Ouch! — After promising to “push the reset button” on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to present Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a light-hearted gift at their talks last Friday night to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire for a new beginning in the relationship. It didn’t quite work out as she planned and made her look like she can’t even find a two-way Russian dictionary to find a word a sixth grader in Russia would know.
She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift—a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word “peregruzka” printed on top. “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said, to Clinton’s clear surprise. Instead of “reset,” he said the word on the box meant “overcharge.” Daily newspaper Kommersant put a prominent picture of the fake red button on its front page and declared: “Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton pushed the wrong button.” A correspondent for NTV television called it a “symbolic mistake,” pointing out that US-Russian ties had become overcharged in recent years due to discord over such issues as missile defence and last summer’s war in Georgia.
Perhap’s this is the beginning of Hillary’s “potatoe” moments, bringing back the memory of the word “potatoe”, which will be forever linked with the ex-Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle who became associated with this misspelling in a June 15, 1992 incident. Quayle went to a photo op at Munoz Rivera School in Trenton, New Jersey, where he was to officiate a spelling bee by drawing flash cards and asking students to write the words on the blackboard. Twelve-year-old William Figueroa wrote potato, but Quayle prompted him to append an “e” which, according to Quayle’s 1995 autobiography Standing Firm, was the spelling given to him on the flash card.[1]
Read what others are saying
Recent Comments