When I'm doing some tedious task that doesn't require much brainpower, I sometimes like to listen to something in the background. This morning I was preparing a glossary for some of my students, adding Chinese glosses to a fairly long list of English words. While doing this, I was listening to something YouTube had suggested and I had randomly clicked on: Tucker Carlson interviewing Tulsi Gabbard. This is not at all the type on content I ordinarily consume, politics just not being my shtick, but for whatever reason today I thought "why not" and clicked on it:
I was using a school computer which is set up, for the convenience of my Taiwanese employees, to use Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for typing in Chinese. I'm pretty proficient in that typing system, but I can type Chinese much faster if I can use the Roman alphabet. Since Google Translate accepts Hanyu Pinyin (Romanized) input for Chinese, I often type Chinese that way into Google Translate and then copy and paste it to the document I want it in. One of the words I had to gloss this morning was loaf, so I typed 一條（麵包） -- literally "a loaf (of bread)." The parenthetical note was necessary because 一條 by itself literally means "a strip" and is the measure word used for all sorts of long thin things such as ropes and rivers, but also for bread (when counted by the loaf), fish, and for some reason dogs. (In Chinese, you generally can't use a number with a noun directly; instead of "a pen" or "two dogs" you have to say literally "a branch of pen" or "two strips of dog.")
I typed that, copied it, and pasted it into my document -- and at exactly that moment, Tulsi said "a loaf of bread." I don't mean a second or two later; we're talking about perfect simultaneity (which is of course the literal meaning of synchronicity). I pressed Ctrl-V, and 一條（麵包）appeared in my document while Tulsi Gabbard helpfully read out the English translation. She was talking about inflation; here's the immediate context:
You know, a loaf of bread is three times more expensive today than it was six months ago, or a year ago.
I considered posting about the sync but at first decided not to. As impressive as the form of the sync had been, the content -- just "a loaf of bread" -- was about as boring as it gets.
That made me stop and think, though, if "a loaf of bread" might have any deeper significance, and I remembered that the word
loaf had been featured in my 2011 post "
Dreaming in a forgotten language." I had dreamed about having a student recite a Greek prayer which was known as the
Chliep Doroch because it was with those two words -- meaning "Dear Lord" -- that the Greek text of the prayer began. Upon waking, I of course realized that that wasn't Greek at all and tried to figure out if there was any linguistically plausible way of torturing the meaning "Dear Lord" out of it. One of my speculations was that
chliep was "perhaps cognate with the Old English
hlaf -- as in
hlafweard, 'loaf-guard,' from which our modern word
lord is derived."
Eventually, I realized that the phrase from the dream was obeying the rules of Russian phonology, and looking it up as Russian (the "forgotten language" of my title) yielded a near bull's-eye: хлеб дорог, literally "bread is dear" -- and хлеб and related Slavic words for "bread" are generally held to derive from a Germanic loan-word, related to loaf and this indirectly to lord.
I also noted in that 2011 post something directly relevant to Tulsi Gabbard's "loaf of bread" reference:
The Russian word for "dear," like its English equivalent, can mean either "beloved" or "expensive." A Google search for "хлеб дорог" turns up David Ricardo in translation: "не потому хлеб дорог, что платится рента, а рента платится потому, что хлеб дорог" -- "Corn is not high because a rent is paid, but a rent is paid because corn is high."
The post further noted that хлеб дорог could also mean "bread of the roads." That caught my eye in connection with today's sync because in Chinese, roads are one of the many long thin things to take the measure word 條. That is, in Chinese "a road" -- 一條路 -- is literally "a 'loaf' of road." (You can put "a loaf of road" into Google Translate to confirm this.)
Writing this post, which necessitated the explanation that a loaf of bread is literally a "strip" of bread in Chinese, made me think of the
Pipkins episode I discussed in my 2022 post "
Michael the glove puppet and X the Owl" and revisited in several subsequent posts:
Due to the influence of William Wright, I tend to connect the word strip with the Stripling Warriors these days. In the Pipkins episode, Pig explains that soldiers are thin strips of bread:
Boiled egg and soldiers! Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers! Do you know what soliders are, apart from being men in the army? Well, they are little thin strips of bread and butter, and they are smashing for dipping into your egg. Oh, I love boiled egg and soldiers!
It was this "strips of bread" angle that made me think of Pipkins, but it turns out to be relevant in another way, too. The name of the episode is "The Glove Puppet," and the story is about how Hartley Hare uses a glove puppet named Michael to "be naughty" -- including stealing one of Pig's soldiers -- always blaming the puppet for the misdeeds rather than accepting responsibility himself.
Now look back at that Tucker Carlson video. The full title is "Tulsi Gabbard on Being Trump's VP, Who's Puppeteering Biden, and Corruption in Congress."
Besides this implication that Biden is himself a "glove puppet," there's also a bit where Tulsi says:
People like Hillary Clinton call me a traitor and a Russian asset or a puppet of Putin.
Here the idea of puppetry is neatly juxtaposed with Russian -- the language of хлеб дорог.
Note added (same day, 10:30 p.m.):
The thumbnail for the Tucker and Tulsi video shows a Venn diagram with a red circle on the left and a blue one on the right:
