Labeling Idiocy (was: Calif. election & bilingual education)

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 11:29 AM 6/5/98 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Speaking of Asia, who invented the idea of "Asia" anyway? Who thought that
>that Indians and Japanese had enough in common to be classified under that
>same label?

I suspect 'the gummint' - they are notorious for using idiotic geographical
labels that put apples and organges into one basket.  For example, DoD
classifies Hungarian as an "Eastern European Language" - the idiocy of that
classification is that Eastern European languages are Slavonic EXCEPT the
Hungarian which belongs (together with the Finnish) to an entirely
different linguistic group.

Another example, until late 60s early 70s they used a label "Warning
propaganda" on everything published on the other side of the Iron  Curtian,
including translations of  American literature (I 'liberated' the rubber
stamp they used to that end as  material evidence).

Regards,

Wojtek Sokolowski