Cassandras

“Cassandra,” Evelyn De Morgan, 1898. Public Domain

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a priestess blessed with the gift of prophecy. She was cursed, however, to never be believed. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Cassandra warns her city about the fate that awaits them. Nevertheless, they welcome the Trojan Horse.

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Ignoring the intelligence of women is not confined to antiquity. Last year, female Israeli soldiers warned their superiors of a growing threat:

In the months leading up to the 7 October attacks by Hamas, they did begin to see things: practice raids, mock hostage-taking, and farmers behaving strangely on the other side of the fence… they would pass information about what they were seeing to intelligence and higher-ranking officers, but were powerless to do more.

The Israeli military was caught by surprise, and several of these young women were captured or killed.

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The Tet Offensive was the turning point of the Vietnam War. Up until then, the American public had been told that victory was assured. But in 1968, rebels launched multiple surprise attacks. Such was the shock that popular support for the war never recovered.

It’s worth wondering what would have happened had Doris Allen not been ignored:

She pushed for someone up the chain of command to take her report seriously, but no one did. On Jan. 30, 1968 — in line with what she had predicted — the enemy surprised American and South Vietnamese military leaders with the size and scope of their attacks.

The US military, alas, was not inclined to listen to a Black woman. Ms. Allen’s New York Times obituary recounts the story, as well as some of her other warnings (some heeded, some not).

In 2009, she was inducted to the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame.

Scenesters

Tyrus Wong and Ming Cho Lee were immigrants from China, and both used the artistic traditions of their homeland to change American entertainment.

 

Ming Cho Lee “radically and almost single-handedly transformed the American approach to stage design,” per his New York Times obituary. Drawing upon his training in Chinese watercolor painting, Lee created sets for hundreds of plays, dance works, and operas. His mastery, alas, did not always guarantee success:

“The most distinguished aspect of ‘Here’s Where I Belong,’ the new musical that opened at the Billy Rose Theater last night, is the scenery by Ming Cho Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in reviewing that one-day wonder for The Times in 1968. “But no one ever walked out of a theater humming the scenery.”

 

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Tyrus Wong was a low-level illustrator at Walt Disney’s studio when his colleagues ran into trouble.

Disney’s animators were struggling to bring “Bambi” to the screen. The wide-eyed fawn and his feathered and furry friends were literally lost in the forest, overwhelmed by leaves, twigs, branches and other realistic touches in the ornately drawn backgrounds.

“Too much detail,” Wong thought when he saw the sketches.

On his own time, he made a series of tiny drawings and watercolors and showed them to his superiors. Dreamy and impressionistic, like a Chinese landscape, Wong’s approach was to “create the atmosphere, the feeling of the forest.” It turned out to be just what “Bambi” needed.

Wong had studied the landscape paintings of the Song Dynasty, and his knowledge was the catalyst for the creation of a classic.

His Los Angeles Times obituary recounts his arduous and improbable journey to becoming an artist, as well as the racial discrimination he encountered. It also notes that in retirement, he became known for the beautiful homemade kites he flew on the beach.

The Originators

A metaphor is when you describe something by saying it’s something else. This may sound confusing, but we use these figures of speech all the time. When you say your vacation was heaven, or you describe the cafeteria as a zoo, the meaning is probably very clear.

Metaphors from sports – e.g. hit a home run, fumble the ball, throw in the towel – are part of everyday English. Below are obituaries of three sportsmen who changed not only their games, but our language.

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“We don’t need to spike the football, and I think that, given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk,” Obama said.

After US commandos killed Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama declined to release photographs of the terrorist’s corpse. He did so using a football metaphor that expresses victorious celebration.

Professional football’s first spike was performed in 1965 by Homer Jones, on the occasion of catching his first touchdown pass. His joy did not last. According to his New York Times obituary:

…he said that he had watched the end-zone demonstrations over the years with disapproval, and that if he had known what would result from his act, he would have thought twice. “It caused so many things — obscene things and confusing things,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t started it.”

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Tenet, a basketball fan… leaned forward and threw his arms up again. “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!”

George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, convinced President George Bush to go to war in Iraq by using a basketball metaphor. He sought to convey the certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction by using a term that means, colloquially, a sure thing. No such weapons were ever found.

It’s not certain who performed the first slam dunk, but it’s often attributed to Joe Fortenberry, who did so in Berlin in 1936 while leading the US Olympic team to a gold medal. His New York Times obituary notes the game, but not his innovation.

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The Los Angeles Times obituary of Glenn Burke, who died at 42, is four paragraphs long. It recounts the prejudice he faced as one of the first openly gay players in a major league sport, as well as his troubled life following professional baseball.

The obituary neglects to mention that he brought us the high five.

The Logophiles

 

There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world today, a majority of which originated with Indigenous people. Many of these are only spoken, not written, and they have no dictionaries. Because of forced assimilation, relocation and other factors involving Native people, most of these languages are on the verge of dying out.

 

Marie Wilcox sought to save one of them, Wukchumni. Her task was all the more urgent because she was the only person on Earth to speak it fluently. She created a dictionary so that the language would live on. As her New York Times obituary recounts:

Within short order, many family members started learning Wukchumni. And other Native American tribes were inspired by her story to revitalize their own disappearing languages.

 

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Madeline Kripke did not, like Ms. Wilcox, create a dictionary. But she kept one of the world’s largest collections of them.

Beginning with the Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her in the fifth grade, she accumulated an estimated 20,000 volumes as diverse as a Latin dictionary printed in 1502, Jonathan Swift’s 1722 booklet titled “The Benefits of Farting Explained,” and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 1980 guide to pickpocket slang.

Her New York Times obituary pays homage to her pursuit:

One question that none of Ms. Kripke’s reference books answers is what will happen to her collection. After avoiding eviction in the mid-1990s by agreeing to remove the volumes stacked in the hallway, she had hoped to transfer the whole enchilada [slang for the entirety] from her apartment and three warehouses to a university or, if she had her druthers [n., preference], to install it in her own dictionary library, which she never got to build.

Happily, the matter has been resolved, and the whole enchilada lives on as the Kripke Collection.

Hard Landings

 

The violence was immediate. Ms. Derickson took a kick to the chest from one of the hijackers and was kicked again while on the floor. The terrorists spoke no English, but one spoke German just as she did. This put her at the center of the drama for the next 55 hours…

In June of 1985, Uli Derickson was a flight attendant on a hijacked passenger jet. By the time her flight was over, she had negotiated the release of children and elderly women, shielded the identities of Jewish passengers, and halted a murderous beating. She also used her personal credit card to buy jet fuel.

Aftermath is an old agricultural word for growth that occurs after mowing. It now generally means, according to Merriam-Webster, “the period immediately following a usually ruinous event.”

In the aftermath of the hijacking, Ms. Derickson was feted as a hero. NBC made a movie about her, The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story.

But then false rumors claimed that she had not protected, but instead identified, Jewish passengers. She received death threats. Ms. Derickson had to move her family out of her house.

Despite her extraordinary heroism, Uli Derickson remained modest. According to her Los Angeles Times obituary:

She didn’t see herself as a hero. “They threw me a hot potato, and I had to handle it.”

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(Photo credit: Vapor trails in the blue sky, Friedrich Haag, Wikimedia Commons)

Vesna Vulovic was a flight attendant for Yugoslav Airlines. Due to a staffing mixup, she was assigned to fly one January afternoon in 1972. An hour into the journey, the plane exploded six miles above earth. Her Telegraph obituary describes what happened next:

Vesna Vulović fell in the central piece of fuselage, her body pinned into place by a food trolley. Pine trees and snow cushioned the final impact. Her screams were heard by a woodsman who had served as a German Army medic in the war and knew how to treat her bleeding. None of the other 27 people aboard survived.

Doctors found that she had a fractured skull, three crushed or broken vertebrae and two broken legs. The three-inch heels had been torn off her stilettos. She was temporarily paralysed and in a coma for a month. The first thing she did on coming round was to ask for a cigarette.

In the aftermath, “Paul McCartney presented her with an award from the Guinness Book of Records and Tito, the Yugoslav dictator, turned her into a national heroine.”

She returned to her employer, but, unable to resume work as a flight attendant, she was assigned to a desk. She lost her job in 1990 after criticizing Serbia’s genocidal ruler, Slobodan Milosevic.

According to her New York Times obituary, “She seems not to have lived the life of a celebrity at all and to have kept mostly to herself.” Nor did she credit fortune, arguing that if she were lucky, she wouldn’t have been in an exploding airplane in the first place.

Ms. Vulovic did acknowledge some benefit, however. Her Telegraph obituary closes with this quote:

‘It made me an optimist,” she said of her experience. “If you can survive what I survived, you can survive anything.”