GWOT/GSAVE: WOTY?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

There's been much discussion this past week about the administration's
"rebranding" of the Global War on Terrorism, now to be known as the Global
Struggle Against Violent Extremism. A Slate column by Fred Kaplan
discusses the acronymic rationale for the slogan-switch:

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2123412/

Look at the first letters of Global War on Terrorism. GWOT. What does that
mean; how is it pronounced? Gwot? Too frivolously rowdy, like a fight
scene in a Marvel comic book (Bam! Pfooff! Gwot!). Gee-wot? Sounds like a
garbled question (Gee what?).

Then look at Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Its acronym is
GSAVE — i.e., gee-save. We're out to save the world, see, not wage war on
it. Or, as national security adviser Stephen Hadley puts it in the Times
piece, "We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive
alternative."
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This might not be so far-fetched an explanation, since the Global War on
Terrorism was indeed abbreviated as GWOT by the military. The initialism
dates at least to Dec. 2003, when a report was published by the Army War
College critical of the Bush administration's handling of GWOT:

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.pdf
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8435-2004Jan11.html

The blogosphere is now abuzz with GWOT and GSAVE, so they might be worthy
of consideration for WOTY.


--Ben Zimmer