{"id":43491,"date":"2015-02-20T23:20:02","date_gmt":"2015-02-20T23:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=43491"},"modified":"2015-02-20T23:20:02","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T23:20:02","slug":"ukraine-the-unh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=43491","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine, The, unh?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[ by <strong>Charles Cameron<\/strong> &#8212; when the definite article is simply too definitive &#8212; and how about The Levant? ]<br \/>\n.<\/p>\n<p>In my ongoing, if pretty much one-sided, convo with <strong>Marc Andreessen<\/strong> [<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pmarca\/status\/542188195979751424\">1<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=42048\">2<\/a>, <a href=\"zenpundit.com\/p=42381\">3<\/a>], I&#8217;ve been arguing for <strong>Twitter<\/strong> to offer a format for <strong>DoubleTweeting<\/strong>. People do it anyway, because it&#8217;s a neat way of raising questions or making points &#8212; but it would be nice to have a format that made it both easy and elegant, and thus expand the practice. Today gave us another example of what I&#8217;ll call, for want of a better term, <strong>DoubleTweeting in the Wild<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p>The Vox is dumb. <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/KdK368wWeo\">pic.twitter.com\/KdK368wWeo<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/JimmyPrinceton\/status\/568182724059463680\">February 18, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That was tweeted on February 18, 2015.<\/p>\n<p>**<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d actually like to suggest that Vox isn&#8217;t dumb, at least as far as these two tweets are concerned &#8212; it&#8217;s learning.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jimmy Princeton<\/strong> had to dig back to April 2014 to find <strong>Ezra Klein<\/strong>&#8216;s use of &#8220;the Ukraine&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p>The three kinds of war facing the Ukraine: <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/IJTQjX8zL0\">http:\/\/t.co\/IJTQjX8zL0<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ezraklein\/status\/459401898916057088\">April 24, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>and he then compares it unfavorably with <strong>Max Fisher<\/strong> ten months later, ie two days ago, on February 18, 2015 &#8212; the same day on which he posted his own <strong>DoubleTweet<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p>Hi Jeb \u2014 here is why it\u2019s actually really important to call the country \u201cUkraine\u201d and not \u201cthe Ukraine\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/oy0smsQZ8J\">http:\/\/t.co\/oy0smsQZ8J<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Max_Fisher\/status\/568119695951269889\">February 18, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Even more to the point, Fisher&#8217;s post on the importance of the distinction between &#8220;The Ukraine&#8221; and &#8220;Ukraine&#8221; was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/cards\/ukraine-everything-you-need-to-know\/is-it-ukraine-or-the-ukraine\">posted on Vox<\/a> on September 3rd, 2014, so they hadn&#8217;t even issued their own warning at the time Klain tweeted his needless &#8220;The&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>**<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cheryl Rofer <\/strong>had to teach me the distinction, and language being language, I still can&#8217;t promise I&#8217;ll get it right every time &#8212; old habits die hard. But for the record, here are the first paras of Fisher&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/cards\/ukraine-everything-you-need-to-know\/is-it-ukraine-or-the-ukraine\">Vox &#8220;card&#8221; giving the reason for the change in name<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It used to be &#8220;the Ukraine,&#8221; but after breaking away from the Soviet Union in 1991 the name changed to just &#8220;Ukraine.&#8221; That distinction actually turns out to be pretty important for understanding the current crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Ukraine has a very long history of being subjugated by outside powers, and a very short history of national independence. That may actually be why the country became known as &#8220;the Ukraine,&#8221; which many historians think meant &#8220;the borderland&#8221; in the language of ancient Slavs (it may also mean &#8220;the homeland,&#8221; a theory that Ukrainian nationalists understandably prefer). In other words, it may have been called &#8220;the&#8221; because it was considered more of a geographic region than an independent country, and one defined by its in-between-ness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>**<\/p>\n<p>Having said all that, I&#8217;m still grateful to Jimmy Princeton for illustrating the sort of use a <strong>DoubleTweet<\/strong> can be put to. And I&#8217;ll try to get my own wording right in future, now I&#8217;m reminded I haven&#8217;t always done so <a href=\"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=29708\">in the past<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ by Charles Cameron &#8212; when the definite article is simply too definitive &#8212; and how about The Levant? ] . In my ongoing, if pretty much one-sided, convo with Marc Andreessen [1, 2, 3], I&#8217;ve been arguing for Twitter to offer a format for DoubleTweeting. People do it anyway, because it&#8217;s a neat way [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[526,630,108,1026,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-cameron","category-language","category-rofer","category-ukraine","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43491"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43517,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43491\/revisions\/43517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}