Starting Off Easy

I’ve been reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.  It’s great, but don’t read it unless you like going, “Man, that is so weird.” 

Whatever.  The point is that usually when I read, I rely on context clues, cause I have my eighth grade English skills in tact like that.  So I had no problem with “politburo” when I came across it.

But context clues never give you the whole story.  I spent years believing “immaculate” meant “big.”  (It usually works until you start to think about the immaculate conception.)

But as it turns out, a politburo is “the principal policy-making and executive committee of a Communist party” or an abbreviation of “political bureau.” (I thought it was just one guy.)

Check it out, though, while the word was coined in 1925 in Russian (politbyuro), it’s still very much alive, in China for example.

(Big ups to m-w.com and wikipedia – today’s was an easy one)

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Posted in politics, vocabulary
Tags: communism, murakami, politburo