Pentagon tells soldiers, "We have ways of making you talk"
Dennis Baron
debaron at illinois.edu
Wed Jan 7 17:39:09 UTC 2009
There's a new post on the Web of Language:
Pentagon tells soldiers, "We have ways of making you talk"
The Pentagon has ordered all its soldiers to reveal what foreign
languages they speak.. . .
The motto of today's army is "never volunteer" (numquam evocati), and
the order to divulge this mission-critical linguistic information came
after fewer than 10% of the troops in the all-volunteer army filled
out a voluntary survey to determine how many of them speak a foreign
language.
Alarmed by the poor turn-out, the Secretary of Defense ordered all
active and reserve troops to complete the language survey by March 15
– even if they only speak English. . . .
soldiers identified as being especially proficient in the key
languages of Iraq and Afghanistan will be eligible for foreign-
language pay bonuses and immediate deployment to the war zone of their
choice.
Those refusing to take the survey will be offered . . . .
read the rest of this post on the Web of Language: http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321
http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron
read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20090107/05286905/attachment.htm>
More information about the Lgpolicy-list
mailing list