Like a lying lover who knows exactly what to say to get you in the sack, we witness a change of lexicon and Joe Queenan looks at war by any other name,
War By Any Other Name
Obama’s new terminology has started a trend.
The Obama administration has come under intense criticism for replacing the term “war on terror” with the emaciated euphemism “overseas contingency operations,” and for referring to individual acts of terror as “man-caused disasters.”
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Yet, if the intention of the Obama administration is to tone down the confrontational rhetoric being used by our enemies, the effort is already reaping results. This week, in a pronounced shift from its usual theatrical style, the Taliban announced that it will no longer refer to its favorite method of murder as “beheadings,” but will henceforth employ the expression “cephalic attrition.”
Soon enough we’ll have the Chavistaspeak,
Another hopeful sign of a subtle cooling of heated diplomatic rhetoric is an official directive by the Hugo Chavez administration instructing journalists to stop using the term ‘nationalizing oil fields.’ Last week, the more graceful term “petrolic resource reapportionment” began to appear in prominent Venezuela media, along with “amicable annexation.”
Yet perhaps the most encouraging sign of all is in Mexico, where vigilante groups have announced that they will no longer use the term “death squads” to describe their activities. Instead, death squads will be identified as “terminus-inducing claques,” “free-lance resolution facilitators,” and “off-site impasse adjustors.”
It’s all the sweet smell of, as Queenan calls it, “a self-emasculating action that plunges us into an Orwellian world where words have no emotional connection with the horrors they purport to describe.”
