John Kirby, the story goes, once used the military discipline that helped propel him to admiral rank in the US navy to launch a rhetorical war on behalf of the English language. As the navy’s chief information officer, Kirby bluntly advised underlings in his department to kick their supposed addiction to technical jargon and “learn a second language: English”, according to a 2014 profile in Politico. Mocking a navy description detailing what the Zumwalt-class destroyer, a missile, could “provide”, the then unformed spokesperson fired off a semantic fusillade in a scathing essay, writing: “Warships don’t ‘provide’. They Fight. They destroy...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
