Latest SOTA ('homicide attack')

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 1/18/06, Joanne M. Despres <jdespres at merriam-webster.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

As Dave Wilton just posted, this account is roughly true for "homicide
bombing". See Word Spy:

-----
http://www.wordspy.com/words/homicidebombing.asp
This phrase has been in the news since last Friday, April 12 [2002],
when White House spokesman Ari Fleischer first ran it up the
linguistic flagpole (see the first use, below):
Fox News (and The New York Post; see above) immediately took up the
new usage, but CNN and the news divisions of ABC, CBS, and NBC
continue to use suicide bombing and suicide bomber.
-----

The administration's war against "insurgents" is more recent, stemming
from a Nov. 29 press conference by Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld said he
had had an "epiphany" about the word "insurgents" (and "insurgency")
as applied to Iraqi opposition forces ("You know, that gives them a
greater legitimacy than they seem to merit"). He suggested "enemies of
the legitimate Iraqi government" as an alternative. See Dana Milbank's
article on the press conference, and Safire's recent "On Language"
column...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/29/AR2005112901405.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15wwln_safire.html

The president has generally avoided the I-word since then, instead
talking about "Saddamists", "terrorists", and "rejectionists." But no
one else has paid much attention to Rumsfeld's pronouncement, least of
all the media (well, maybe Fox News is an exception). Searching on
<http://www.defenselink.mil/> finds numerous uses of "insurgents" and
"insurgency" in recent military briefings and articles by the American
Forces Press Service.

--Ben Zimmer

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