same denials. The translator's job, I think, is the easier one. He has only to find the right word in the other tongue. Ours is harder. We must find the right word in our own.
If I were to leave my reader with a single instruction this afternoon, it would be this: when a politician or a soldier or a corporation tells you a thing, translate the sentence into the shortest possible English. Interdict becomes seize. Regret any hurt becomes will not apologise. Force multiplier becomes weapon. Recalibrate becomes abandon. Do this for a week and you will find that you have cleaned the windows of a room you had thought was permanently dim. The room is not lovelier than you supposed; on the contrary, it is somewhat worse. But at least, for the first time, you will see it.
