Kidnapped

[Jonathan Lighter]

As I understand it, the soldiers were taken in an assault upon their vehicle, with an exchange of gunfire.  This sounds to me like "capture" in open battle.  "Kidnap" might seem a bit more appropriate if, for example, they had been off duty, unarmed, or otherwise exposed, and were then - again for example - grabbed by masked men, hauled into a car, and driven away.

  My reaction comes more from the ordinary connotations of "capture" and "kidnap" than from any possible political considerations.  Does anyone know exactly who selected the word "kidnap" ?  Was it the Army's word or the media's ?

  Now to split hairs.  Technically the insurgents, whatever their motives, are indeed criminals under present Iraqi law, being in rebellion against a duly elected central government.  Nor do they belong to any uniformed, coherent military force as, for example, were members of the American Confederate armed forces. To that extent their action is legitimately described as a kidnaping.

  Given the facts as we have them, it would be hard to come down definitively for or against the use of "kidnap" in a nontechnical (i.e., nonlegal) discussion.

  However, the captors' torture and mutilation of their prisoners did more to shape the subsequent discourse than did either of the word choices under consideration here.

  BTW, the Germans and Japanese "captured" many Americans in World War II, but use of that very appropriate word didn't make them seem any less bad.

  JL

  Brenda Lester <alphatwin2002 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Brenda Lester
Subject: Re: Kidnapped
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Same people who confuse torture with abuse.


Dave Wilton wrote:
"Kidnapped" implies a crime. Simply "capturing" a soldier bears no moral
stigma.

Although it's hard to tell whether this is deliberate or just sloppy choice
of words.

--Dave Wilton
dave at wilton.net


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Barbara Need
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 12:15 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Kidnapped

When did soldiers start getting kidnapped rather than captured? The
two recent events that started me wondering are the loss a couple of
weeks ago of two American soldiers and the recent capture of an
Israeli soldier. In the first case, the speculation was that the
soldiers had been "kidnapped" and in the second the report I saw
specifically described his capture as a "kidnapping".

Someone suggested that kidnapping implies (or actually describes) a
situation in which the taking of a person has the intended goal of
money or some specific action (e.g., the release of prisoners). While
that is certainly an issue in the more recent case (apparently the
captors of the Israeli soldier are making demands to ensure his
release), as far as I can tell (I was out of town all last week, so
not following the story very closely), the American soldiers were
found dead and there is nothing to indicate that there was anything
"behind" their capture (or anything more than usual in a war).

I wondered if this use of language was an attempt to shape the
discourse of war vs insurgency. If they had been taken prisoner or
captured than the people who did it are soldiers on the opposite side
in a war. If they had been kidnapped, the people who did are
criminals (and by extension, bad).

Thoughts?

Barbara

Barbara Need
UChicago

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