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| Britain |
| ChalaqueÂ’s visit |
| 2011-05-11 |
| Scotland Yard assures me that the codenames they use to describe operations are randomly selected these days — Bumblebee, for instance, didn’t have any obvious connections to burglary — but the one for President Barack Obama’s first state visit this month has still raised eyebrows. It is, Mandrake hears, Chalaque. In Punjabi, the word is used to describe someone who is cheeky, sharp, crafty and too clever for his or her own good. One Punjabi speaker tells me that it carries mildly disrespectful connotations and adds it hardly helps matters that it sounds so much like “macaque”, which she had initially thought I had said. America can’t reasonably take umbrage, however. The codename that the Secret Service chose for Ronald Reagan during his period in the White House was, after all, hardly reverential: Rawhide. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #3 The codename that the Secret Service chose for Ronald Reagan during his period in the White House was, after all, hardly reverential: Rawhide. I am sure there is some potential umbrage-taker who would object to a codename like *gtfsk. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-05-11 12:48 |
| #2 Exactly, Mike. I'd say the EUroweenians are ignorant of foreign cultures. |
| Posted by: Spot 2011-05-11 08:02 |
| #1 The codename that the Secret Service chose for Ronald Reagan during his period in the White House was, after all, hardly reverential: Rawhide. ...In which our scribe demonstrates that he knows diddly about how we think of cowboys. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2011-05-11 07:46 |