Latest SOTA ('homicide attack')

[Joanne M. Despres]

I talked with a NY Daily News reporter from the Washington press
corps a few weeks ago who mentioned that the GWB's Press
Secretary (I thought he mentioned Ari Fleischer, but he's been
gone too long, hasn't he?) at some past briefing asked members of
the press to substitute a whole raft of terms favored by the
administration for the words normally used.  One of the
substitutions was "homicide bombing" for "suicide bombing"; I
believe another was "enemies of the legitimate Iraqui government"
for "insurgents."  Anyway, this reporter said that you could hear a
lot of snickering among the press corps at the suggestion, and that
organizations including the NYT and AP rejected "homicide
bombing" out of hand as misleading (since, they reasoned, almost
any type of bombing is likely to be homicidal), but he said that Fox
was quite happy to comply with the Press Secretary's suggestion.

FWIW,

Joanne

On 17 Jan 2006, at 15:47, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> 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')
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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