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Literary Review
The words of war
WHILE looking at some words that seemed to have gain currency during the current Gulf War, it became apparent that the words of war (or war words) began entering our language in full force at the time of the previous Gulf War.
Then there is the question: How are wars named? For some historians, the Great War is World War I, the first global war, which did not get numbered until the onset of World War II. The U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., whose system serves as a universal model for library cataloguers, did not change the heading "European War, 1914-1918" to "World War, 1914-1918" until 1980. Then there was the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Middle East war (which will not earn the capital until its over), and the Balkans War. The Persian Gulf War 1991 is bound to become Gulf War I since Time magazine, the self-appointed arbiter of universal journalese, has begun to label the present Iraq war as Gulf War II.
Other regional wars were named on the basis of the participants: the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Sino-Indian War. At the time of the previous Gulf War, William Safire of the New York Times wondered if it would be called the Iraqi-Multinational Force War "... because that is too mouth-filling, and because the allied side has not settled on the coalition (as used by the White House) or the allies (as used by most newscasters)." The White House must have taken note of Safire's comment, because this time around it was the Coalition or the Coalition Forces from the day one.
If we cannot say "collateral damage" was a child of the 1991 Iraqi war called by Saddam Hussein the "mother of all battles," the word certainly became popular after that conflict. Only a generation ago, collateral generally meant money or property that was used as a guarantee that someone will repay a loan; less frequently, a person of the same family although not directly related. Its other usage as "side by side, parallel" to describe destruction or injury that was not intended or expected, esp. in the vicinity of a military target became a euphemism for "Oops, we killed the wrong people!" after America's first crusade against Saddam Hussein.
The Clinton administration used "collateral damage" to explain the killing of civilians in the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and Albanian refugees killed by NATO bombing the same year were described in similar terms by the U.S. military and the American press. The exposure of U.S. troops to DU (depleted uranium) used in weapons in the first Gulf War was "collateral damage" as the Pentagon was reluctant to discuss the dangers of weapons deployment for the fear of costly health care and disability compensation for U.S. veterans who were exposed to DU. Over 2000 Palestinians killed in the last three years in the conflict that the Israel government calls "self defence against terrorism" too became "collateral" damage.
Who would be surprised if — for a section of the Indian press — security measures in Kashmir cause "collateral damage!" How quickly and widely it has caught journalists' fancy can be seen in the few examples cited here: "Collateral damage: the health and environmental costs of war on Iraq." And "Looming global oil price war could wreak collateral damage in Canada." The efforts to boost internal security in U.S. by monitoring the Internet have privacy advocates in despair. The media-rights group Reporters Without Borders noted recently that the Internet has become part of the "collateral damage" of the war on terror. For the Internet junkies, "collateral damage" is refusing legitimate, non-SPAM E-mail or network traffic.
Could Hollywood be far behind, since it loves such hung-ho buzzwords! "Collateral Damage" is a movie about a New York fire-fighter (Arnold Schwarzenegger) whose wife and child are killed when a Marxist-Columbian terrorist detonates an explosive device in a prominent public area. The grief struck fire-fighter then decides to hunt down the terrorist in Columbia when the various American law enforcement agencies fail to do so. The morality of innocents dying in the line of fire is defended as collateral damage.
War words tend to creep in everyday language. During the American Civil War, captured Union soldiers were kept at a Confederate prison camp (c.
1864) where the `deadline' was a line marked 17 feet from the camp fence. Orders were to shoot dead any prisoner crossing that line. Deadline was then borrowed by newspapers reporters and editors. In their lingo, the word meant a time by which a news story had to be completed; if it wasn't, then it was killed or was dead for that edition. In its present sense, the word has come to mean a time or date before which a particular job, activity or task must be finished. Makes one wonder what "collateral damage" would mean 100 years from now! Watch out for war words such as "embedded" and other gems in the next "Wordspeak".
E-mail the writer at: anand@journalist.com
ANAND
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