War on Terror or Words Are Important
An excerpt taken from Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality by Steven Poole:
The US had not declared war on terror itself, since Hollywood still made slasher movies and funfair ghost trains did not become illegal. Rather, the war was supposed to be against terrorism. ... Wars are things you have against nation states. Terrorism is a tactic of violence. The idea of a war against a tactic is blatantly absurd: it is like declaring war against sniping, or war against high-altitude bombing. A former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes: 'No one, for instance, would have declared at the outset of the Second World War that the war was being fought against "blitzkrieg."'
~pg. 152
And another passage from pages 206-7 pertaining to commerce:
Having borrowed terms from vocabularies of civil virtue and domestic life, commerce in the twentieth century rendered itself more exciting by opening a new front on the language of war. A businessperson could already be described, for example, as a 'captain of industry'. The naval metaphor may be intended peacefully, as though industry were merely flotilla of luxury yachts, sailing lazily down the river; but a 'captain' was originally the director of a warship. Meanwhile, businesspeople conducted corporate 'raids', and engaged in 'battles' in the boardroom and price 'wars' with competitors. Commercial products were 'launched', like rockets from an artillery tube. Employees were 'fired', as though they were mere cannon fodder. Such warrior vocabulary combines with the use of business metaphors in war - military interrogators at Guantanamo are just another kind of 'professional'; while missiles and bombs are 'delivered', like courier packages - to blur the rhetorical lines between the two pursuits. Any shift in the tenor of public language from war to peace again is usefully minimised. War is business as usual.
A rather interesting take on how the meaning behind the word can drastically differ and completely change the context or make one have to look behind the word for hidden meanings. A bit heavy-handed so I think I might want to take a break and look for something light and fluffy to read for a while...
The US had not declared war on terror itself, since Hollywood still made slasher movies and funfair ghost trains did not become illegal. Rather, the war was supposed to be against terrorism. ... Wars are things you have against nation states. Terrorism is a tactic of violence. The idea of a war against a tactic is blatantly absurd: it is like declaring war against sniping, or war against high-altitude bombing. A former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes: 'No one, for instance, would have declared at the outset of the Second World War that the war was being fought against "blitzkrieg."'
~pg. 152
And another passage from pages 206-7 pertaining to commerce:
Having borrowed terms from vocabularies of civil virtue and domestic life, commerce in the twentieth century rendered itself more exciting by opening a new front on the language of war. A businessperson could already be described, for example, as a 'captain of industry'. The naval metaphor may be intended peacefully, as though industry were merely flotilla of luxury yachts, sailing lazily down the river; but a 'captain' was originally the director of a warship. Meanwhile, businesspeople conducted corporate 'raids', and engaged in 'battles' in the boardroom and price 'wars' with competitors. Commercial products were 'launched', like rockets from an artillery tube. Employees were 'fired', as though they were mere cannon fodder. Such warrior vocabulary combines with the use of business metaphors in war - military interrogators at Guantanamo are just another kind of 'professional'; while missiles and bombs are 'delivered', like courier packages - to blur the rhetorical lines between the two pursuits. Any shift in the tenor of public language from war to peace again is usefully minimised. War is business as usual.
A rather interesting take on how the meaning behind the word can drastically differ and completely change the context or make one have to look behind the word for hidden meanings. A bit heavy-handed so I think I might want to take a break and look for something light and fluffy to read for a while...