"Unable to Read the Air"

In yesterday's Financial Times, letter writer Takashi Ito introduces a Japanese idiom to describe ousted Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's recent behavior:

Sir, The hot new word in Japan is “KY”. An abbreviation for “kuuki-yomenai”, it literally means unable to read the air. For an ex-Goldman Sachs partner, John Thain was astoundingly KY. He decorated his office as he laid off Merrill Lynch employees, and then he asked for a $10m bonus when the whole country had turned against excessive executive compensation. There was also the little detail that his company was not doing that well.

The height of his KY was the fact that he was buying company stock the day before he was ousted!

Now a true believer (in Goldman superiority) may say that he was buying stock because he knew his departure would ignite the share price, but I am not willing to give Mr Thain that much credit. Anyway, the stock dived on the news.

The O.E.D. on "Conversate" and "Aks" versus "Ask"

On his Atlantic blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates transcribes a conversation he had with Jesse Sheidlower, Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary ("Added Bonus: Irregardless of what you think, "conversate" is a word"). English mavens may find this of interest. Here's an excerpt:

TNC: What fuels the notion that certain words aren't really words?

JS: There a lot of different things. People feel that there is a certain kind of language that's appropriate and a certain type that isn't appropriate. And these judgments are based on many things--some may make sense, some might not. People take these things very seriously. People are told things about the language in school that are demonstrably untrue, and they think anyone who doesn't follow along with those beliefs is stupid or wrong.

Let me give you an example, in terms of looking at things historically. At the beginning of this conversation you pronounced the word "ask" as "aks." This is something that people often object to. People say it's the wrong pronunciation, and it's stupid. But if you look at the history of the English language, you can't tell if the correct pronunciation is "aks" or "ask." The "aks" pronunciation goes back 1000 years. It's in Beowulf. It's in Chaucer.

What happened was both were in use. But at some point, the dialect in which the "ask" pronunciation was used became dominant. But both continued and have been in use since then. When you look at America, the "aks" pronunciation is widespread in Southern American English. African-Americans used this because they were in the South--it's not especially African-American, but its Southern.

Now, if you look at other Germanic languages, the "correct" pronunciation is, in fact, "ask"--but you can't tell that looking just at English and it ultimately doesn't matter. If I asked you to name the ordinal number between "second" and "fourth" you'd say, what?

TNC: Third.

JS: Right, third--but the old pronunciation is "thred," it comes from three. But if you were to say thred, you'd be considered a moron--even though it's "correct."