Now we know for sure that politics warps our opinions on everything under the sun, political or not. Either that, or everything under the sun is political. Take the matter of language and Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the ragingly anti-Semitic president of Iran, who has been the butt of a lot of snide jokes recently because of his efforts to preserve the purity of his native Persian. If he were the genial president of some unarmed little nowhere place, his campaign to halt -- or at least slow -- the creep of English into Iranian life would be portrayed as an act of cultural heroism. Wouldn't it?

Here's what Mr. Ahmadinejad wants, according to the official news agency IRNA's account of a decree he issued last week: Henceforth, all Iranian government agencies, newspapers and publications are to use words deemed appropriate by the state's cultural watchdog, the Farhangestan Zaban e Farsi, or Persian Academy. To that end, the academy has drawn up a lexicon of more than 2,000 substitutes for some of the foreign terms contaminating the Persian, or Farsi, vocabulary, most of them Western. (Arabic influences, apparently, are less offensive to the mullahs.)

As such lists do, this one has produced its fair share of mirth. Not just in the West but on the streets of Tehran, if news reports are to be believed, people are having a lot of fun with the official new Farsi words for pizza (variously translated as "elastic loaf" or "extendable meal"), cell phone ("companion telephone"), helicopter ("revolving wings"), chat (a "small talk") and cabin (now a "small room").