"Fog of War"

[Jonathan Lighter]

1915  Arno Dosch in _The World's Work_ (Feb.) 470: Under the "Fog of War" [title]...The "fog of war," as the London newspapers phrase it, hung so thick there was no telling what would happen in the next twenty-four hours....The fog of war did not lift in the morning, nor for several mornings. We knew there was a big battle on, but that was all we knew.

  Thank you, Google Books!

  JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: "Fog of War"
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On 6/11/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> Carl von Clausewitz, _On War_, trans. Michael Howard & Peter Paret (Princeton:
> P.U.P., 1984) Bk. 1, ch. iii: "War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the
> factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser
> uncertainty."
[...]
> There may well be a pre-1984 trans. or ref. that translates "clouds" in Book I
> as "fog," but Clausewitz never quite used the phrase in German.

The first edition of the Howard & Paret translation was published in
1976, actually.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000I9V7YG/


--Ben Zimmer

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