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We are advised today (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/06arms.html?emc=eta1new) by our President, that a newAmerican strategy will "narrow" the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons, with the exception of "outliers like Iran and North Korea."
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Trying to figure out what this actually means takes some effort. For conditions to be more "narrow" we can suppose means potentially less lethally annihilating for the behaving nations, with an apparently grimmer fate possibly in store for the "outliers like Iran and North Korea."
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And the word"like," is a rather slippery item here, implying there are others who very likely fall into the "outliers" category but not specifically here revealed. Syria? Venezuela? Luxembourg perhaps?
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One may well ask: How many other outliersare there? Who are the other outliers? How did and why will a nation become an outlier? Is the list of outliers subject to change? At whose prerogative? And under what circumstances?
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I had a more basic question: What is an "outlier"? Is it something like "outlying," that is remote or distant? Or is it a word a presumably superior person lays on presumably duller minds to prompt a response such as: "Oh yeah, them liars an' outliers deserve everthang they gits!"
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Giving the devil (!) his due, I looked up "outlier" and found that it has indeed been a word in our language -- though not mine -- since the 17th Century, and means:
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1. a person whose residence and place of business are at a distance
2. something (as a geological feature) that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
3. a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
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All the same, I'm still uncertain that Obama meant that an increased measure of punishment was in store for nations "at a distance." I suspect what he meant is any nation that dares to not bow to our, the American prerogative on issues from diplomatic through commercial, which may in fact be identical in intention and result, as well as to the disadvantage of the outlier. In a word, they're more liable to be nuked.
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The issue here is that nothing changes except the verbal cosmetics. Obama says "outliers gonna git it." The great American electorate, once more not questioning what is meant or obscured, responds, "Yowsah!"
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The news item did not specify if Obama ended his announcement with the lame albeit universally now employed political patois, that most important now was "moving forward."
