War Names
While directing a friend to a paper on Sawzall, I discovered a blog post that casts engineers who create such broadly applicable tools as “major force multipliers”. This reminded me of my own everyday-life reuse of military planning lingo: “force projection“, which I take to mean, one’s ability to persuade and influence others remotely, over telephone or e-mail. A person who does this effectively can be said to have good force projection.
In small doses, I find military-speak to be fairly satisfying, although I’m not quite sure why. Apart from clown college, any enterprise that needs to be taken seriously eventually develops a sterile, professional vocabulary. But for war, it helps for the lingo to have a euphemistic flavor. For one thing, this sort of language helps distance war planners and combatants from the sometimes grim reality on the ground. Framing combat as a professional activity helps to emotionally detach participants from what actually transpires. Killing enemies is a weighty task, but surely neutralizing them can’t be all that bad. We even do that to heartburn in the off season.
In a signature routine on euphemisms, comedian George Carlin laments how the term shell shock has undergone many changes in the war lexicon over the years - first to battle fatigue, then operational exhaustion, and finally to post-traumatic stress disorder. “Still eight syllables,” he remarks defensively, “but we’ve added a hyphen.”
