Reply #31: "Must" versus "will".

[Igel]

"John Dean must vanish from the pages of time."

"John Dean will vanish from the pages of time."

Which can be a prophecy, which can be a threat, and which is merely expressing a wish? Most importantly, under what circumstances and context?

I have trouble finding lots of good circumstances for 'must' to be a prophecy, but I'm unfamiliar with the ins and outs of how epistemic/deontic modality is expressed in Persian--unless he was saying it in Arabic. Surely it *can* be a sort of prophecy, a statement of fact: John Dean is mortal, therefore he must die. It is, however, an interpretation severely depending on context, with a reading of deontic modality (at least in English) being much more common. And the distinction between wish and threat is rather meaningless when it's the Extremely Supremely Exalted Worthy-to-be-Emulated Leader. I read Cole's writing on the matter; he didn't prove his point, he merely asserted his point over and over until he was quite convinced that he had convinced his readers that he had proven it.

People seem to defend Ahmie, because it goes to support a domestic political argument they really want to make. Winning the argument is more necessary than accuracy. The implication is clear--the Iranians' naming their new missile Khaiber is also crystal clear in meaning, in the same vein. Naming the missile "Auschwitz" would have preserved one clear import of the name, and would have been clearer to a non-Muslim audience. Khaiber ... where the pious Muslims under the peaceful Muhammed destroyed the community of the perfidious Jews, killing most, taking the survivors as slaves ("serfs", in the bowdlerized version), and finally ethnically cleansing them to produce a Judenrein area. But clarity is not desired here, because it makes the wrong bad people look bad. And that is politically wrong in this instance, or politicheski nepravil'no, to use an infamous Russian phrase.