Hearts and Minds
Oct. 4th, 2008 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofeleven- Senator Joe Biden, 2008 Vice Presidential Debate
Alright, here's the thing. Madrassa? It means 'school' or 'university'. It's Arabic, meaning literally 'place where learning is done', and it's been adopted as a loan word in a number of languages, including Farsi, Urdu, Turkish, and Indonesian. What it does not mean - in any of these languages - is 'religious school' or 'Islamic school'.
Now, granted, general foreign words are often used in English in a more specific sense, to refer to things specifically from that country; Sombrero and Salsa are two obvious examples. Still, the use of Madrassa in an unmodified sense bothers me; if Biden had said 'seven thousand fundamentalist madrassas built' or 'Taliban-run madrassas', I wouldn't have an issue, but as it is the use of the term carries the implication that all schools in the Arabic-speaking and Arabic influenced world are terrorist indoctrination centres...
In other debate observations - Castro must be pleased to see that he still ranks a mention as a threat to the US...
no subject
on 2008-10-07 06:55 pm (UTC)Go Castro? Maybe he has a secret cloning project to make thousand of little Castros only top US officials know about... wait, that sounds too much like The Boys from Brazil.