The Will of God

[Combat Ingrid]

What movie is that?

Kingdom of heaven.

[DaShi]

Wow...really, DaShi. That hurts man. Right here. I don't even know what to say.

Mild dyslexia is common among people who read and write in English (French too, I believe). It's nothing to be ashamed about, unless you're an English teacher.

[Elok]

No. That would never go in a Danish newspaper. We had a "Christian" party hovering around 2%, who would sometimes use some religious formulations, but nothing as strong as "the will of god"; but they went below the 2% election limit in 2005, and so are not represented in parliament.

No, no, I meant do you not have synecdoches/metonymy in Danish? The rhetorical use of one thing to stand in for something closely related, or of a part to stand for the whole? For example, we commonly use "the British crown" to refer to the actions of Queen Elizabeth and company, though the actual phrase would imply that we're discussing the behavior of a piece of gaudy headgear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/synecdoche

Huh. Firefox, for some reason, thinks "synecdoche" might be a misspelling of "Indochinese." One wonders how they got that...

[Thue]

No, no, I meant do you not have synecdoches/metonymy in Danish? The rhetorical use of one thing to stand in for something closely related, or of a part to stand for the whole? For example, we commonly use "the British crown" to refer to the actions of Queen Elizabeth and company, though the actual phrase would imply that we're discussing the behavior of a piece of gaudy headgear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/synecdoche.

Perhaps my problem is that the "one thing" (God's will, if there were such a thing) is so obviously totally opposite to the whole (the lying, violently oppressive military dictatorship with a thin veil of theocracy) in Iran.

Perhaps, as Krazyhorse said, they used it as an ironic synecdoche. I wonder if the effect would not have been better if they had not used "so-called will of God". But their current use has the advantages that they can't really be criticized by religious people for implying religious hypocrisy, since their use is relatively subtle.

[KrazyHorse]

I wonder if the effect would not have been better if they had not used "so-called will of God".

No, that would have taken a relatively clever turn of phrase which, honestly, any reasonably intelligent and informed English speaker can understand and turned it into a boring piece of polemic.

Seriously, dude: it's really frigging obvious. If you want to misunderstand it, you can. And I can easily see how somebody who doesn't read English natively (or isn't familiar with the NYT) would misinterpret it. But the NYT's target audience will understand them. It's a nice little dig at Iranian fundamentalists. It reminds you exactly what it is that these people believe, and how ridiculous it is.

I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't perhaps true that other languages don't use irony as freely as English does.