Attritted

[Kathleen E. Miller]

At 03:14 PM 3/21/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>At 3:00 PM -0500 3/21/03, sagehen wrote:
>>Speaking of military lingo, I heard for the first time in my life, so far
>>as I can remember, the word "attritted" regarding Iraq's military armament.
>>It seemed obviously a backformation from "attrition," and sure enough, the
>>OED gives it as such from M20 /military slang/.  Is it ever used in any
>>other context?  It was a Canadian military historian who uttered it on this
>>occasion.
>>A. Murie
>
>I remember (and have somewhere) a very old clipping on military
>back-formations like "attrit" and maybe "liaise" or "degrade" from
>Safire's "On Language".   Could have been during Gulf War I.
>
>larry



Article 1 of the citation list.

February 24, 1991, Sunday    Late Edition - Final
Section: 6    Page: 20    Column: 3     Desk: Magazine Desk    Length: 1183
words

On Language; Degrading Attrition

BY WILLIAM SAFIRE

"TOO BITTER IS THY jest," says the King of Navarre in Shakespeare's "Love's
Labor's Lost." "Are we
betrayed thus to thy over-view ?"

Overviews , no longer hyphenated, are sought avidly by bookers . A booker
is a person with a
persuasive voice and professionally desperate demeanor, calling from what
seems to be a boiler room,
whose job it is to arrange the appearance of guests on television programs;
this new job title is rooted in
the British verb to book , "to reserve a place."

A booker called the other day to say, "Come on and give us your overview on
war words." That usage
substantiates an observation in a letter in my hand: " Overview is a word
beloved by television news
readers," writes Ralph A. Brooks of New York, "as are upcoming, ongoing and
offloading . What's the
difference between a view and an overview ?"

A view , which until recently had a sense of "a thought," now connotes more
of a slanted squint; an
overview , on the other hand, has a loftier, almost Olympian, feeling. That
word, used overmuch by the
overpaid overseers of voice-over footage, has a meaning more comprehensive
than "summary" and more
pretentious than "survey." (Yes, there is an underviewer ; in mining, this
is a supervisor who works under
an overseer.) I have just given you my view of overview ; for an overview
of that word, we must put it in
a context of global military strategese, which to lexicographers is a
target-rich environment .

Journalists tend to snicker at the jargon of military briefers, but we
peddle our own prepackaged parlance,
often overly compressed: "Good evening. Dan Rather, updating the war." The
1941 verb for "to bring up
to date" requires another word or two to make grammatical sense out of the
thought, which now suggests
adding new technology to, or otherwise modernizing, the war: a leisurely
"updating you about the war" or
"updating the war news" would do the trick but might lose crispness and
urgency, not to mention precious
milliseconds.

Although briefing is a military coinage that has crossed over into general
use, official military language is
drawn more to the bloodless and the bureaucratic than the brief; it often
takes secondary senses of words
and makes them its own. (The World War II verb to brief , probably from the
lawyer's brief, or written
argument, means "to impart information concisely"; to debrief means "to
receive information.")

The most common verb used in military briefings from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
has been to degrade , which
means to most people "to humiliate, to cause to be held in contempt";
correspondents think that being
forced to cover a war without being allowed to see the fighting is fairly
degrading. But a second sense,
primary only to military people, is "to reduce in grade; to lessen in
rank," and that sense is extended to "to
weaken." When a general says, "Our attacks have degraded enemy forces," he
does not mean that the
enemy has been held up to ridicule, or even that his majors have been
busted to captains; he means that
the attacks have weakened the enemy. For some reason, the brass hate to use
the word weaken .

Pentagonians like to verb nouns. ("To verb a noun," of course, makes a verb
out of the noun verb .)
Attrition , for example, means "the wearing down by friction; rubbing
away." The first use of war of
attrition was in 1914; "General Kelly says that Iraqi military targets are
being ' attrited ,' " Robert and
Margaret Lloyd write from London, and wonder if they are out of touch with
United States usage. No;
this is the military speaking to a much wider public than before, but using
a term pioneered by Laurence
Sterne in his 1760 novel "Tristram Shandy": "So glazed, so contrited and
attrited was it with fingers and
with thumbs in all its parts."

Attrit and degrade are used interchangeably, but a careful commander would
use attrit when he wanted
to stress the wearing-down quality of the degradation process.

To avoid being degraded, the enemy will hunker down . This is a lively
piece of old Scottish dialect
adopted by the modern military. Perhaps of Scandinavian origin, akin to the
Old Norse huka , "to squat,"
this term was first used when a Scot was observed in 1720 "hunk'ring down
upon the cald Grass." This
term for crouching or kneeling often implied a craven or frightened
attitude, but has developed into a sense
of crouching defensively in a mood of defiance. (It is probably not related
to the Flemish hunke , "a large
lump or piece," leading to the English "hunk of meat"; the Scots then gave
hunk the meaning of "slut," and
Americans in 1845 gave hunker the meaning of "conservative"; we now think
of a hunk as a sexually
attractive male, not necessarily a right-winger.)

Another bright metaphor introduced by pilots into this war is trolling :
"It involves a search for supply
vehicles or convoys, called 'movers,' " R. W. Apple Jr. writes in The New
York Times, "on main logistical
routes." He quotes Marine Lieut. Col. William J. Home on the term's origin:
"It's very similar to fishing with
your line out, hoping to find something." This boating reference recalls
the World War II bilingual trope,
strafing the strasse , meaning "looking for girls."

"The reports of ' friendly fire ,' a serious danger on any battlefield,"
were reviewed by John H. Cushman
Jr. of The Times. This phrase describes a moment in warfare that causes
shudders in airmen and
artillerymen: when your bombs or shells are dropped by tragic mistake on
your own troops. This is
sometimes treated with macabre humor -- "hell with 'em if they can't take a
joke" -- to conceal a sense of
guilt that can last a lifetime. Friendly fire is an extension of friendlies
, the word for one's own troops or
allies, perhaps from the apocryphal line sardonically attributed to General
Custer at Little Big Horn,
"Those look like friendly Indians."

Saddam Hussein's contribution to the current war lingo is his bloodthirsty
prediction of " the mother of all
battles " to be fought on the ground. Western writers have picked this up
as a simple maternal
personification, like Virginia's designation as "mother of Presidents" or
John Bright's 1865 phrase
"England, the mother of Parliaments."

There's much more to it. In Arabic literature, the mother of all battles
refers specifically to the battle of
Qadisiya in A.D. 636, where the Arabs united under Islam to win a decisive
victory against the Sassanian
Persian army. This seventh-century fight continued to the walls of
Ctesiphon; the Arabs triumphed, gaining
the land west of the Tigris River for the cause of Islam.

When Saddam Hussein uses the phrase, the mother of all battles , as he
often did during the recent
Iran-Iraq war, he wants to evoke the memory of that first great Arab
victory. The ruins of Ctesiphon, the
ancient Sassanian capital where the first significant Islamic conquest took
place, lie 20 miles southeast of
Baghdad. It may again become a target-rich environment .

Images: Drawing

Copyright 1991 The New York Times Company