The Web of Words January 20 2011: dribble

First, we shall strike a high note with a philosophical quote of Jean Baudrillard,

A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dungheap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble unstemmed from his mouth—either epileptic or dead.

I am not exactly thrilled with this quote. M. Baudrillard has said a number of things which sort of leave me nonplussed and vacant-starey-eyed-ish (or tharn, as it is succinctly stated in Watership Down)... and as perplexed as a chap reading a Persian legal document.
For another example,

The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.

The first activity, shopping, is redundant, since we are in a shopping mall; the flirting with objects is tantalizing and yet remote. The invocation of all permutations of the forms of shopping and flirting merely flings us into the infinity of mind-fogging mathematics of consumers desire... and we are exhausted without reaching satiation.

What started all this was the word "dribble". In Le Monde today we read,

Hu Jintao dribble sur les droits de l’homme

http://clesnes.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/01/19/hu-jintao-dribble-sur-les-droits-de-lhomme/

which loosely translated comes out that "Hu Jintao dribbles on Human Rights". Since he and President Obama were holding a press conference at the time this occurred, it may have led to a major diplomatic embarrassment. Since there was also a state dinner involved, I immediately "tazed" on the possibility that the President of China had picked up a large ornamental porcelain gravy boat, laden to the upper Plimsoll markings with the brown and buttery, and had proceeded to "drizzle" or "dribble" a longish stream of turkey gizzard by-products upon some celebratory gift volume of Thomas Paine that President Obama had brought along.
The act would have been either, (1) a ghastly insult and tantamount to a declaration of war, or (2) an inscrutable Zen-type response (actually, it would be more correct to say a Taoist response!) that would change the world.
Of course, it was (3): neither of the above.

There were some translator problems which seemed due to a very long response of President Obama to a question about Human Rights, the President unexpectedly responding with a rather extensive historical pageant of Human Rights through American history since Nixon went to China, and overwhelmed the translation squad who had been expecting a hearty "Hooray for the Rights of Man!" from the President, and were caught off guard. There was no instantaneous translation and things slowed down, leading President Hu to finally omit his own response to it.When it was repeated, he answered it.

So far, no "dribbling" that I can see. An omission is not a "dribble", plain and simple. We must read on.
Certainly so far there is no indication of  "dribble" in the salivatory sense, nor in the "Exxon Valdez-gravy boat" sense mentioned above; it may be "dribble" in the sports sense. And since we are reading French, it is probably not basketball, although at first I strained at imagining President Hu bouncing a question up and down the length of the conference hall, then doing a Meadowlark Lemon: caroming the query off some officious person's head and into the basket: swish!
But we must turn to soccer, where "to dribble" - in French "dribbler" - is to move the ball down field  by a rapid succession of short kicks.

And this is how Hu dribbled:  "China is quite determined to respect the universality of Human Rights. However, China is a country with an enormous population and is right now at a critical point of its development..."

Now comes the "kicker";

"... We are prepared to study the good example and best practices of The United States."

Somehow President Hu managed to modify the meaning of "dribble" from a series of intra-team kicks to sort of a game of "Hot Potato" (patate chaude) where we kick the ball between the teams!
To get the right idea in American English, we would have to say something like "Hu Jintao Punts On Fourth Down On Human Rights".
Well done.

--