Elsewhere: America’s Linguistic Legacy in Iraq

Assessing the cultural impact of America’s deployment in Iraq for The Washington Post, Anthony Shadid offered a taste of the occupation’s linguistic legacy:

There is the bellicose language of the checkpoint: “Go” and “Stop” (often rendered as “stob” in a language with no “p”), along with a string of U.S. expletives that Iraqi children imitate with zeal. In parks along the Tigris River, they play “tafteesh,” Arabic for inspection.

Shadid explored the market in Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood with local resident Yahya Hussein. Kiosks teemed with bootleg copies of American DVDs, imitation handcuffs and toys dressed in army fatigues, and a poster announced the “first and biggest rap party in Baghdad”:

Youths asked a barber for the latest haircut, which they call “spiky”; one barber insisted the name came from a soldier’s nickname for his military dog. The soldier’s version of a crew cut is called “Yankee” (or, sometimes, “bankee”).

Businesses hawked camouflage-patterned men’s underwear. “Harley,” a kind of biker boot, went for $125. “Texas,” the cowboy version, cost $100.

For each item, Hussein had a simple phrase: “after the suqut,” the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Shadid noted that Iraqi-Arabic still features words borrowed from English during British rule, which ended in 1932, and observed:

Abu Naji† was the nickname Iraqis gave their British occupiers. There remains no equivalent for the Americans, but a slew of words describe those who imitate them. The older term for someone becoming more American than Americans was mitamrik, or Americanized. More conservative types here call such people khanazeer or quruud, “pigs” or “monkeys.” One student at the Academy of Fine Arts coined another name: “Am-raqis.”

† The nickname Abu Naji, which is still used today, seems to be derived from a friend of Gertrude Bell’s, Naji al Karradi. Bell was a senior British official in Iraq from 1916–26.