Interesting look into the language of imperialists. Dexter Filkins, New York Times, yesterday from Afghanistan: Ethan Bronner, New York Times, November 2009: It could be 1857 and we might be in the Sepoy Mutiny referring to the "mopping up" campaigns of Sir Hugh Rose Mowing the grass, mopping up as they went. Know any other euphemisms for massacres? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Cops call picking up low-level mobsters during a big shakedown of the kingpins "taking out the trash." People typically devise terminology to dehumanize their enemies, especially when they plan to kill them. What do you suppose KSM called the people in the WTC on 9/11? I've seen letters objecting to the term "suicide bombers," because it humanizes the killers. (Not in so many words, but that was the point.) * * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * * If this thread turns into a political discussion or argument I will delete it.
How about what Bush called it? Some more: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/euphemism.html "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs"—by Stalin's apologists for revolution and forced modernization in the 1930s The French Revolutionist Jean-Marie Roland spoke of the mob violence of the attack on the Tuileries as agitation or effervescence, never as "massacre" or "murder". t was natural, said Roland, "that victory should bring with it some excess. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, roars long after the tempest." Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" Slight uptick in violence - new words coined for Iraq war to denote a few hundred more deaths than before And of course, shock and awe source and excellent article And from Norman Finkelstein: "In the index of Benny Morris’s Righteous Victims, he lists all Israel’s military operations, and each has a name. I’ve studied this to the point of, I won’t say lunacy because people will nail me on it, but tedium, and even I can’t keep the names straight. But each operation is just an exercise in massive death and destruction. Two years ago it was Operation Summer Rains. Succeeded a few months later by Operation Autumn Clouds. It’s just nonstop destruction and death, and these names they dream up, if they had any honesty they would call it Operation Attila the Hun, followed by Operation Genghis Kahn, followed by Operation Murder, Incorporated." http://mondoweiss.net/2010/02/touri...e-hun-finkelstein-tells-the-schmuck-joke.html
The walls of the staircase at our college are painted with some "motivational" images and writings. The above one is one of them. I have been wondering what it meant. It is accompanied with a picture of a nest on a branch, and in the nest are some small birds and eggs.
That's not exactly a euphemism. In Islam, the Arabic word jihad means "striving in the way of Allah," i.e. striving to improve oneself and society. Mohammed is said to have called self-improvement the "greater jihad," more important than external battles. Nonetheless jihad also refers to warfare, particularly war fought to prevent disruption of proper customs of worship, and it has been generalized from that to refer to any righteous battle--military or metaphorical--that a Muslim could wage in good conscience. The word has been adopted into English, and due to the dominance of the U.S. perspective over anglophone culture in recent decades, in our language its primary meaning is "holy war." So to call a massacre in the name of Allah a "jihad"--no matter how perverted the motivation might be--is, arguably, not a euphemism.
In line with Spidergoat's direction, "polytheist" would indeed be a euphemism for Christians as used by Islamists. And Sam's whole discussion does sound quite political. Oh well.
Again, that's not a euphemism, if they really see the Trinity as three distinct deities. The principles of Christian theology are pretty inscrutable to an outsider. Even I don't understand that one! But she is talking about words and their meanings so she's welcome.
Can't really find a specific reference to it, but during WWII bomber pilots would refer to a mission where they encountered little resistance as a milk run.
That's an older term from the railroad era. A train that was carrying milk stopped at every station along the route. It never picked up much speed, the stops were all routine, scheduling was perfunctory, so it was easy easy and even boring for the trainmen.
I think you could make that argument vis-a-vis "kuffar", although I suppose it does strike me as propaganda rather than a euphemism per se.
This thread has gotten too confusing and I'm missing your point. What are you saying that the word "infidel" is a euphemism for?
While looking at war euphemisms yesterday I saw this in the urban dictionary The village voice has a great article on the euphemisms created for and/or used during the Iraq war, as avidly as I've read on it, I haven't come across many of them For the sake of brevity and clarity, I'll only repeat the ones to do with killing Cakewalk: Popular term introduced by U.S. hawk Kenneth Adelman to predict overnight success in Iraq. Adelman now says the phrase was "too glib." Collateral damage: Euphemism for civilians killed during wartime. Pentagon briefers refuse to discuss dead civilians by any name, and The New York Times omits Iraqi civilian losses from its daily body count, on page two of A Nation at War. (For Iraqi estimates, see The Washington Post.) Expectant: Military term for "expected to die," applied last week to an Iraqi who was shot in the head and lived, though most of his skull had come apart. Kill box: A zone in which pilots are free to search for and attack targets at will. Here is Spencer Ackerman in The American Prospect [also a very well written article]: "The Iraq War has been characterized by euphemism since its inception. The name "Operation Iraqi Freedom" denotes a foreign military occupation of Iraq endlessly described as liberation -- a term that, in practice, means the absolute opposite of any common-sense definition of "freedom." For over five years, foreign troops have enjoyed the legal right to kill any Iraqi whom commanders deem fit to kill; to search any house commanders deem fit to search; and to detain any Iraqi whom commanders deem fit to detain. This is, clearly, a condition Americans would never accept for themselves." Personally I prefer Operation Iraq Liberation if only because the hidden message in the acronym Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Some interesting ones GATED COMMUNITIES:Any visitor to Baghdad notices them: the 10- to 15-foot concrete barriers protecting major installations and government buildings. They're covered with graffiti, political banners of yesteryear, and the occasional dab of paint. In 2007, the U.S. military began putting them around entire neighborhoods and limiting access to the enclosed enclaves. The term for these concrete-barricaded areas? "Gated Communities," a phrase borrowed from placid American havens of golf, swimming clubs, and other affluent leisure-time activities. The residents staged a protest, which Petraeus aide David Kilcullen considered an al-Qaeda in Iraq propaganda stunt rather than a legitimate expression of community outrage; the U.S. merely waited out the protests and kept building. [okay this is not about killing, but it was too funny to pass up] CONCERNED LOCAL CITIZENS: Let's say you had a bunch of insurgent fighters who 20 minutes ago were shooting at American soldiers and marines. Let's also say that through a combination of strategic calculation (they really didn't see much of a future for themselves under the foreign domination of anti-tobacco nazis like al-Qaeda in Iraq), inducement (lots of cash from U.S. commanders who'd rather not be shot at and blown up), and opportunities both present and future (today: becoming the neighborhood warlord; tomorrow: overthrowing the Shiite government!) they decide to stop shooting at the Americans. You can call these guys a lot of things: well-motivated warlords; rational decision makers; allies of convenience. What you really shouldn't call them is "Concerned Local Citizens," a term that equates ferocious nationalist/sectarian killers with busybody retirees who hold bake sales to fund smoothing down the gravel at the playground before someone skins a knee. This LOL-worthy term was so egregious that even the military, in early 2008, changed it to ... SONS OF IRAQ OMENS OF PROSPERITY: Here's something that might count as a breaking euphemism. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki last week ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to conduct raids throughout Diyala province, which U.S. officials boasted of being increasingly pacified in 2007. The operation is called "Omens Of Prosperity." Because nothing says "prosperity" like 50,000 troops kicking down doors and arresting people. And finally, in light of the last few years, a Just War which is finely rendered meaningless here.
There is no consensus that this phrase was coined during the current conflict in the Middle East, or even during the Bush Dynasty's first oil war. Dictionary.com gives its origin as 1985-1990, which pushes it back to a slightly earlier time. I am positive that I heard the term during the Vietnam War and Wikipedia says I'm not alone in that recollection, although neither of us has yet dug up any citations from the chaotic mass of data in the years before the internet. General Curtis LeMay, a key figure in World War II, uses the term to describe the killing of Japanese civilians, but 55 years later it's not easy to determine whether he was saying that at the time or merely picked up the phrase from current jargon. At any rate I'm more sanguine about this term than "friendly fire," an established euphemism for accidentally killing your own people.
I'm still finding that most of Sam's comments are subtle political references rather than any real issues of the science of language.
Only because they're the war-related euphemisms she notices. You're all welcome to post your own favorite war-related terms, which would presumably reflect your own perspectives. War is a rich source of vocabulary so that shouldn't be hard. Who knows the origin of "G.I." and "Jeep"? Or the G-word for Asians? (Hint: it's not even an insult in the source language.) This board doesn't get a lot of traffic so I don't moderate it as rigorously as Politics or Cosmology. As long as there is at least a vague continuity to the original topic, people are polite, and it doesn't turn into an argument about something other than linguistics and related disciplines, I usually let it go, in the interest of generic science and scholarship.
