Obama and the core of “corpsman”
It’s a small point; really very small in the larger scheme of things: President Obama mispronounced the title “Corpsman” several times at a prayer breakfast, saying “Corpse-man” instead of the proper “Core-man.”
The usual suspects have criticized him for this error. My first impulse, however, is to feel a small harmonic quiver of empathy. How many among us have not made the error of mispronouncing something we’ve only read in books but never heard, or at least never paid much attention to? Terribly embarrassing, and not at all unusual, especially for the reclusive and bookish.
The left used to take great delight in reaming out Bush for saying “nukular” instead of “nuclear.” And yet that was a widespread regionalism, an acceptable and common pronunciation of the word in many parts of the country—just not the parts of the country in which the left ordinarily resides. They considered Bush’s pronunciation just another piece of evidence for the imbecility of his small and chimpish mind.
Obama’s “Corpsman,” however, is a far more idiosyncratic blunder. Although a small one, it is not entirely trivial, because it is almost perfectly emblematic of some of the deeper divisions between left and right. Perhaps Obama’s supporters might even consider it to be a badge of honor, because it is evidence of Obama’s career in academia—his bookishness rather than his real-life experience—as well as his ignorance of all things military. These are traits shared (and in some ways admired) by many in the left.
What’s more, it’s an example of Obama’s international outlook, which is another leftist plus. His childhood was largely spent away from this country; in some ways he is rather unfamiliar with the basic American vernacular and ethos, and has had to try to pick such things up as he goes along. Understandably, there are gaps. And, understandably, the military would be one of them.
You may think I’m making much ado about almost nothing. And indeed, I am. But I have noticed that, with a man as carefully scripted and controlled as Obama, who purposely conceals a great deal about himself, the gaffes and thowaway remarks can loom unusually large in helping to tell us what might be going on (or failing to go on) beneath the public persona.
Cargo cult does not have to actually learn. they believe that nobody knows, and everyone fakes it. so, is it any wonder that they seek success through force and manipulation rather than debate and knowlege?
When I think of the hue-and-cry raised over Dan Quayle’s “potato” and “potatoe,” you go right ahead, Neo, and make all the ado you want.
Obama lost me when he mispronounced the constellation Orion as O-ree-on.”
It was also the name of a green energy company Obama was touting.
My guess is that Obama was too reading Urdu poetry to learn how to pronounce one of the most majestic constellation names or notice the connection between Marine Corps and corpsman.
This also provokes a bit of schadenfreude, given how often we heard in 2008 — and since! — about how terribly smart Barack Obama is.
There are millions of Americans who never went to college, but can pronounce the word perfectly well. Many of them, I suspect, will now conclude that the man isn’t as smart as he told us he was.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Daniel in Brookline: But I think that, to some people, this particular mispronunciation proves how smart Obama is. He reads books, see? And he is too smart to bother with pedestrian military matters.
with a man as carefully scripted and controlled as Obama
So…he didn’t practice his speech? or no one listened to him when he did? or no one thought to write a note that the pronuciation was “core-man”, or the speech writer didn’t us a phonetic spelling?
Really? seriously? you want me to believe that??
I R A Darth Aggie: I had a bit in my post about that and then took it out, but I thought about it. I think this speech was so minor that he didn’t rehearse it in front of anyone.
I also think that many of his advisers, aides, and speechwriters are similarly somewhat ignorant about such things. I’m not at all sure that, even had he rehearsed it in front of someone, the person would have caught the error.
Let’s look at common expressions with Corps
Corps of Engineers (lots of Corps lakes in Illinois as well as locks on the Illinois and Mississipi rivers).
Drum and Bugle Corps (big in Black majority high schools in USA)
Corps of Cadets (West Point, Texas A&M, VMA etc.)
Esprit d’Corps
Shall I continue. Now Obama doesn’t have a Kentucky or other regional accent that would excuse him of this. Pure sloppiness.
It was the teleprompter’s fault. It should have phonetic spellings for anything military.
As a former Air Force officer with a brother in law who served as a Navy corpsman with the Marines in Viet Nam, I have heard the term pronounced properly many, many times. As Neo pointed out, Obama and his ilk have no interest in or exposure to the military.
This was not always so. During WW II the elites were over represented among pilots and other high risk positions. To whom much was given, much was expected. Movie stars (Jimmy Stewart) and athletes (Ted Willams) served with distinction.
But, it’s a French word. When NPR mispronounced a Spanish word, we (then ‘Liberals’)in the Southwest gritted our teeth and told ourselves that French is the second language in the Northeast, so they ought to be forgiven for their ignorance of our second tongue. They shouldn’t. I do not speak Italian, although I have discovered that, with enough Spanish and French, I could fake my way up and down the Italian peninsula, but I can pronounce Genghis Khan, with its Italian spelling, unlike the supposedly intellectual John Kerry. It’s not that Obama, or Kerry, for that matter, are so smart. It’s that he and his entire crowd tell themselves constantly how smart they are, and constantly show us out here in America how smart they are not.
Michael: yes, one of the interesting things is that the Obama crowd is quite ignorant of the extent of its own ignorance.
Not a good thing.
Some things are better left unsaid, this isn’t one of them. Good stuff, thanks.
I agree with the assessment this shows ONCE AGAIN that ∅bama is to a big degree the President of a foreign country. Our POTUS never lived in an area that was mainstream to American culture, so mainstream America remains a foreign country to him.
This is the guy who bowled 37 in his mid 40s: most likely the first time in his life he had ever bowled. This is the guy who, in looking at rural America as would an anthropologist studying a foreign culture, speculated that rural America was “bitter, clinging to guns and religion.” This was not so much scorn of rural America, as it was ignorance of it. He doesn’t know us.
I’m with DirtyJobsGUy here.
There was a time when I was young and I didn’t know how to pronounce corpsman. But I was raised by beatniks, avoided the military, became a hippie, and had no contact with people who talked about the military. Nonetheless, by the time I was in my thirties I figured out how to pronounce corpsman.
Obama, on the other hand, is Commander-in-Chief of the entire US military. He probably doesn’t talk to military folks as often as he should, but he does talk to them.
Obama really should know how to pronounce corpsman properly.
I echo Huxley. I don’t know about “corpsman” in specific, but there were parts of the American experience I never heard about, only read about. This is not a badge of honor in adults, though it is something of cultural marker when one’s child does that.
And there you have it. It is revealing of tribe or class all the way through school to mispronounce something according to its spelling, revealing that you are a reader and thus a Very Smart Person. But in adulthood that is supposed to gradually recede, as you correct yourself upon hearing what other human beings say. Obama has without question heard the actual pronunciation of corpsman in his lifetime. He never made the association or correction because those people weren’t important to him. It didn’t register.
It is a perfectly innocent mistake (perhaps even an acceptable English variant) to pronounce Sevastopol with the accent on the 2nd and 4th syllables. But if you are going to do business there, and hear them put the accent on the 1st and 3rd repeatedly and don’t adjust, you are expressing that you either don’t care or are stupid.
AVI: I know how to pronounce “corps,” as in “Marine Corps” and “drum and bugle corps.” But I’m not sure I’ve ever noted the word “corpsman” before, actually. So I’m not sure how much Obama has actually heard it, although I would guess he’s heard it more than I have, at least since he became president. But perhaps not as often as one might imagine.
Maybe it was a Freudian slip.
Was he scratching his forehead with his third finger when he said it?
Obviously Obama also never heard the following pronounced:
Peace Corps, US Gov’t service agency
AmeriCorps, US Gov’t service agency
Job Corps, US Gov’t
Citizen Corps, FEMA grassroots strategy agency
US Medical Reserve Corps
Inner-City Teaching Corps, serves Chicago schools
Youth Volunteer Corps of America, YMCA service group
Marine Corps War Memorial, in Washington, DC
He’s unfamiliar with service agencies? Nobody ever says the names of government or other service agencies in the White House?
Besides all the above, he never heard anyone say “corpseman.”
That could only mean someone who works in a mortuary, cemetary, or the like. Right?
This is just another example of Milburn Drysdale Progressivism.
Obama brings to mind the antithesis of the Beverly Hillbillies. Sitting around “the fancy eatin’ table” with their “meat stickers and pot passers” they were trying to fit in to a culture they didn’t understand; the Clampetts knew that it wasn’t native to them. Obama, on the other hand, cites 57 states, bows to foreign dignitaries including the American-born mayor of Tampa (and still doesn’t have the bow correct), talks about “corpse-men” “O-ree-on” (Orion) and immodestly how he “gives better than her gets” not because he tries to emulate a culture he doesn’t understand, but because he thinks that he understands it more acutely than anyone else. He has it correct and he needs to show the rubes exactly how it’s done in polite society.
In turn, the Progressive Democrats are Milburn Drysdale, always overlooking in their own what they denigrate in the opposition just to keep the money in the bank (the power in the party) while having the temerity to believe that they do this all for the benefit of the rubes.
Sloan: shouldn’t it actually have been “corpseperson?”
I expect that members of the U.S. Marine Corpse would applaud him; if he could find any.
BTW it is not VMA; it is Virginia Military Institute. Their nickname is the Keydets, (I don’t know why) and they would not recognize an institution named VMA. VMI has contributed many distinguished military leaders to the United States. Sadly, their Corps of Cadets also contributed many young corpses to the Confederacy during the War of “Northern Aggression”.
If he had said it only once, I might blame the teleprompter, but he said it repeatedly.
I doubt he knows what a corpsman is, although as CIC of the Marine *Corps* he should, as Navy corpsman go into battle with the Marines. I think the real reason is that this topic was simply not worth his time, nor his staff’s time, to prepare for properly.
My brother retired a few months ago after 25 years as a Navy corpsman. I sent this to him thinking he’d laugh, but instead he was disgusted. And he’s Independent, not Republican.
Obviously he has never seen “Full Metal Jacket”…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdytWbl9sh8
My background is more like Obama’s than like the average American’s, and I’ve never heard “corpsmen” said, or even encountered the written word before this story came out.
If I were stuck reading it aloud without preparation, I’d say “corzmen,” based on its obvious latent Frenchness. Obama’s a worldly intellectual, I hear, so if he’d done that, I’d understand how it happened.
If I were reading a prepared speech, I’d ask somebody, probably a Marine, how Marines say it before I said it, because I know soldiers care about pronunciation as in-group signaling, like inhabitants of a weirdly pronounced town do. Obama’s commander in chief, so he must have met a few military guys and, being a worldly intellectual and winner-over of people, noted that characteristic of their language, if only so he could add it to his data bank and play it back to them. …Right?
But he just plowed over it. Assistant Village Idiot has the nub of it, though he’s too nice. To get it wrong just like he did, Obama has to be both morbidly enclosed and not educated or cultured in the way we’re told he is.
It’s not a slip. He did it twice.
SAB just beat me to it. I was going to point out that in virtually every war movie as soon as someone is wounded everyone yells “Corpsman!”
Has Obama never seen “Full Metal Jacket,” “Band of Brothers,” “Flag of Our Fathers,” or virtually any WWII movie?
Speaking of words only read but never heard, I once encountered an amusing instance of the opposite in an email that referred (twice) to “polo bears.” How about a few chukkers on the tundra?
Obama has without question heard the actual pronunciation of corpsman in his lifetime. He never made the association or correction because those people weren’t important to him. It didn’t register.
AVI: Bang!
When Obama mispronounced Orion, he had been listening to presentations from various companies including the Orion Energy Corp. which he was plugging.
I suspect that behind Obama’s carefully cultivated impassive expression, he is often not only not betraying what he’s thinking, he is someplace else entirely.
Maybe it’s because corpsmen deal with people who are very much clinging to guns and religion at the time.
I try to avoid watching him or hearing his insipid voice, but I couldn’t avoid it today and it sounded to me like he also mis-pronounced “Etats Unis” (sounded like “Entants Uni”). Shouldn’t a post historic Europhile such as The One know how to pronounce his own county’s name in “the international language of diplomacy?”
Truly Pathetic!
Wm Lawrence:
A minor quibble: I don’t think Obama is a Europhile, but many of his supporters are.
I just linked this post at GCP.
Nom,
Don’t call Marines “soldiers”. They are “Marines”.
I am no fan of President Obama, but I must admit that when READING “corpsman” I might pronounce it just as he did- in spite of the fact that I know how things like “Marine Corps” is pronounced.
Shouldn’t a post historic Europhile such as The One know how to pronounce his own county’s name in “the international language of diplomacy?”
“Indonesianique?”
I must admit that when READING “corpsman” I might pronounce it just as he did-
Maybe the word was hyphenated between the two teleprompters. Left: “Corps” and right: “man.” Let’s just hope they don’t have this problem with “country.” (Pace Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts.)
Would have been sweeter if Obama had been giving a s-W-ord as an award to a corpseman 🙂
“Many of them, I suspect, will now conclude that the man isn’t as smart as he told us he was.”
I actually don’t think it’s a matter of “smartness” in this instance. What I think it does help prove is that he’s much more provincial (even without clinging to guns and religion) than is ideal for a president of the United States. There are whole chunks of the country, both demographic and geographic, that he seems woefully ignorant of, especially when his job is to be the leader of all of us. A mistake like that would be excusable in someone else in many instances, but for the Commander in Chief it really isn’t acceptable that he’s that clueless.
I’m reminded of a video I watched earlier today of Clarence Thomas. Part of what he said was (paraphrasing) this, “Lot’s of people want to be a success. The question is do you have the will to prepare to actually accomplish it”. It sounds to me like Obama didn’t do his preparation. He didn’t put into the job the level of due diligence it required as President of the United States. It’s a small slip in one way, but a telling indicator in another.
(The specific section starts at around 1:07 hr on the video.)
Nom…Obama as a “worldly intellectual”
I question whether Obama is really an intellectual, worldly or otherwise. I think he’s an actor who frequently plays the role of an intellectual.
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My first husband, who was an avid reader and a really good young poet, pronounced “shudder” as “shrudder” for our entire courtship and marriage. I myself didn’t realize that “subtle” and what I always spelled in my mind as “suttle” were the same word until early high school. Which is to say, sure, I understand how stuff like this happens…
…But I wasn’t 40-odd and President of the United States when I was making silly pronunciation errors of non-esoteric words. Sigh.
Where the hell does this “intellectual” and “bookishness” come from, anyway?
Obama’s extemporaneous speech – the only relevant one, given his handlers and speechwriters – betrays no evidence whatever of any facility with abstract reasoning, or any unscripted literary references. Am I missing something?
I am long through cutting this president any slack. This “error” is a combination of lack of literacy and contempt of the military. There’s something in it of Kerry’s claiming to have won a “Silver Star with V Device,” a decoration which does not exist, in contempt of anyone who knew it did not exist. But the obvious joke, Corpse Man, is a little too nervy for O. I think he missed the word that anyone with his supposed learning would have understood at the age of nine or so, and was amused and proceeded on. Instead of, “Corpse Man? Hell, that can’t be right. Gimme a dictionary,” he went, “C-O-R-P-S-M-A-N? Corpse Man? Tee hee hee. Corpse Man.”
I think Obama’s mispronunciation (sp??!!) betrays a lack of awareness of how important it is that he speak right, or maybe (also) a lack of understanding of his own limits. My guess is he doesn’t even see his teleprompted speeches before he gives them. He needs one handler who will help him practice, but I bet he would never imagine he could benefit from this.
I’m with the above commenters who don’t think he’s intellectual at all; I think he’s just very artful at making some or many people think he’s smart.
Occam’s Beard: you are correct. I have noticed that Obama’s extemporaneous speech is not the speech of a person who does a lot of reading. It is strategic, political, and serviceable. It also is remarkably lacking in humor, although he attempts humor at times. The lack of humor was one of the first things I noticed about Obama, and it was not a good sign.
And please don’t give me his academic credentials. I worked once for a Harvard graduate who thought Portugal was in Central America.
∅bama is an airhead. There I’ve said it.
I’m done beating around the BUSH on this subject.
At least Bush would know that raising tax rates during a recession would not help the economy…. Palin also
Yeah… Poor Obama. This reminds me of the time my poor brother — not having been brought up in the South — ordered sowthern fried chicken.
Of course that was when he was 13, well before having been accepted to Columbia U.
But truthfully, this mistake doesn’t really make me think less of Obama.
New-kyoo-ler…
Bush wasn’t the only President to use that pronunciation.
Several previous Presidents made me wince by mis(?)pronouncing the word.
Why doesn’t the media point this out?
Oh… NEVERMIND.
> just not the parts of the country in which the left ordinarily resides.
… I don’t think Fantasyland is an actual part of the country, Neo.
Granted, San Francisco tries Real Hard.
I might give him a little slack on this if (a) he’d give anyone else any and (b) if there were not Corpsmen working in the White House 24/7.
The man see those Corpsmen, along with all those other folks wearing funny clothes and unfashionable haircuts. Obama is too important to notice the little people, though, even though he isn’t really fit to carry their sweaty jocks.
I was a corpsman, and I never heard that word mispronounced except in jest.
As all these examples collectively show–the bowing, the mispronunciations, the odd turns of phrase and other things–Obama is exactly the kind of “foreigner”–someone who was not a “born and bred” American who was intimately familiar with American life and customs, history and language, our freedom, democracy and form of government, someone who loved and cherished them, and who owed his primary allegiance to America–that the “natural born citizen” requirement of the Constitution was supposed to prevent from becoming President, which is why this requirement should have been very strictly enforced.
From the evidence Obama’s attitude, outlook and viewpoint is, it seems, a weird mixture of Marxist-Muslim-Black Nationalist and supercilious Ivy League attitudes of resentment, hatred, and disdain for a group composed of Whites, unbelievers, all Conservatives, and the “lower classes” i.e. most if not, in essence, all of America and Americans.
Obama’s citizenship status has been covered up to such an extent that–absent some spectacular mistake or an insider spilling the beans–we will likely not know for sure if he met the requirement during his term of office. But if, at some later date, it is found out that Obama was not really a “natural born citizen,” such deliberately orchestrated fraud–with all of its monumentally pernicious consequences–should and would be a millstone around Democrat’s necks for many election cycles to come.
If Obama is not a “natural born citizen,” I’d imagine some people would do almost anything, or perhaps they would do anything, to keep this secret a secret.
I took O’s blunder to be evidence of his ignorance of French. I’m of sufficient age to have been given a particular horror of mispronouncing French words commonly used in English. To my mother, it was a sure sign of illiteracy and–although she never said it outright–classlessness.
Wolla Dalbo Says:
February 6th, 2010 at 10:22 am
Exactly and to the point; is there anyone representative of the MSM that reads this blog? The only group of people more deserving of our criticism and disdain than the Obama Democrats is the MSM; for violation of their implicit fiduciary duty of honesty in reporting, and shameless complicity in obfuscating the significant facts and details of Obama’s background.
If zero had any military votes, he lost most of the remaining.
Doc is right up there next to Jesus. In fact, the two words are sometimes pronounced within nanoseconds of each other.
In the Army it’s “medic”, but the idea is the same. zero dissed everybody’s idea of a genuine, substitute working Jesus.
From the Sixties on, I have encountered instances where ignorance of matters military is considered a positive virtue. Perhaps this is the in-group signaling for zero’s group.
I went around with a bunch of journos about the NYT getting Purple Star mixed up with Purple Heart. The journos’ point was that such arcane knowledge was so specialized that no civilians could be expected to know it, including journos who are presumed to be going the extra mile to find stuff out.
Dan Quayle’s encounter with the spelling of a root crop dogged him for decades, courtesy of the media. Pres. Ford started both ways for U-Mich football, was a scratch golfer and a great tennis player well into his retirement. One slip and he was a stumblebum for life.
We don’t see such things happening to dems in general or zero in particular.
BTW. Corpsemen are either Graves Registration or democrat voters.
26K results for corpseman in Google now
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=Corpsemen&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&fp=c26c79a56c95bda8
No legacy and drive-by media sites or liberal sites – all military and conservative sites.
It’s the EASY way to find conservative sites at this point. If you want conservative blogging – type corpseman into Google/Bing/Yahoo
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It wasn’t until my mid thirties that I made the connection between the word “misled”, which I knew and correctly used in speech, and the word I pronounced “my-zld” in my head when I read it in print. I was fully aware of what each word meant, but hadn’t realized it was the same word until I said it one day to my wife, who looked at me like I was crazy.
I’ll bet most people have a word or two like that. It simply shows a gap in his experience. He has never worked with the military in any detail. But we already knew that. I don’t give the man a lot of passes but I give him one on this.
As a private citizen I would give him a pass. As President and Commander in Chief, I would not.
jms.
At the age of about fourteen, I said, once, “aDOLescent”.
Corrected and never made that mistake again.
As others have said, we are all surrounded by “corps” pronounced “core” from Peace Corps onward.
This is different from your example, which I was expecting to hear “missiled”.
Then we get into the point that he is supposedly CINC and supposed to be paying attention to one of the oldest functions of the Chief Executive.
I’ll give him all the breaks Quayle got over “potato”.
Hi,
I think Neo is right in raising the issue of President Obama saying the word “Corpsman” as Corpseman instead of the usual Coreman.
But then one more fact is also equally true, as to how many people, apart from the military background, actually have to come in contact with this word.
Agreed that the President, as the Supreme Commander of the Forces, should have taken more care while saying the word aloud. But for this one time i’ll give him a pass.
Once you say the word ‘corpse man’ out loud in that context and don’t catch yourself on that horrible-sounding error, but even go so far as to say it again, then you are too stupid to breathe.
Sapna.
“corps” is NEVER pronounced “corpse”. Not in English, not in French.
For “corpseman” to be correct, it would have to be the only exception to the rule.
Off topic but not too far….I find Obama’s pronunciation of “Pockyston” to be annoyingly prissy and contrived. I guess it is rather difficult to say Pakistan correctly when one’s chin keeps going up in the air.
I find it stunning that the President did not know a common military designation. Any reading of first hand accounts of wars WWII, Korea or VN will have it. Movies and TV shows, paintings and other art depict Navy medics who serve with Marines.
For job training, I suggest that the President read the citations of the 22 MOHs (That’s Medal of Honor for the West Wing) Navy Corpsman.
Funny, the leftist press never forgave Dan Quayle for misspelling Potato (Potatoe) Decades later it was celebrated. Yet this pseudo sophisticate Barack Obama is a joke especially to people who resent the lamestream media from constantly overlooking his numerous gaffes and lies, to wit: his reference to 57 states in Oregon in 08, and also his claim of an uncle who helped to liberate Auschwitz which would be quite interesting in that the Russians liberated Auschwitz, not the USA.
You media mavens have abnegated your responsibility to actually maintain a professional level of objectivity and therefore have seriously damaged your own credibility which is already declining.
As a 70 year old Marine (“once a Marine, always a Marine”) I have to chide neo-neocon and others who failed to pick-up the real mistake in His Loftiness’ malapropis, or worse … his pure ignorance:
February 5th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
AVI: I know how to pronounce “corps,” as in “Marine Corps” and “drum and bugle corps.” But I’m not sure I’ve ever noted the word “corpsman” before, actually. So I’m not sure how much Obama has actually heard it, although I would guess he’s heard it more than I have, at least since he became president. But perhaps not as often as one might imagine.
C’mon folks. A Corpsman is never, ever a Marine. A Marine is never, ever a Corpsman, But, in times of conflict and battle they are mutually dependent on their brother’s skills. The Corpsman for the protection provided by the Marine; The Marine for the care provided by the Corpsman.
Note: Right or wrong, I capitalize Corpsman because they truly are CAPITAL to the core and the Corps.
The President? Behind his facade is a charade of a leader.
Thank you neo-neocon for a great blog … I truly mean it.
That would be “malapropism” rather than “malapropis”.
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