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I don't usually like Safire's articles on language, but this one seems a good follow up to our discussion this week on Bush's use of the word "crusade."  Max

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Every Conflict Generates Its Own Lexicon

September 30, 2001

By WILLIAM SAFIRE




You are about to embark upon a great crusade,'' General
Eisenhower told his troops on the eve of D-Day; he later
titled his memoirs ''Crusade in Europe.'' American
presidents liked that word: Thomas Jefferson launched ''a
crusade against ignorance,'' Theodore Roosevelt exhorted
compatriots to ''spend and be spent in an endless crusade''
and F.D.R., calling for a ''new deal'' in his acceptance
speech at the 1932 Democratic convention, issued ''a call
to arms,'' a ''crusade to restore America to its own
people.''

But when George W. Bush ad-libbed that ''this crusade, this
war on terrorism, is going to take a while,'' his figure of
speech was widely criticized. That's because the word has a
religious root, meaning ''taking the cross,'' and was
coined in the 11th century to describe the first military
expedition of the Crusaders, European Christians sent to
recover the Holy Land from the followers of Muhammad. The
rallying-cry noun is offensive to many Muslims: three years
ago, Osama bin Laden maligned U.S. forces in the Middle
East as ''crusader armies spreading like locusts.''

In this case, a word that has traditionally been used to
rally Americans was mistakenly used in the context of
opposing a radical Muslim faction, and the White House
spokesman promptly apologized. In the same way, Vice
President Dick Cheney was chided for referring admiringly
to Pakistanis as ''Paks.'' Steven Weisman of The New York
Times asked, ''Is it conceivable that he would have used a
similar slur with the Japanese?'' The shortening Paki is
taken to be a slur, even when criticized as
''Paki-bashing,'' and Paks only slightly less so. In past
military cooperation with Pakistan, U.S. service members
used Paks as they would use Brits or Aussies, nationality
nicknames no more offensive than Yanks. Cheney probably
picked up Paks in his Pentagon days, but innocent intent is
an excuse only once; now he is sensitized, as are we all.

In the same way, when the proposed Pentagon label for the
antiterror campaign was floated out as ''Operation Infinite
Justice,'' a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic
Relations noted that such eternal retribution was ''the
prerogative of God.'' Informed of this, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld quickly pulled the plug on the pretentious
moniker.

Who coins these terms? Nobody will step forward; instead,
software called ''Code Word, Nickname and Exercise Term
System'' is employed to avoid responsibility; it spits out
a list of random names from which commanders can choose.
This avoidance of coinage responsibility leads to national
embarrassment (which is finite justice). ''Operations,''
said Winston Churchill, ''ought not to be described by code
words which imply a boastful and overconfident sentiment.''


Apropos of Churchill: in Bush's well-received address to
the joint session of Congress calling for a ''war on
terror,'' the president said with impressive intensity,
''We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not
fail.'' This evocation of an earlier rhetoric of resolution
(which his aides, who turned out the speech in nine hours,
insist was not researched) could not have been lost on
Prime Minister Tony Blair, an honored guest in the
audience. In a speech broadcast to America on Feb. 9, 1941,
Churchill said: ''We shall not fail or falter; we shall not
weaken or tire. . . . Give us the tools, and we will finish
the job.'' (Note where the Brit placed the shalls to
heighten the expression of resolve, and the will expressing
futurity before the stressed finish. Bush held to the more
American will not, in front of the emphasized tire, falter
and fail.)

The Bush speech showed a heightened concern for
connotation. In an exegesis of his prepared speech, this
former speechwriter looked for the words not chosen. For
example, Bush castigated the power-seeking terrorists as
those who ''follow in the path of Fascism, Nazism and
totalitarianism.'' The word left out of the series
beginning with Fascism and Nazism is, of course, Communism;
however, the administration is seeking help from Russia and
other former Soviet republics, in which many former and
present Communists live -- hence, the less specific,
all-encompassing totalitarianism. The tactful substitution
preceded the most original phrase in the speech, pointing
to the end of the path of all those isms: ''history's
unmarked grave of discarded lies.''

The other noun that was not there in the Bush address to
Congress was defense, as in the hottest phrase in
Washington today, homeland defense.

The earliest citation I can find is by China's Xinhua News
Agency, reporting on April 11, 1977, about ''the
mobilization of the puppet army and the 'homeland defense
reserve forces' '' by South Korea. Twenty years later, a
panel of experts recommended to Defense Secretary William
Cohen that a new armed-forces mission considering
biological threats be called Defense of the Homeland.

In February 2001, a commission headed by former Senators
Gary Hart and Warren Rudman delivered a prescient report
that the nation was vulnerable to terrorist attack. It
called for a cabinet-level agency amalgamating customs, law
enforcement, Coast Guard and other nonmilitary federal
agencies coordinating homeland defense. The Hart-Rudman
report received little attention in the media or at the
White House.

On the eve of the President's speech, White House sources
told The Associated Press he would create a ''Homeland
Defense Security Office'' -- a coordination group, not a
whole new department. At the last minute, the word defense
was dropped. Why? I'm told because it ''sounded
defensive,'' and more probably, ''protecting the internal
security of the homeland would be confused with the
war-making mission of the Department of Defense.''

Thus, in the new lexicon of the war on terror, security
means ''defense''; defense means ''attack.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/magazine/30ONLANGUAGE.html?ex=1002733234&ei=1&en=0763c099c57f6d44



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