Latest SOTA ('homicide attack')

[Jonathan Lighter]

You'll recall that it was the Prez himself who observed that they're not "suicide" bombings, they're "homicide" bombings. Since then, I've rarely heard the phrase "suicide bomber" (etc.) on Fox, though once in a while it slips through.

  I'm willing to muse that an adviser to Mr. Bush may have opined that since many fundamentalist Muslims regard such bombings as "martyrdoms" (done out of hope and love - and I'm not making this part up) rather than "suicides" (done out of despair), "homicide" is less tendentious, punchier, and, in fact, incontrovertible.

  But "musing" isn't "believing."

   (BTW, Fox later reported that the explosion was carried out by a "homicide bomber" after all.)

  JL "When News Breaks, We Fix It"

Damien Hall <halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Damien Hall
Subject: Latest SOTA ('homicide attack')
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I forwarded the exchange about 'homicide attack'

>>Twenty people were killed in Afghanistan today by a terrorist bomb.
>>Fox News Live adds the following :
>>
>> "It was a remote controlled bomb and *not* a homicide attack."

to my girlfriend, who said that the 'homicide attack' part had been added by Fox
News because they don't use the phrase 'suicide attack'; they don't think it's
negative enough. I suppose that if you don't want to use the phrase that
everyone else uses for these kinds of attacks, you still have to have some way
of talking about them, and 'homicide attack' is theirs, which is sad when it is
used in this context.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania

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