pink mist

[Benjamin Zimmer]

A column in the Australian newspaper The Age entitled "The battlefield
of language" (on "rendition" and other war-related euphemisms)
mentions a gruesome one I hadn't heard before...

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/the-battlefield-of-language/2005/12/29/1135732690912.html
Age correspondent Paul McGeough in a report from Iraq in 2003 wrote:
"Some of the photographers use a chilling term they picked up from the
US military in Afghanistan to describe what might have happened to a
dozen or more people thought to have died in this missile attack. They
have become 'pink mist'."
-----

Looks like it goes back at least to the first Iraq war, as in this UPI
story from Jan. 27, 1991:

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http://groups.google.com/group/clari.news.hot.iraq/msg/8b3d19b940354c8c
They might not have to egg-walk across booby-trapped earth with
magnetic mine detectors and wooden pikes, probing for buried
explosives that would vaporize them into what one Marine instructor
called "that big pink mist.''
-----

The expression also appears in _Jarhead_, both the movie and the book.


--Ben Zimmer