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Literary Review
The words of war - II
ANAND
APROPOS war words, Saddam Hussein's description of Gulf War I as "the mother of all battles", quoted in last month's "Wordspeak" had many readers believe that he was perhaps the father of the expression. The ousted Iraqi president and his secular Baath party did not mind evoking Islamic symbols or invoking Allah when it served the purpose. In Arab history, "the mother of all battles" refers specifically to the battle of Quadisia in 636 AD where the Arabs united under Islam to win a decisive victory against the Sassanian Persian army. Hussein was clearly trying to evoke the memory of the first great Arab victory, and also of a victory in the cause of Islam.
Although Hussein's empty boast has since spawned a variety of mother-linked expressions (for example, the mother of all inventions), English has its own maternal personifications as seen in John Bright's 1865 phrase "England, the mother of Parliaments," or Virginia, the U.S. state on the Atlantic coast, being known as "mother of Presidents."
The previous Gulf War's "collateral damage" has gone a long way, and this Gulf War's "embedded" is set to do the same. The U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence, Bryan Whitman, could have fired the first salvo of war words when he said on February 10, 2003, "Let's jump right into what everybody is interested in, and that's the embedding: our embedding policy and our embedding procedures."
The novel use of a word that, so far, had meant "to fix firmly in a surrounding mass of some solid material" caught everyone's fancy, and its usage perhaps got as much ink, as we used to say in journalese, as more deserving reports and print-worthy news stories from pre- and post-Iraqi War Arab world. According to Whitman's own description, embedding a journalist or media person meant "... living, eating, moving, in combat with the unit you're attached to." Such journalists knew everything that the soldiers did, but their reports were censored to keep the enemy benefiting from it. The Pentagon admitted that the embedded or supervised journalists ensured good press coverage. There were others, the "unilaterals" who could report what they wanted, but did not get any assistance from the coalition forces and were often left unprotected and exposed to danger, as was Paul Workman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
After "embedded" was accredited in Pentagonese, TV news channels grabbed and ran with it, and it was free for all. Embedded soon turned into a linguistic loose canon, causing damage and behaving unpredictably and indiscriminately that was evident in Whitman's own words, "You would get an embed opportunity with a unit that's leaving from the United States, you would go with that unit, you would be there through their load out, through their deployment, through their send-offs. . . . You'd go into combat with them. You'd march on whatever capital we happen to march on with them. You would return to the United States with them, and you'd cover the victory parade. That's embed for life."
The French, so finicky about their language, too had serious concerns because the Pentagonese terms were creeping into French language dispatches. At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, the French media for the most part had banned terms designed to give the war a disembodied image, such as the famous "collateral damage" and "surgical strikes". This time around, scholars debated in Le Monde that the oft-used word "reconstruction" should be used with caution, because "This complex term comprises all the dimensions, economic as well as political and social. That it should have appeared at all before the conflict is shocking." Another predicted a quick end for "embedded". Considering how Pentagon-invented terms have survived and thrived despite their ban, the French clearly underestimate the American capacity to maul any language.
Since military origins of civilian terms interested many readers ("deadline" in last month's "Wordspeak"), here is another that would straighten the backs of generations of peons with some military bearing. The first pioneers were foot soldiers (peoniers in Old French) who walked ahead of the main army carrying a spade and a pick in order to make a camp (from campus, Latin for level ground) for the fighting corps. During the journey to its present form, the word acquired many meanings: initiator, explorer, settler, colonist. From Old French, it went to Portuguese which gave it to Indian languages as peon: one who walks ahead of the master, a factotum. The civilian workers in an army camp (many were fellow-travellers) were known as camp followers, and had a healthy sprinkling of prostitutes among them. And when an Indian newspaper headlines a news report, "Servant decamps with lakhs worth of jewelry", they mean someone leaving furtively, as a soldier deserting an army camp must have done.
E-mail the writer at anand@journalist.com
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