"Decapitate", "tip-fiddle", "friendly fire". As in previous wars, the present conflict in Iraq is bringing us new ways of speaking about the unspeakable. While some of these coinages may help us to get a better understand of the thinking behind the military and political processes, others can sound like examples of George Orwell's Newspeak - and do not inspire confidence.
As teachers who have a good understanding of the language, we still have to make an effort to make sense of what is being reported in the press or via broadcast media. Our students face more serious challenges. However, if teachers and their students feel it is an appropriate topic for classroom activities, there are some resources that can help them develop a critical understanding of the language of this war.
One of the most interesting is the Language Of War column that has been a regular part of the Guardian newspaper's war coverage. Some examples follow, and all the items can be found by entering "language of war" into the Guardian's web archive (www.theguardian.com/archive/). The column unpacks some of the jargon and provides examples and definitions which offer an insight into the sometimes confusing language that is being used about the conflict in Iraq.
Students might be interested in reading and discussing the articles as they stand. However, if you would like to make more extensive use of the words in class, and you have access to the internet, a starting point is to present students with some of words in a few sentences of authentic context, and to then ask them to try to present explanations or definitions of what the word might mean.
An excellent way of getting such additional contexts is to use the Webcorp tool at Liverpool University's Research and Development Unit for English Studies (www.webcorp.org.uk). This is a very powerful resource. Not only will it let you create concordance lines for the words or phrases you are investigating, but it also lets you return to the original text sources for each result so that you can check who was saying what.
"Mirror-imaging", "blue-collar warfare", "thwack" are all worth investigating. Having got a student definition, the next step is to give the students the relevant articles from the Language Of War column and to see if they agree with the writers' interpretations.
With a better understanding of the jargon being used by English speaking journalists and military or government personnel - and the kinds of bias that these terms might involve - students can then start to make connections with their own realities. By carrying out the same research activity into media language in their own countries, students can get an insight into the similarities and differences between the way the English media are reporting the war and the way it is being represented at home. We all need such insights if we are to make informed critical judgments about the way this complex and problematic world situation is being reported.
Decapitation exercise
Military commanders normally deploy abstract and cold language to describe the horrors of war. But in a rare display of honesty, US officials described an overnight precision bomb attack as a "decapitation exercise". Such a mission is designed to kill the leadership of a hostile regime, or, as US officials describe it, to "cut the head off the snake". They hope nobody will object to such stark language, calculating that few will shed a tear if Saddam Hussein or his cronies die.
Tip-fiddle
From the acronym TPFDL, which stands for time-phased forces deployment list, which in turn means (it seems) the detailed blueprint of a US military campaign. The tip-fiddle stipulates who is to go where, and when they are to get there. The tip-fiddle for the current Iraq campaign was, apparently, number 1003 and early on in the campaign angry military top brass in Washington accused the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, of having fiddled with it. The net result of all this tip-fiddle fiddling, they suggested, was that the coalition force was undermanned.
Mirror-imaging
This comes from the world of policy analysis and intelligence assessment. "Many people in the administration had a very strong political agenda, which was inspired by the Iraqi opposition, and by Western mirror-imaging, assuming they want what we want," said Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Niccolo Machiavelli warned against assuming that your adversary would never do something you would never do. It could be dangerous if applied, say, to Iraqi readiness to use chemical weapons. "Mirror-imaging - projecting your thought process or value system on to someone else - is one of the greatest threats to objective intelligence analysis," a senior CIA officer, Frank Watanabe, wrote in 1998. Failure to avoid it led the US to believe that Japan would not attack Pearl Harbour.
Blue-collar warfare
After one US marine was killed and another injured in fighting with Iraqi irregulars at a cement factory near Diwaniya, Lt Col BP McCoy described the incident as "blue-collar warfare". Blue collar is taken from the world of industrial sociology to denote skilled and semi-skilled workers, but to Lt Col McCoy it was "just the hard-grinding work of patrols". The phrase might reflect the initial bewilderment of US personnel coming to terms with a war they had been led to believe would be easier. "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd wargamed against," explained the senior US ground commander in Iraq, Lt Gen William Wallace.
Thwack
Officers in the RAF, the most junior of the three armed services, sometimes become a little overexcited. One officer could barely control himself when he described how RAF Harriers opened fire on an armoured Iraqi convoy leaving Basra. "The army and airforce had a thwack at them and they didn't get anywhere, let's put it like that," a senior RAF source said. "I think they got thwacked."