Serbs, Apaches, and Tomahawks, oy vey!

[Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM]

To anyone participating in or thinking of joining this political debate: Please
take it off-line. The origin and traditions and development and use of the names
of Indian peoples for US weapons is on topic for this list, but IMHO the same
cannot be said of rhetoric such as

     Is it cynicism? Amnesia? Or have the Americans just not stopped to
     reflect that the arms they are now using to attack the Serb regime with its
     odious ethnic cleansing are named after the Indians they exterminated last
     century?
and
     It is the NATO forces who are engaged in odious ethnic cleansing, no one
     else.


Grant, you raised an interesting and relevant issue --

     There's room here for development, I think, of how words like "Apache"
     still carry the power and the threat and the charge that they did, but
     now for different reasons.

-- but the quotation that you brought in threatens to derail us. Can we please
limit this discussion to the questions of language?

Returning you now (I hope) to discussion of American dialects and related
subjects.

-- Mark A. Mandel