Apparently, Artesians Helped Build The Navy's Newest Ship

I'm not sure who Artesians are, but they played a role in building the newest ship that will be stationed at Mayport. Perhaps they are people from Artesia, California. It's a town in southern Los Angeles county of about 17,000 people. However, there is no shipyard in Artesia. Artesia, New Mexico, also does not build ships, but the oil and gas industry is big there, and the USS Little Rock probably uses a lot of fuel.







Artesians could also be some kind of Germanic tribe that was mostly wiped off the face of the earth by the Roman Empire. Maybe some of them survived in port cities in Spain or Portugal, honing their craft as shipbuilders. While I could not find any evidence of this long, lost tribe, it may exist.

The vice admiral in the video above clearly mentions Artesians, and we all know VADMs do not make mistakes. According to Wikipedia, there are only 160 or fewer flag officers, and only 16.7% of them can be three-star, or vice admiral. That means there are only 26.72 vice admirals in the whole country, so we know this one can't be wrong in saying Artesians helped build the ship.

An idie band called Artesia does exist, and it's possible the band played a role in the creation of the USS Little Rock. Perhaps they helped with acoustics. However, Artesia is a band from Brittany, France, and the general theme of the speeches about the new ship seemed to indicate the construction contracts were generally filled by Americans.

OK, I'm having some fun at the expense of the Navy. It just goes to show the importance of words. I always told my students when I was teaching speech to absolutely never use a word they did not know. Not everyone knows what an artisan is, or how it's pronounced. If you're giving a speech, it helps to write it yourself, practice it, and find out how to pronounce words you might not know. There really is no shame in not knowing a word that has little to do with your chosen career. But every word does matter in a speech, especially in world world of covfefe and United Shursh recorded for posterity. Further listening to the speech here shows the use of the word "lethality," a word almost exclusively used to describe the effects of chemical weapons. It might sound cool, but is that what this ship represents?

Consider the reaction had Lincoln ended the Gettysburg Address thus:

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not parrot from the earth.

Of course, we'll never know for sure if old Abe got all the words right in the actual speech, but I'll go on believing he did. My advice for students, presidents, or vice admirals: write a short speech with easy words. That goes triple for best men at weddings.