D9CI 40P 97 19 P L I 86-36 GJ UV0GJ l1 l l JWVU l GJ IllDWU lill5lDWlill5 lilll Wl5UllDl5 J1 WUlW I1 DGJlD P L 86-36 HANDLE VIA COMINT CHANNELS ONLY r 1 HOW TO MAKE A RAILROAD DISAPPEA I 1 I LETTER TOLEARNS THE EDITOR TEACHER A LESSON TEXTA WORD- SEEK LETTER FROM CANADA ANSWER TO VEXING AGENCY-WIDE PROBLEM Frederic O Mason Jr THE USES OF ELEGANT ENGLISH 1 I CHECK YOUR MORSE FRONT-END ALIGNMENT TOUJOURS LA POLITESSE Stuart H Buck CLARITY THY NAME IS QUALIFIER John J Mallick GOLDEN OLDIES THE THINGS THEY SAy Doris E Miller NOT-TOO-OLDIES GETTING STARTED 'fillS B6etJMEN'f eON'fltINS eOBEWORB Mlt'fGBPRlltt 1 32 4 5 6 7 11 12 14 lS 16 ElInd'e 1t1 BIBHSltL EllieSS NSA es8Pf1I I Hlewpt t SM B9 11651 El te PeIIooI'f II_ QReiII IJ h Declassified and Approved for Release by NSA on '10-'1 '1- 20'1 2 pursuant to E O '135 26 vl DR Case # 54778 DOCID 4009739 OP S EURR 'f Published Monthly by PI Techniques and Standards for the Personnel of Operations VOL III No 11 NOVEMBER 1976 WILLIAM LUTWINIAK PUBLISHER BOARD OF ED TORS Editor in Chief Arthur J Salemme 56425 CoHec t ion 1 Cryptanalysis Language Emery W Tetrault 52365 Machine Support 1 89555 1 8025s Iln '-- Mathematics Reed Dawson 39575 Special Research Vera R Filby 71195 Traffic Analysis Frederic O Production Manager 1 MasQn ---lIC4998s For individual subscriptions send name and organizational designator to CRYPTOLOG PI OP SECRB P L 33215 Jr 41425 86-36 EO 1 4 c P L 'fOP SECRE'f UM8RI 86-36 P L 86-36 HOW TO MAKE RAILROAD DISAP PEA' ateIY Lu- t-m-Y---- fi l-es--- while cleaning and desk getting ready for my retirement in January I came across something I've been keeping as an object lesson for more than a uarter centur November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page I EO 1 4 c P L 'fOP SI3CRI3'f UMBRA 86-36 DOClD 86-36 4009739 EO 1 'fOP SEEURRJ3'f UMBRA I hope that as I retire from the Agency I can hand over this favorite object lesson of mine to a new generation of analysts who can get 25 more years' use out of it fey SEe f MBft 55 If you do not want to cut up this issue of CRYPTOLOG just write 'Index' and your name and organization on a plain piece of pa er Well I wrote all that on a plain piece of paper and nothing has happened Charles W Bostick G4 Letter to the Editor Editor's reply To the I must tember of the Editor CRYPTOLOG be doing something wrong In the Sepissue you offered your readers a copy 1974-1976 Cumulative Index You said Maybe that's why we haven't received too many requests for the Index We should have added and send it to PI CRYPTOLOG So if any of you readers want the plain-piece-of-paper trick to work you're going to have to send it to us The Index should appear sometime in January UNCLASSIFIED November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 2 'fOP SESRE'f UMRIU DOCIO 4009739 P L SEeltET 8POKE TEACHER LEARNS A LESSON I nd IG423 I in conclusion one of the most important lessons to be learned from this exercise is that nothing should be taken for granted the teacher droned on Even when your ideas seem to be working out well there may be a better explanation The students stifled a collective yawn They had heard it all before -- several times - November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 3 SHeRe SPOIfH EO 1 4 c P L 86-36 86-36 DOCID 4009739 SECRET SPOKE EO 1 4 c P L 86-36 Some time after the September 1976 issue of CRYPTOLOG was forwarded to the printer in July and before that issue actually appeared the room number and telephone number given in the article on the Foreign Publications Procurement Program were changed Please change the note to read If after reading the article you ealize that you have some intelligence needs that can be filled by the Program visit Room B5l2l at FANX-III or call 8-7301 concerning your eqUl rements tor toreign publications 0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_ 5EERH SPQIil I ceS lFIBE I'I'I L lElIA WORD-SEEK I L - P L A754 86-36 ry to find the 26 service letter TEXTA meanings for other than R and W tetragraphs Words read forward backward up dO lfl and diagonally Any lette rmay be used more than once EO 1 4 c P L 86-36 SoLution wiLL appear next month - November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 4 SBCRB SPOKE DOCID 4009739 EO 1 4 d P L 86-36 SHCRH'f November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 5 SHCRH'f IoIANPbr VM SQllnJr 61 ' iN bS 8NbY DOCID 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED c ANSWER 1U G A cvEXIN J o K E R e first i three card positions alternating A and B cards occur in the following sequence That is a cup having a GBPoker hand beginning with will always be immediately followed by one beginning Q 9 Q' or position 20 followed by position 21 in the sequence I 8 K 3 I o r Bt109 2JPY 7 ' K9 9tQW J9 2tA 99 19 1 14 21 3 10 17 7 20 2 9 13 4 23 5 12 24 6 And the last two card positions occur in the following sequence shown at left below Combining the two pattern position numbers PPNs gives a unique PPN for each possible hand shown at right below 2 9 J Q K A 10 K 10 J 1 16 31 11 26 6 21 22 2 17 32 8 23 3 18 12 27 7 33 13 28 At Qf 29 9 24 4 19 34 14 So 15 30 10 25 104atW2 K is 7' 8 2JPYJ IOfis So the sequence of pattern position numbers 1- 313 337 361 385 409 433 - 280 315 350 350 385 420 33 22 11 35 0 24 13 0 is 5-5 1- 457 481 505 f'529J 553 577 -- 45 5-- 4 55 4 9 0_5t5 5 5rr- 5 2 5--- 5 60 2 26 15 @ 28 17 601 - 595 is 6-6 6 A IOfis 7-7 Jt is 8-8 At is 9_9 110 7 8 8tlO 2 J 1042 A 9 169 193 217 241 265 289 - 140 175 210 210 245 280 29 18 7 31 20 9 2-2 A J4 8 9 Q910 J K K 1 25 49 73 97 121 145 35 70 70 105 140 1 25 14 3 27 16 5 1- 1-1 Q 7'1 A Q Jt is 3-3 K' 9f KY 9 At is 4-4 5 20 35 If one considers only thePPN of the first hand in each sequence of 24 -that is cups or hands wi th PPN 1 for the first three cards -- the following shows for the top line the second PPN incrementing at intervals of 24 The second line shows the largest multiple of 35 the second PPN cycle which can be subtracted without giving a negative result And the third line shows the result of the subtraction -- providing a unique sequence from 1 to 35 1- 16 22 11 18 8 15 So much is easy but the determination of the absolute PPN in the total sequence of 24 x 35 840 for any given cup is more difficult 625 649 673 697 721 595 630 665 665 700 30 19 32 8 21 769 793 817 841 _- j - '-- -- -- - --- 735 770 805 840 34 23 12 1 is The four-Aces hand must consist of 1-1 2-2 3-3 4-4 5-5 6-6 7-7 8-8 9-9 ' 7f1A9Af6A at PPN 11-14 To reduce it 10-10 o 23-23 24-24 l-25 2-26 3-27 to PPN l- subtract x lO from both sides o 4-28 5-29 6-30 7-3L 8-32 -- 9-33 10-34 4 52 JPY as circled above Now add x lO to 11-35 12-1 23 '24 24-35 1-1 again the resu t to get its absolute PPN of 539 Given one cup find its two PPNs and add UNCLASSIFIED one to each to produce the PPN of the next cup Remember that the number after 24 in the first position of the PPN is 1 and that following 35 in the second position is also 1 November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 6 L UNCLASSIFIED DOCID UNCLASSIFIED eing linguists you are aware that God speaks English You may also have noted that He speaks an especially elegant kind of English That is because he learned it in 1611 during the reign of King James II God still speaks this 1611 English or at any rate He did in the church I attended as a boy and we do our best to talk back to Him in 1611 English It was this God-English that first focused my attention on the power of words and set me to listening to people around me -- not only to understand what they were saying but also to observe how they were saying it From GodEnglish I progressed to the observation of how educationists use English then the U S Navy the U S Government sociologists policemen radio announcers -- in short I became a wordwatcher I began wordwatching at an early age but the climax of my career came when I was extra-officially and there are those who would say frivolously appointed Chief Wordwatcher of one of the operating divisions of the Central Intelligence Agency I have since that time retired but because of the great interest I have found in the straight world in the subject of Elegant English I have not abandoned my mission but rather have even felt compelled to broaden the scope of my research and expand the audience for whom I do it Before I retired I had prepared two written reports which appeared in Studies in Intelligence and this evening at the invitation of Mrs Filby and with your indulgence I am presenting my first oral report on the uses of Elegant English in various parts of our society I am going to take the liberty of incorporating into this first oral report some excerpts from the two written reports with the thought that even though some of you may have read one or both of the written reports you may nevertheless find it of some interest to renew your acquaintance with the contents this evening Wordwatcher's Credentials Since I appear before you in the capacity of an authority on the subject I believe you deserve to hear something of my experience along these lines my credentials as a watcher of words and if you will bear with me for a moment I shall give you a brief overview if you will forgive the use of that splendid word right here before we even really get started As I implied a moment ago church was the scene of my first awakening and I can even identify the person who started me out It was Mr Darrell my Sunday School teacher for a number of years Mr Darrell was a sweet and saintly man but when he prayed or read in 1611 English wonderful things happened to words and I spent many glorious hours contemplating these things If you know anything about Southern Baptists you know that they take seriously Jesus' injunction against the vain repetitions of the heathen Prayer to us Southern Baptists had to be extemporaneous fished up out of your guilty soul at the very moment of your confrontation with God and whatever you fished up had to be explained to Him in 1611 English Mr Darrell understood this and he had a goodly collection of Thee's and Thou's and unto's although he was a bit shaky about the nominative and objective cases of personal pronouns and also somewhat hazy about conj gating verbs to suit them Still Mr Darrell was in his mid-fifties and he had been speaking to God for I suppose about 45 of those years and I must assume that during those years God had learned to cope with Darrel lese -that He understood Mr Darrell when he ended his prayers as he invariably did with the supplication We wouldst ask Thee to give us willing hands and receptacle hearts When Mr Darrell read from the passage where Jesus' disciples were preparing to shoo the little children away and Jesus rebuked them and said suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not for of such is the kingdom of heaven Mr Darrell always put the stress on the wrong word saying suffer the little children to come unto me o It was easier for him to imagine that Jesus had constructed an English sentence backward than November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 7 UNCLASSIFIED DOCID 4009739 UNCLASSlnED that King James II might have known another meaning for the word suffer If Mr Darrell had been called upon to recite another line which was set down at about the same time that the quotation from Jesus was translated -- Oh Romeo Romeo wherefor art thou Romeo meaning in Elizabethan English Oh UJhy are you Romeo Deny thy father and refuse thy name -- he undoubtedly would have said it as almost everyone else else does nowadays with the wrong stress plus a comma Oh Romeo Romeo wherefor a 't thou Romeo presumed meaning Where a 'e you Romeo or even more with-it Where are you at Romeo English is after all English It is not that Mr Darrell was altogether without instruction He had beeri to school I He had le rned for example that when a word appeals in italics it is to be emphasized Unfortunately the scholars whom King James commissioned for his great project had such a spirit of reverence for Holy Writ that hey were afraid of being accused of sacrilege if they changed it in any way Whenever they came upon a Greek phrase therefore which required more words in English to express the same thought they put the extra words in italics -- not for emphasis but to apologize to God for adding words to His Mr Darrell did not understand this and when he read from the Bible the effect could be wondrous indeed In reading for example the 60th Psalm he would really hit those italicized words That thy beloved may be delivered save UJitnthy right hand and hear me o o Gilead-rs-mine and Manassehis mine o Who will bring me into the strong city Give us help from trouble for vain is the help of man We have echoes GBPi that style of English in our midst today which I shall speak to you about in a moment But for now let me continue with the discussion of my development as a worawatcner she married me about 18 months later She was Anglo-Argentine She belonged to one of the mos't cha ' Ig and baffling conanunities on the face of the earth Her English was fascinating It still is on occasion I first began to suspect that speaking with her might be a bit of a problem when I showed her a series of cartoons I thought were especially funny and she laughed and showed them to her sister who did not laugh Finally she pointed to the crucial place on the page and said No no che ten6s que mirar ah abajo que ah estll the funny partl The Anglo-Argentines have a language all their own with partakes of both English and Spanish In Spanish when they go to a doctor for example it is so that he can revisa 'tes and then if he finds an injection to be indicated he may pincha t'tes And so when they go to a doctor in English it is to have him revise them and then perhaps pinch them with a hypodermic needle The countryside beyond the tskirts of Buenos Aires is known as et aampo andso the Anglo-Argentine ifhe'has a day off or a weekend free may decide to spend it in the camp In Spanish hoPnO means oven and therefore Cabo de HOPn08 should be translated Oven Cape or Cape of Ovens but the entire English-speaking world knows it by the AngloArgentine version of Cape Horn The same sort of thing happened to the Rio de 'la Plata which should be translated as Silver River r River of Silver but which is known to the English-speaking world as the River Plate Baak to Missouri If you think I had a problem you should have seen the reaction of my fellow Missourians when 'I took her back to Brookfield with me after the war She could never understand that in English almost the only thing you ever hang wlthout' an From U S Navy to the APgentine up is a man and so when people came to see us I had had two years at Missouri University they were puzzled'when she would say Let me when World War II came and I enlisted in the hang your coats She once asked a neighbor Navy Since I could type I was immediately whose responsibility it was in their household assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence to throw the garbage every day In Buenos Since I had had two years of Spanish at the Aires when she wanted to vacuum tne floor University I was forthwith transferred to the what she did was pasa ' la aspiradora When a joint British-U S Naval Routing Office in friend came to calion us once and my wife said Buenos Aires Argentina I was as it were that she had just passed the vacuum sweeper qualified I thus made the leap from 1611 he was not sure what she meant and was afraid English through English Composition and Rheto- to ask But they all loved her because she ric I and II to the passive voice of Navy com- laughed with them when they found her English munications and the River Plate English of the to be a bit strange although it did not seem Anglo-Argentines at all strange to her to tell them for instance that she and I had just combed ourselves and My experience with R ver late Engli h began put our clothes and had gone downtown on an 1DUJ1ed1ately upon my arr1val 1n Buenos A1res automob 11e whose eng1ne d d 1 no t marc h'very I had bought a watch before leanng the Un1ted well States which was guaranteed to be shockproof and was No matter how I banged it on the table _ It was in a local movie theater one evening it would not run I therefore went to a jewelry before the advent of television and X-rated shop in downtown Buenos Aires The young lady movies and in aday en four-letter words behind the counter not only sold me a watch -- were almost never heard in'pubrIc and certairily 1 o November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 8 UNCLASSInED '-' - - DOCID 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED not from the lips of a cultured young woman that she saw in a newsreel her first view of American football She was captivated by it She grasped me by the arm and exclaimed Ay Viejo Viejo Mira esos hombres mastodontes hitting each other in the guts You could almost feel the shock of astonishment and revul sion in the theater around us and I explained quickly that while I used that phrase around the house now and then it was not appropriate to public gatherings As you may have noted from my recounting of that episode she calls me Viejo She has called me Viejo since we were first married and it was at that time simply a term of endear ment but of course as each year passes it becomes ever more appropriate for her to call me old man To the Missouri ear however Viejo sounds like vehicle and I could tell by the expressions on the faces of my friends and family and neighbors that they were bemused _ to say the least by this bizarre term of endearment They would have understood and accepted darling sweetheart honey or mi amor -- but vehicZe Well I shall not dwell any further on my domestic problems of communication except to urge any of you who happen to know the difference between the house burned up and the house burned down to come forward later and explain it to her -- and to me too U S NavaZese Let us return now to Buenos Aires and my introduction to the English of U S Navy communications It is fortunate for us all I think that the guns of the U S Navy have never spoken with the same impact which its official correspondence makes A U S Navy sentence never propels a thought from one place to another like a projectile from a gun One of the reasons for this effect is that a Navy sentence can never boast the luxury of an I or a we for a gun or a you for a target because the words I you and we are taboo in Navy correspondence I learned this under the instruction of a gray-haired warrant officer who had been constructing Navy sentences since the days of coal and of some sail too I think I learned that the predicate of a Navy sentence must be set up so that it just floats around in a fragrant passive soup unattached to anything in particular Let me show you what I mean You have received some equipment which does not work You cannot write to the Bureau of Yards and Docks and ask Shall we return the defective equipment to you In the first place this is a direct question and direct questions are not in accordance with the high class and elevated tone of Navy correspondence In the second place it includes two of the taboo words An experienced Navy writer will have no trouble with this situation however He will put together a sentence something like this It is wondered if it is desired that subject equipment be returned to the Bureau of Yards and Docks The passive voice Nobody actually does anything in the passive voice and so nobody can be blamed for anything You have not fired any information or questions at the Bureau of Yards and Docks You have merely lobbed some words into the air and the Bureau of Yards and Docks may retrieve subject words or not as it sees fit I lived with this elegance during my entire service in the Navy but it wasn't until years later that I discovered that it had a purpose Professor Calvin Linton who for many years as a consultant for about 30 U S government agencies on report writing revealed the truth to me when he described how the scales had fallen from his own eyes early in his career as a consultant He wrote me I suggested to the writer of the sentence Desire is expressed by this office that the equipment be procured on a loan basis for a period of six months' time that he might try saying We would like to borrow the equipment for six months His reply was Of course I could write it like that But we'd never get the equipment We don't 'borrow' around here we 'procure on a loan basis for a period of ' Professor Linton got a hint of where he was going wrong from that example but the true revelation came to him somewhat later I suggested to the Civil Service Commission that the sentence Advice regarding date of birth is herewith requested might be changed to Please tell us your birth date I was told though not in these words that the tone of the original was purposeful not accidental It was to suggest to the reader that he was up against something far more powerful and menacing than merely one human being asking another for information Sty Ush Words Professor Linton's discovery is valid for the entire range of uses of Elegant English Elegant English has a much more serious purpose than merely to ask for or to give information It must above all impress the listener or reader with the erudition of the writer with the vividness of his imagination the oriRinality of his thoughts the modern contents of his vocabulary and the aristocracy of his soul Not only must he know how to phrase things so as to instill awe in the mind of the reader but he must also be alert for the stylish word or phrase -- the word of the year or the month -the unusual word that dresses up a sentence and makes the reader admire the writer's cleverness and originality The truly elegant writer constantly observes the English of his contempo- November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 9 UNCLASSIFIED DOCID 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED raries and the moment he hears a new words The list is by no means exhaustive In fact it barely scratches the surface You undoubtedly such as parameters he lo'cks onto it nurses and nurtures it in his own syntactical feed lot have your own special elegant words and that is and launches it into the marketplace at every sufficient rationale for anybody so long as opportunity everything is viable and you do not have to quantify your options I collect these stylish words and phrases The challenge of Elegant English is at its of which the following are only a small sample greatest when one is expected to write a report 4ationale nope4ative or a mem randum but has nothing to say or U6t nput has so l ttle that he could say it in one or 6aee ughput two sentences You could find your job eliminadiehotomy p4e-planned ted if you wrote a report containing only two 604theowg 6Jta 6 t1tuc tulte sentences Most bureaucrats realize this inpM GBPrUe POliU stinctively One of the most popular series of option6 eOn6t4uet lectures Professor Linton ever gave was entitled ti6e-lltyle v le How to Write Without Saying Anything pOlltu4e quanti6Y Plan-Speak m g6ul mULima1 4elevant op U rna-t ov v ew 6eedbac k pMamUeM po tUne If you want to use Elegant English I recommend that you use these words wherever you can fit them into your discourse Note that most of these elegant words are not words that describe a simple thing or act such as house man hit run No these words justify their use by sounding elegant and they deserve to be taken out of the narrow functions which they were originally intended to perform and made to dress up'our prose Thus if you have a reason for doing something it becomes your rationale If you are describing a confusion or a conflict why not call i t a dichotomy If a man is being candid or frank with you he may certainly be said to be forthcoming And almost anything you can name may be said to be relevant or irrelevant so long as you careful never to specify what to Let me show you how this list can be put to use One of the purposes of my talk this evening is to discuss how Elegant English affects government communications If we take that simple statement of purpose and put it into as elegant a sentence as we can manage using as many of these magnificent tools as we can squeeze in we might come up with something like this The thrust of the input into the overview which is being presented this evening has been pre-planned in order to posit meaningful and relevant parameters for the formulation of a judgment of how Elegant English utilized in the throughput of governmental correspondence tends to exacerbate the dichotomy which usually exists at the interface between the infrastructure levels of the bureaucratic construct Planners are the champions at this practice of writing a great deal without saying anything I discovered this fairly late in my career when I was assigned to the plans section of my division I learned that planners are adept at producing long i volved papers replete with footnotes attachments tables and cross references and that tlley have even gone so far as to change the very processes they engage in Oh and permit me a bit of an apostrophe about that word If you are going to be elegant in oral as well as written English you must cultivate the habit of pronouncing it proh-cess-ees As I was saying planners have changed slightly the very prohcessees they engage in and often like to refer to those prohcessees as pre-planning Now you might think at first glance that the very concept of pre-planning is tautological but if you do it probably shows a lack of experience Almost anybody with any number of years of service in our government can recall at least one incident one event one development which was very good and also accidental One does not report such adevelopment to his superiors as being fortuitous In a case like that the report must necessarily say that the incident was pre-planned so that nobody on the higher level will suspect that it was in fact post-planned Among planners educationist planners are perhaps the most accomplished euphuists in the English-speaking world This is important I think because after all they are teaching our children our little throughputs you might say and the future of Elegant English thus seems assured Gone are the days when teachers used words like fail and reading and and disobedient Now chilwriti ng and dren are sometimes underachievers who must work diligeIltlx to acquire language skills al though Is that not an elegant sentence Does it not some of tneJii may be so disadvantaged that they sound familiar Would you not agree that it is cannot be expected to work in any way except at grammatically impeccable Would you not also their own level and in some instances may even beagree that if the listener understands it it come severe norm violato s needs more work Continued or page 19 UNCLASSIFIED ''Poor'' I DOCID 4009739 CONFIDElN'FIAL ANALYSTS COLLECTION MANAGERS SYSTEM DESIGNERS CHECK YOUR MORSE FRONT-END ALIGNMENT - Iff'IVEI A P CIVACO rhymes with Knievel DIAGNOST-IC DISPLAY FOR YOUR PROBLEM IS AS NEAR AS YOUR NEAREST COPE TERMINAL ANALYSTSI Ie is your task getting its fair share of attention and technical support at the collection site o Actually SEE how your assignments are being handled YOU can trouble-shoot collection problems on YOUR task Ie COLLECTION MANAGERS o Any collection manager can now be a firstclass Monday-morning quarterback o Second-guess field collection operations with ease o Watch low productivity as it actua lIy happens o PERCIVAL will give you the whip hand SYSTEM DESIGNERSI o Now that PERCIVAL is available you need no longer depend on the fuzzy statements and unreliable folklore passed on to you by operations personnel o Get the UNVARNISHED TRUTH first-hand' o Watch the most intimate details of secret MORSE collection rituals never before seen by outsiders' PERCIVAL JtemembVl i l Jthumu wilh KvU e ve1 1 The PERCIVAL o November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 11 P L EO 1 4 c P L 86-36 CONFItlEN'fIAL 86-36 DOCID 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED la tolite e STUART H BUCK P16 9 remember'very well the incident Jack Gurin refers to in NSA-crostic No 4 CRYPTOLOG June-July 1976 solution August 1976 ' -- for SORUTION TO NSA-CROSTIC No 4 CRYPTOROG June-Jury 1976 Jacob Gurin -san Employment of Military Linguists NSA Technical Journal Vol XIII No 4 Fall 1968 Also reprinted in NSA Technical Journal Special Linguistics IssUB II During the showing of a Japanese movie used as a training aid the students cheered mightily when after about one hour of total lack of comprehension they understood the maid when she knocked on the door and said 'Excuse me ' the simple reason that I was there In fact I am grateful to Jack for jogging my memory on the subject It has brought back a flood of memories that I am about to share with CRYPTOLOG readers Jack and I were in the first MISLS unit assigned to study Japanese at the University of Michigan In a sense we were guinea pigs Professor Joseph K Yamagiwa who was in charge of the language program struck us as a man who knew what he was about It seemed as though he had been preparing for years for our arrival and was ready and anxious to tryout his theories and his new book on us Of course he had a great advantage in being bilingual in Japanese and English and on top of that he was clearly a scientific linguist Any doubts on that score would be quickly dispelled by a glance at his text entitled Modern Conversational Japanese I don't want to knock the book so I suggest that the reader take a look at it and ask himself if this is a proper text for a rank beginner I just mention the book because the ideas contained in it have a bearing on the story Shortly after we arrived at Ann Arbor some of the professor's minions appeared bearing gifts -- huge stacks of printed matter purported to guide us through the torments of learning Japanese Arumor quickly spread that the course materials had been delivered ups_ide down and that we had started on the first day with the last lesson in the course If so one would expect the lessons to be easier later on but that was not the case so I suppose the rumor was just the product of some embittered mind One thing was certain -- the Army expected quite a lot from us When turned loose in the field we were supposed to interrogate prisoners in any dialect or to translate at sight any captured document no matter how grassy in short to cope with any language task that might turn up To keep our zel L at a fever pitch laggards were' constantly reminded that they could always be reassigned to less pleasant and more hazardous duty Well there was a war on so I suppose an atmosphere of urgency was natural enough What was not natural for some of us was the Yamagiwa approach to language study Many of us were used to graded lessons rules exercises and old-fashioned terminology -- all of which was heartily condemned by Yamagiwa Apparently he saw the human brain not as an organ capable of rational thought but as a sponge that merely soaked up everything and anything exposed to it So there was to be no old-style analysis when he was around Evidentiy language learning was a matter of pure conditioning and the sooner you got going with it the better Before we knew any Japanese at all he had us assemble and listen to him carryon lengthy conversations in Japanese with the Nisei instructors I don't know what effect this had on the others but I always departed from these sessions wondering what in the devil they had been talking about I guess I was never tuned in on the right wave length There may have been some sound pedagogical reason for all this but I never discovered it Equally baffling was his idea of having us memorize long lists of unrelated words I still remember the very first Japanese word that I learned -- rappa meaning bugle For some reason it stuck in my mind but I was never able to work it into a conversation I don't want to sound too critical of Yama giwa for I'm sure hat he was on our side in the war Besides he did provide us wi th reams of model sentences to memorize Many of these had to do with the social amenities Gomen nasai meaning pardon me was one of them _For practice we used it whenever we met accompanying it with-a-5ucking in of the breath in the best Hollywood tradition It was reassuring to have something reliable to fall back on At this stage we didn't know any Japanese to speak of but we certainly were polite After his mystifying conversations with the Nisei instructors Yamagiwa liked to take us all to the movies -- Japanese movies that is The purpose we soon discovered was not to provide entertainment Presumably we were expected to soak up the language just by being there For me at least it didn't work The film that Jack Gurin refers to was a real gem To this day I don't know whether it was a clever satire or an outright imitation of some ancient American movie One thing was clear from the action the story concerned the age- November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 12 UNCLASSffiED DOClD 4009739 UNCLASSMED old struggle between good and evil In other words a mOraHtyplay Yo-u could teTf thevillain right off by the way he twirled his wax moustache and jiggled his eyebrows Groucho Marx style The heroine seemed to be struggling throughout most of the film to pr tect her virtue so you knew she was good Then there was her boy friend poor but honest You could tell where he stood So everything was reasonably clear except the language So far as we could tell the plot concerned the abduction of a simple country girl by the fellow with the trick moust che obviously for nefarious purposes Falling for the blandishments of this snake the poor girl was lured into a car and away they went towards some den of iniqUity Se l ingt_ha1-hi$J tQ vedwas inpe 'il the hQ l t -country lad leaped on- hhf Tcycle and went pedaling over the hills like some Gold Medal winner Back in the village the girl's poor but honest parents sat grieving in the doorway of their humble cottage During a good part of the film the camera went hopping back and forth between these three scenes 1 girl screaming and struggling in the car after it dawned on her that they weren't just taking a t rn about the park 2 sturdy country lad head down pedaling uphill and down and 3 grieving parents sitting fn the doorway It was a scenario worthy of Max Sennett Finally the villainous one reached the hideaway where one assumed - his geisha girls were pro- fessionalized and dragged his wailing and kicking victim out of the car and into the house Once inside however she broke loose and then began a mad chase araund a large table both screaming in Japanese at the top of their lungs Every now and then they would reverse direction -- she keeping a few jumps ahead To break up the action there would be an occasional switch to the tireless cyclist then to the grieving parents At least they didn't say anything -- which was a relief to us The country girl and her wicked abductor on the other hand never stopped shrieking at each oth r -- and we didn't understand one ord of hat they were saying Then ame a moment wtien the two stopped breathless in their tracks about to change direction I suppose There was a long silence with only the sound of their_ heavy breathing Suddenly a door opened and a geisha girl dressed in the regalia of her trade peered over her fan into the room Sizing up the situation in a glance and seeing that her services were obviously not needed at the moment she lisped GbmBn naaai and withdrew giggling behind her fan For the very first time we heard something in Japanese that we understood The pent-up emotions of weeks past came pouring out and the walls shook with our applause I don't suppose you could call this a linguistic hreakthrough It was more like a glimmer of hope which came when we needed it most UNCLASSIFIED So ution to NSA-crostic No 5 CRYPTOLOG October 1976 I - L 86-36 l MaChinelntelligence- Promise or Delusion l CRYPTOLOG July 1975 The branch of computer science called Artificial Intelligence involves the attempt to program or build a digital computer capable of producing behavior that a human being would accept as truly intelligent UNCLASSIFIED November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 13 UNCLASSMED DOClD 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED CLARIT' THY NAME IS QUALIFIER John J Mallick 824 I t took me 60Jt-ty yea u on ecvr th To l eac h one c onc tlUJion Thvr e -u no heaven biLt c taJr ily No hell exc ept c on6lUJion Jan Struther 1 01-1952 '-t-fobably possibly it is tentatively suggested that Qualifiers like that are very common in intelligence reports And most people in our business -- whether they are reporters or readers of our product -- will probably agree oops now it's got me doing it that qualifiers can be overworked Yes indeed it really would be nice to write or to read a report in which every statement stood on its own without qualification Simple statements of fact X happened then Y happened and that means that Z is going to happen Instead of that wearying style ' It is assumed that X happened and if so then there is a good likelihood that Y happened Thus if previous indicators continue to be valid there is a possibility that barring unforeseen international developments Z will happen Perhaps the major problem with qualifiers is the common misconception that they are by nature obfuscatory There is no doubt that qualifiers can be and sometimes are used as weasel words to purposely avoid taking a forthright stand However if qualifiers are properly used they should clarify and not obscure The use of qualifiers to weasel out of responsibility for taking a position is intellectual cowardice the use of qualifiers to accurately indicate the degree of credibility 'that should be attached to an intelligence statements on the basis of available evidence is a moral obligation A Washington Post article of 25 July 1976 demonstrated that the media also often are forced to call an ace a possible probable ace The article concerned speculation that the Chinese were posthumously rehabilitating the image of Lin Piao Mao Tse-tung's former you should pardon the expression right-hand man Its short 35 paragraphs contained 21 qualifiers including such double-barreled sentences as An effort to erase black marks against Lin which appears evident in several recent press articles would indiaate that some Chi nese leaders want to win the army's favor Since Lin's alleged conspiracy in 1971 other military leaders apparently linked to his plot have not been named Thousands of officers with apparently no links to the conspiracy undoubtedly remain in the army The most likely advocates of such strategy are radicals with most of the government apparently in the hands of moderates Why don't intelligence reporters write smoothly Why don't they just throw out all those qualifiers It is because in intelligence reporting smoothness of style must take second place to precision of meaning When Arthur Symons wrote While clearness is a virtue of style explicitness is not a necessary virtue he was talking about good literature not about good intelligence reporting In intelligence reporting explicitness is the necesThere is no doubt that the Post article sary virtue would have been more interesting to read with I was shocked recently to hear a highlyfewer qualifiers however it seems that the respected user of our product remark that he news reporter who wrote it took seriously the tried not to pay much attention to whether some- responsibility of the press to indicate validity thing was reported as a possible probable or as accurately as possible How much more imdefinite fact Picture the physician who feels portant it is that intelligence analysts always that qualifiers are unimportant If he tells me keep in mind the overriding significance of that I need brain surgery when he means to say validity and clarity Over 300 years ago George that I might need it he stands a good chance 'Herbert stated Good words are worth much and 'of having an A-validity cardiac case on his cost little Those in our profession might add hands Imagine the damage if a research analyst that accur te qualifiers are the best of words reports that some nation is preparing to launch -- nd that is an unqualified A-validity fact an attack on the United States when he means that it might be preparing to launch an attack November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 14 UNCLASSIFIED DOCID 4009739 e6N1'If N'f1kL - I it artmtut nr QDIlI1EN 001111GBP THE THINGS THEY SAYI Xhe following articZe is as pertinent today as it was when it first appeared in KEYWORD in August 1968 There is in fact much that is golden in the file copies of KEYWORD published 1 68 through 1973 which can be roead in the NSA Crypto logic CoUectior Room L3_W_O_7_6_ E_d_ Cftblication of I 'article Trans literation Traps in the May 1968 KEYWORD reminded me that I once wrote a short piece on the pitfalls of COMINT translation not those in the text but those in the mind of the translator especially the beginner Certain remarks recurred so frequently among our trainees that I felt moved to record them and to do a little talking back Since some of these may still be heard today I present them b low i ese people don't know their own grammar Well it's ten to one they know it better than you do even if they don't know the rules they know the patterns and follow them instinctively and any slight grammatical irregularities they may indulge in will not affect the meaning of the message Beware therefore of trying to support a far-fetched interpretation by assuming grammatical error Assume instead that the grammar is correct and reexamine your interpretation until you can reconcile it with the text It is worthwhile of course to familiarize yourself with certain commonplace errors of the he don't and between you and I type simply to speed up recognition even though they seldom occur in traffic or affect the meaning of it It'sobviouslyan idiom 'aning o You may U L' ' o ' ' 'VtN''' idioms n - ' be right have but been a lot iof vented at NSA that never existed except in the mind of-a desperate translator Ditto for old proverbs and dialectal variants The DO RIS E MILLER P16 lIlT Roo iit ' translator'schances6fdiscovefiriga new idiom P L 86- 3 6 vary of course with the language the degree to which it has been studied and recorded and the nature of the traffic but in most cases further work resolves the passage in some quite prosaic way If a putative idiom does seem to be the only possible answer it should be treated as warily and documented as carefully as a tenuous code recovery until it achieves A validity I'm a translator not a bookkeeper I True but routinely checking the numbers in a message is one of the best possible ways to check your own translation Are the dates including message and intercept dates compatible with each other and with tenses in the text as you have rendered them Maybe it should be will arrive rather than has arrived Are paragraphs and subparagraphs all numbered and accounted for Maybe that passage would be clearer if you realized that it consisted of two unrelated points Are speeds tonnages calibers reasonable Don't make a new-fangled weapon out of an old-fashioned garble Does price times number work out to the total given Look again at the terms of the contract It is surprising how often this simple process will point up unsuspected errors or bring a fuzzy picture into focus It's a plant Sooner or later it seems everyone comes upon a message the facts of which cannot be squared with what he knows and he reasons that the _message must be a fake_ L J eITh-erateTy plllIl ted to deceive us the November 76 CRYPTOLOG COHFID HTIAI 1 Page 15 DOClD 4009739 JONFIB NTIAI interceptors But it's highly unlikely and evidence of a particularly convincing kind would be needed to support such an assumption Any practical advantage to the sender of deceiving us would in most cases be far outweighed by the risk of confusing his own side If he is simply worried about being read he changes his crypt system Look for the usual explanations garbles misinterpretations a gap in your own knowledge Or now and then of course a prank by someone in the group I f you really do smell a rat look around for the local funster I've written a footnote explaining what I think This amounts to saying that you don't understand the text and have probably botched it for when you get the right answer it stands on its own feet Just keep working until enlightenment comes If you publish that footnote I predict it will haunt you stand each other or the world's work would break down In some countries heads would roll And our job is to determine what it is' they are saying and put it into English in words as hard as cannonballs It said DUMPS but we've never had DUMPS so I degarbled it to PUMPS And that men is how we lost Slambang Air Base It is just as dangerous to degarble good text as not to degarble bad and familiarity alone should never be the criterion Keep an open mind don't spare the research and remember that a new word is often the tipoff to a new story 1 know it doesn't make sense but that's what it says This is the granddaddy of them all the classic dis Well this is MY in claimer -- and the _ r---r '_- _ r---r- _ r-- tel'pl'etation Chimborazo of the huThe unspoken end of moresque Do we really this you may believe that all these have yours Can we responsible types not both be right 'these makers and shippers are filling the No by jing we can airways with nonsense allover the world Do both be wrong but we we really think that foreigners don't add up cannot both be right Not necessarily This is just the most spontaA telegram is not a neous universal and irrepressible outcry in the translating world there is no one in the poem or a parable or a Zen riddle It is a straightforward communication having -- or business who hasn't given tongue to it at some time But the person who says it seriously or meant to have -- only one possible interpretavery often is in trouble For all good transtion The man who receives it is expected to lators know deep down that if it doesn't make react in some very specific way to issue that visa move that battalion buy that wheat or _ sense then that isn't what it says file that report make that decision sound out C6IiFIQfNTJAU that del gate The correspondents must under- 1ltrpartmrut of a @11jmtEN uot-too-QI 11j 1ltJJtE8t If you liked Doris Miller's Golden Oldie The Things They Say and who wouldn't like it why not try to get in her league yourself Even though Doris is retired this is how she can help you In March 1975 she gave a talk entitled You Too Can WIN By Writing under the sponsorship of WIN Women in NSA In that talk she stressed the importance of having NSAers -- women and men alike -- express their views in Agency publications To help her audience to get started Doris handed out copies of the Getting Started form that is reprinted on the next page Fill it out You might find yourself getting an idea for an article for the NSA Technical JournaZ spectrum or need I suggest CRYPTOLOG And then -- who knows how soon -- you might find yourself in the Department of Golden Oldies too I FOJL il1n0JLma Uol1 on WIN C OI'Ltac t' IGb13 --mmmm--mm 4A187 x'4767 1 November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 16 CONFIBBNTMI UNCLASSIFIED J L 86-36 DOCID 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED Scrihe GETTING STARTED 1 _____ Explain a process _____ Ask a question MY object is to _____ Defend a principle Make a report on something that has been accomplished _____ Call attention to something that is wrong Suggest a better method or idea _____ Share a personal experience _____ Enlist support 2 ' MY _____ Report news or announce a coming event _____ Recognize an achievement Amuse and entertain _____ React to something someone else has written None of the above but something else namely working ti He is A Better Way to Hurray for The Fallacy of It's Time to The Scandal of Are We Paying Too Much For ------------------ After A Proposal for What Happened at What Why I Agree Disagree with Who Wrote ------- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to None of the above but ' ' 3 I wi ZZ consider this and wiZZ address it to This wou d be a particu ar y good time for such an artic e to appear because or This subject is 5 time ess I am especiaZZyweZZ quaZified to U11'ite on this because _ or on the other hand ___ I want to speak up on this even though I am no expert on it because 6 Some tentative suggestions for a fina title are 7 I think it NSA wou d be most appropriate for Technica Spectrum CRYPTOLOG JOW'l1a 1 pub ication in major papers on scientific or technical subjects or cryptologic policy up to and including Top Secret Codeword distribution to named persons general-interest articles on Agency policy management techniques history current topics up to Secret but no Codeword general distribution throughout the Agency see reverse side of this page distribution in Operations and elsewhere to individual subscribers as requested November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 17 UNCLASSffiED -- _ ' _ ---- - _--- - --------- DOClD 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED r- - - 1 C I Your contribution does not have to be typed we'll give prefere ' ' ence to content over form every time Though especially in the case of a long piece the 1 editorial eye will appreciate - - any effort you can make in that direction--garbles and strikeovers freely forgi ven I Do you happen to have a news item a comment or a tip that is no more than a paragraph Or perhaps you have an article of several thousands words Long or short if it has something worthwhile to say we'll print it For your interest and guidance one page of typescript double-spaced makes about one column in CRYPTOLOG First-person articles or stories about your own experiences are welcome o long as they relate to our work f Want anonymity A thoughtful ll ece on a subject of interest to many readers will be con_sidered for anonymous publication if the writer requests it The writer must however identify himself to the editor in an accompanying note or by a personal call Needless to say personal or trivial complaints will not be considered Photographic illustrations can be reproduced at the same quality as those in the NSA Newsletter Sensitive materials No We'll go all the way to Top Secret Codeword but we have to draw the line at compartmented or otherwise exclusive sources j Something missing If you feel that your work or your interests are not being' well represented in CRYPTOLOG it's pI obClbly because you and your friends are not contributing The editors earnestly want to cover the whole territory but articles don't grow on trees y'know Somebody who knows the subject matter has to write them Need assistance You may have an idea or some not s or even a half-finished paper that you feel has possibilities but you don't quite know what to do with A call to the appropriate departmental editor wi l get you a story conference and possibly inspire you to finish it up and get it into print Our deadline is theoretically the middle of the month the 15th of August for publication in October and so on but don't let that stop you if something good comes along on the 16th And anyhow this is a monthly publication if you miss this month's deadline you'll be just in time for next month's CRYPTOLOG See you ADDRESS PI CRYPTOLOG November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 18 UNCLASSIFIED DOCIO 4009739 ELEGANT ENGLISH UNCLASSIFIED Continued from page 10 Once while looking over a bibliography Professor Linton came across the titles of two works written by this kind of educator These were the titles Sociological Implications of the Dynamics of Volunteerism and A Pilot Study Directed Toward the Development of Means of Evaluating the Noncognitive Aspects of Education Particularly in the Affective Domain Now if you ever find yourself in a situation where there does not seem to be any escape from using a plain old Anglo-Saxon word withollt any beauty of sound or appearance the best thing to do is to define it carefully for your reader so tha't he will realize that however simple and earthy the word may seem to be it is in reality heavily freighted with style and nuances Do you know for example what a need is You may think you do but a planner especially an educationist or a sociologist who plans cannot use such a simple word with the easy assumption that the reader will fully appreciate just what he is getting I should like to read to you from a copy of an interoffice memorandum recently circulated in a university in this metropolitan area It was part of a program to set up statements of what the university staff conceived its functions to be The document was entitled Preparation of Mission and Goals Statement for the Library and these are short excerpts In organizing your ideas use the pattern outlined in these materials 1 Identify needs see Sec III A 2 Articulate goals to meet the'needs see Sec III B for checklist see Sec III C for examples 3 Develop objectives to meet each goal see Sec IV Write separate documents for each step in the procedure a list-of needs a stat ment of goals and a list of objectives The following list of definitions may help you in your preparation of the documents for your area Needs - Those things required by the various people the activity serves Goals - A series of statements each broad and general describing ends not means and aimed at meeting needs Objectives - Specific accomplishments or processes read prohcesses which should be measurable and which should be concerned with means for achieving goalS Many pages further along in this document is something called a Goal Identification Check List which is a series of questions by means of which you can test whether what you have articulated are in fact goals This is what the check list looks like o GOAL IDENTIFICATION CHECK LIST 1 Is the goal expressed in ends not means activity terms 2 Is the goal flexible provide opportunities for innovation 3 Is the goal achievable both implementable as well as realizable 4 Is progress toward the goal measurable assessable 5 Is the goal capable of exacting commitment from all sectors 6 Is the goal available to be changed not written in cement and challenged updatable 7 Is the goal free of the constraints of quantification and temporality 8 Is the goal related to needs and problems Now that is the kind of a library you want for your university Not just a place where they keep an orderly collection of books and papers for students to read but a place that $ aliYe with goals that are- iffiplementable and realizable and updatable achievable measurable and assessable and above all not constrained by quantification and temporality It is from such universities as this that our bureaucracy is staffed I am happy to say -- or at any rate those parts of the bureaucracy with which I am familiar seem to be peopled largely with ates of tha school o _ cho ls very much like it In my second written report I cltea a number of sentences which show ample evidence of having been hammered out on just such an academic forge They included the following Jones appears to be in excellent financial straits We feel that the university while still an important element is less so than it once was Even if it were the situation on campus makes the procedure impossible He helped his daughter with whom he is quite close out financially November 76 CRYPTOLOC Page 19 UNCLASSIFIED DOCID 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED He believes the risk will be minimal if students and instructors utilize reasonable jurisprudence in the course of the exercise This announcement by the two officials would put an end to specific rumors of one firing the other or vice versa At that time they were in the first stages of a broken marriage The Cubans were the largest and only exile group in the country Also in my second report I included several examples from my collection of what I call the Technique of Traumatic Terseness We all know what a great impact can be achieved by making portentous statements in few words Lafayette we are here I cannot spare this general -- he fights Now note how much greater an impact can be achieved when the short statement describes the totally unexpected not to say unbelievable Doe and his wife had a daughter of four When he last saw her she was pregnant Jones's wife was in her late twenties and their daughter Mary is aged about five The latter is rather pale and sickly She doesn't like Germany very much She smokes Roe was one of seven children and was raised without a father who was killed by a log in a forest From the content of these sentences you may have divined that we in the CIA live in more of a Tolkien world than a James Bond world Fleming after all never sent Bond out into a forest where the very logs rise up to smite you The people we deal with are surrounded by dangers James Bond never dreamed of and that may explain why they feel impelled to begin enjoying life and reproducing it at a very early age Elegance in the Media The news media and the popular arts are doing their share to maintain the standards of posh English and they deserve to be mentioned here I think There is for example the radio announcer who livens up what would otherwise be rather pedestrian broadcasts by emphasizing unimportant words in a high-class way which shows that he is a radio announcer knows what he is doing and does not belong among the herds of ordinary mortals who do not know how to talk on the radio We used to have some noteworthy practi tioners of this art in our own metropolitan area but not anymore I refer to the policemen in the traffic helicopters who until somebody took them in hand and utterly destroyed their charm used to give us bulletins in this manner There has been four-car collision a the entrance to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge on the Virginia side There will be some delay there until we can get a patrol car to the scene of this accident Officers are responding to this situation and we hope that thebridge will be cleared soon The art is not lost however It still flourishes in small towns throughout the country and if you keep your car radio tuned to the radio stations in these towns as you travel through the countryside you can often hear this type of classy elocution I recently taped a short excerpt from a news broadcast from station WELD of Fisher West Virginia While I was taping the sequence I found to my surprise that I was getting homesick It was only after several minutes that I realized why I was hearing echoes of dear old Mr Darrell reading to our Sunday School class from the 60th Psalm That announcer obviously cares very much about his profession He does not want the radio audience to get the idea that radio announcers are just ordinary people who speak as ordinary people do If he were sitting with a group of his friends he would certainly not use this special way of speaking because if he did they would most assuredly drown him in the Cheat River But when he gets behind A microph ne and they get behind a radio set everythIng changes and one must maintain the standards of the art f t e policy of detente or whatever diplomatIC lIne we pursue in the future to keep the peace of the world should ever fail us which God forbid I hope I am near Fisher West Virginia so that I can get the news from WELD It would come in a bulletin something like this I think ' Twenty-one American cities were destroyed yesterday atom bombs launched from the Soviet Union Communications with Washington D C have been interrupted since early this morning at which time President Ford announced that he had pushed the button which would launch 85 missiles toward targe in the ritardando e diminuendo Soviet Union Elsewhere in the news today That announcer in Fisher incidentally did the ultimate recently to our old friend the chaise longue We long ago gave up any silly insistence that this means in French simply long chair because Sears Ward 's and Hechinger's among others have decreed that it is fact a lounge chair But the WELD annoucer has an even better idea He calls it a chase lounge and the implications of that pronunciation I leave to your own imagination Some radio announcers have trouble with the nominative and objective case of pven modern November 76 CRYPTOLOG UNCLASSIFIED Page 20 DOCIO 4009739 UNCLASSIFIED English pronouns when two or more of them occur in a series but this really should be no problem at all In case of a question heaviest weight must always be given to elegance of sound rather than grammatical correctness I think you will agree with me that the phrase you and me sounds low-class and ought to be avoided at all costs I remember hearing a radio broadcast from St Louis many years ago in which Harry Caray was describing a Cardinals baseball game assisted by that great old ballplayer Gabby Street You may remember Gabby -- he was the one who caught the baseball tossed from the top of the Washington Monument many many years ago Gabby was commenting on an umpire's decision and he said between you and me Harry 'and then he realized what he said and quickly changed i t I guess what I should have said was 'between you and I' Whereupon Harry congratulated him for having spotted and corrected the error all by himself without anybody having to point it out to him Gabby was intensely pleased to have thus been admitted into the company of the elite and he pointed out to Harry that the reason he had made the mistake in the first place was that he had not had much education when he was a boy Even newspaper writers and editors are not immune to the problem of the objective and nominative cases for personal pronouns Mr Colman McCarthy of the editorial staff of the Washington Post tells of an editor who certainly belonged among us elegant thinkers and writers If you think among we elegant thinkers and writers sounds better have it that way by all means According to Mr McCarthy this editor came upon a story which had been turned in by a reporter detailing the events of a police line-up that contained a notorious murderess A witness to her latest crime was brought in took one look and exclaimed My God that's her The reporter was so struck by the immediate and unequivocal identification that he put that statement in direct quotes in the lead sentence of his story Our elegant editor would have none of that however and he corrected it so that on the printed page the article quoted the witness as having said My God that's she Elegance in Popular Music In at least one respect the poetry of popular music today is more admirable than the work of a T S Eliot or an Emily Dickinson It is because the writers of lyrics today have voluntarily given themselves an almost overwhelming handicap They have determined to write great music using no other words except baby luv we can make it I wawnt you I ne-e-e-d you and come on Even in cases where they violate these restrictions however they are still inoculated against the case-virus for personal pronouns It was Engelbert Humperdinck I think the latest Engelbert Humperdinck that is who sang a song recently whose lyrics are the epitome of originality and poetic imagery of which today's songwriters can be so proud 1 ' m yours sang Mr Humperdinck till the stars fall from the sky for you and I Final Caution Before concluding there is one word I should like to caution you about and that word is majority I once read a report from one of our officers in the field in the aftermath of a serious flood in which he said that the majority of the water had receded Now there is no denying that majority sounds much more high-class than plain old most But don't you see the danger here By using majority that way the writer was implying that there was a minority of the water still around h1m and from experience I would be willing to bet that the officer did not even know the definition of the word majority He may in fact have been talking about a plurality of the water So if you are not absolutely certain of the definition I recommend great care with these words This completes my report this evening and it remains for me now only to thank you for inviting me here to give it and for having listened to it so attentively and politely In concluding I can think of no better way to exhort you to continue the good fight than to quote the words of a USAID officer in the field who was surveying his situation his country of assignment and the future about which he was quite concerned I would have you listen carefUlly to his words because he has laid down a rule which I believe to be valid for you and me and for the entire bureaucracy in which we move and have our being This is what he wrote With regard to future plans we must steer a careful course between doing nothing and doing the irrelevant And now finally to the popular arts -specifically popular music Have you noticed that the lyrics of popular songs seem to have overcome at least the problem of lie and lay Lyrics these days are less constrained by delicacy ana discretion That is precisely what I have been attemptthan they used to be and lying and laying ing to do this evening -- steer a careful figure much more prominently and often in love course between nothing and the irrelevant I songs than they did in my youth And so Helen hope that in so doing I may have inspired you 'Reddy signs a ballad in which she entreats me to go forth and do likewis and to do it to come and lay by me and I believe it was elegantly Lou Rawls who recently crooned a song to his lady love who was laying beside him on the bed - _ -_ _-_ _---_-- --- November 76 CRYPTOLOG Page 21 Pi-Nov 76-53-24924 UNCLASSIFIED DOer-D - 3 9-- - -TOP-5fEREf- ___ --- - ---J HANDLE VIA COt-tiNT CIIANNELS ONLY 'fIllS BOEURUMEN'f EURONTltINS EUROBt WOftB UTt ftlltL This document is from the holdings of The National Security Archive Suite 701 Gelman Library The George Washington University 2130 H Street NW Washington D C 20037 Phone 202 994-7000 Fax 202 994-7005 nsarchiv@gwu edu