Do you ever get tired of terms that find their way into news stories over and over again. Here are a few that I would like to see retired.
Heavily-fortified green zone: this of course is that large swath of land in Baghdad that houses the 104-acre American embassy and the Iraqi government. Green zone is now forever paired with heavily-fortified as if to try to drum into our heads that the area is safe for the employees and politicians therein; this pairing is even used to describe attacks on the enclave, like the one that occurred the other day. So, is the use of this term an ironic wink to the reader that the heavy fortifications are not fulfilling their purposes, or, is it an attempt to brainwash us by word association into believing that our attempts at safety in the midst of carnage are succeeding?
Anti-American cleric: this is the term used to describe Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi’ite cleric who holds sway in Sadr City and who has the support of many of the poorer residents of Iraq. News organizations from Fox, to USA Today, to the New York Times all use this expression as a lead-in to al-Sadr. Apparently, the only way we can understand this individual and his relationship to his people, his country and the world is to give him the epithet “anti-American”. This does echo the Manichean presidential pronouncement after the September 11, 2001 attacks that individuals and countries can either be “with us” or “with the terrorists”, and continues the fallacious notion that we as a people are too stupid to understand nuances.
(Pick your country) tanks and troops: an expression that was used ad nauseum when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 [as in Israeli tanks and troops] and is also used to describe our own actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps by substituting the term troop (a word which implies an amorphous group) for soldier (a term that describes a human being) the media are trying to deflect our attention from the individual toll our country’s policies and actions are taking.
Lest you think I am in some way fixated on the Iraq war (since apparently we Americans have severe attention span problem, unable to hold Iraq and the economy in our brains at the same time), I also offer the following item:
Going forward: this is an entirely overused expression which means from now on. It appears to have some business connotations and I suppose the notion of movement is important in the corporate world. But it has morphed from a business buzzword to a constant annoyance on NPR and in other news reports. Yes, it is even used in reports on the Iraq war.
If you have any other examples of tired, silly, overused expressions, you’re welcome to add them in a comment.
“Suspected militant”: as in, “U.S. air strikes killed 25 suspected militants in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan . . .” If they’re “militants” (even “suspected” ones) they can’t be civilians, right? Because the U.S. doesn’t target civilians, and “our” precision munitions keep “collateral” deaths to an absolute minimum. No matter that the people on the ground and the doctors in the local hospital say that the dead included 8 children and 12 mothers and grandmothers. “Our” foolproof intelligence told us the houses were bases for “militants”; so it must be so.
“Actionable intelligence”: after all we’ve been through, from “weapons of mass destruction” on, we still believe in this? I continue to be amazed. As when Barack Obama proclaimed that if “actionable intelligence” showed Osama bin Laden’s location in Pakistan, and Musharaf wouldn’t do the right thing, then President Obama would unilaterally order a U.S. attack within Pakistan. (Of course, the U.S. is already bombing Pakistan, supposedly with the consent of the Pakistani government. The Democrats want to show that they can be just as tough as the Republicans, and that, in fact, they would ratchet it up a bit.)