The “Death to America” Flash Card Series
According to this story, Nicholas George, a student at Pomona College in California was questioned and detained at Philadelphia International Airport, allegedly because he was studying a pack of some 200 Arabic vocabulary flash cards. He’s suing.
Seems like another case of zealous (over)profiling, until you read this:
“George says he was carrying nothing dangerous — that words like “bomb” and “explosive” (among 200 other, less-alarming cards) were simply translations he was trying to learn.”
I’ve studied four languages (including English), and can’t recall the “explosive” and “bomb” flash cards in any vocabulary lessons. What else was in there, “Death to America!” and “72 virgins”? It makes me wonder about the choices made by the producers of cards for various languages, and how they choose which words to include. It almost seems like material for some lame parody — French flash cards with “existential despair,” Russian ones with “resigned to misery,” Thai cards with “underage prostitution” — you get the idea. Maybe some verb conjugation cards would be a better idea.
One Response to “The “Death to America” Flash Card Series”
February 12th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Anyone aspiring to certain jobs with the government would need to know the translations for words like bomb, or maybe that’s the reason why we’ve had so many intelligence breakdowns? However, using them while traveling indicates the type of poor judgment that should disqualify a person for such government work.
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