Raw Earth

Reporting on the February 28th meeting at which Trump and Vance ambushed Zelensky, the media almost totally ignored the President's use of the term "raw earth" instead of "rare earth" in reference to minerals US companies intend to mine in Ukraine. Trump said "raw earth" four times. If Joe Biden had said "raw earth" instead of "rare earth" four times in a speech it would not have been downplayed. Trump is equally demented, it just manifests differently.

Next morning Amy Goodman used "raw earth" on air and I wondered if the term referred to something other than the rare earths as listed on the periodic table of elements. (Not that I could name them.)

Going online I found only one journalist who had zeroed in on Trump's gaffe –Mike Snider of USA Today. He wrote, "President Donald Trump wants Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to make a deal with the U.S. over the country's 'raw earth' minerals. But what does that actually mean?"

"Trump described the potential deal on Friday, saying, 'We don’t know exactly how much because we’re going to be putting some money in a fund that we’re going to get from the raw earth that we’re going to be taking and sharing in terms of revenues, so it’s going to be a lot of money'…

"This wasn't the first time Trump described the deal as involving 'raw earth’…"

I searched a long time to find a transcript of the whole exchange. Trump said, "And as you know, our country doesn’t have much raw earth. We have a lot of oil and gas, but we don’t have a lot of the raw earth. And what we do have is protected by the environmentalists, but that can be unprotected. But still, it’s not very much. They have among the best in the world in terms of raw earth. We’re going to be using that, taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI and including weapons and the military. And it’s really going to very much satisfy our needs. So something that just worked out really well…

"We have a lot of oil and we have a lot of gas. We have a lot, but we don’t have raw earth. So this has just about every component of the raw earth that we need for computers, for all of the things we do. It puts us in great shape."

Opportunistic linguists will now decree that "raw earth" is a synonym for "rare earth" based on "vernacular usage." Afraid to say the President misspoke, they'll he speaks the language of the common man.

I'm not a pedant, but I spent 33 years as an editor and still react to misuse of the language. I took screen shots of the very sad brouhaha in the oval office. Trump said "You don't have the cards." Zelensky said, "We're not playing cards."

By the time he addressed Congress Tuesday night, Trump had been briefed on the proper terminology and could brag that Zelenskyy had given in to his demand that US corporations get Ukraine's "rare earths" –he said it extra-clear– as payment for US-made weaponry... No sooner did "we" own their rare earths than Trump criticized the Russians for "pounding" Ukraine.

The rare earths may be fashionable, but, the US Department of Energy website is outdated and sub-literate on the subject:

On this subject the highly literate Tom Lehrer is in his element: 

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium
And hydrogen and oxygen, and nitrogen, and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium

Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum, and osmium, and astatine, and radium
And gold protactinium, and indium, and gallium
And iodine, and thorium, and thulium, and thallium

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium, and silicon, and silver, and samarium
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium

There's holmium, and helium, and hafnium, and erbium
And phosphorus, and francium, and fluorine, and terbium
And manganese, and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium
Dysprosium, and scandium, and cerium, and cesium

And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium
And cadmium, and calcium, and chromium, and curium

There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered