"casualty"

[Shapiro, Fred]

Jon,

Thanks for clarifying the sense you are referring to.

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Lighter [wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 9:50 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "casualty"

It looks as though the only difference between 2b and 2c is that 2b - the
earlier - applies to military contexts and 2c doesn't.

I'd have separated 2b and 2c into subsets of a new def.  Possibly the OED
didn't do this (and merged 2b into the smae paragrpah with 2a) because it
was difficult to assign some of the cites to the right sense. (Some seem
ambiguous, though perhaps only in retrospect.)

2c doesn't cover what I have in mind. The problem may lie in the wording of
def. 2c. I'm talking about cases in which the word is applied specifically
to persons killed, as in the Speer quotation. In my experience the following
is true:

1. the traditional military definition of "casualty" is a person who has
been put out of action through death, injury, capture, mental breakdown,
disease, or any similar cause.  The plural "casualties" covers all of these
circumstances collectively.

2. "popular" usage (as in the Speer/ Hitler case) applies the plural only to
the dead.  To take an example I've encountered more than once, the first day
of the battle of the Somme is accurately said to have cost the British Army
nearly 60,000 casualties, which includes about 20,000 killed.  This is
frequently misinterpreted and rephrased as "60,000 deaths."  Similarly, I
have heard it said that the U.S. suffered 58,000 "casualties" during the
Vietnam War.  But the actual number of casualties was far higher than that.
I have heard that the U.S. has suffered "4,000 casualties in Iraq."  The
real number is, again, far higher.

More subtly, the figurative assertion that "When war is declared, truth is
the first casualty," means that truth suffers. It does not mean,
necessarily, that truth is dead (i.e., everybody starts lying constantly and
flagrantly), though that is how it often seems to be interpreted.  This may
be a distinction without a practical difference, but surely the number of
"casualties" in a battle or a train wreck is important to know.  The current
OED entry does not suggest that there could be - and is - the kind of
confusion discussed above.

When I was teaching a course on war and literature, it seemed that nearly
all my students (over twelve semesters) misunderstood the meaning of
"casualties."

JL



On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "casualty"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Jon,
>
> Doesn't sense 2.c. in OED correspond to the meaning you are referring to?
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
> Jonathan Lighter [wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 3:18 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: "casualty"
>
> OED does not recognize the usage, very misleading and to be deplored on
> that
> basis, that equates "casualty" with "person killed."
>
> Here is a perfect example. Canetti quotes Albert Speer, who was quoting
> Hitler from memory.  I don't know the denotation of the translated German
> word, but English is English:
>
> 1979 Elias Canetti _The Conscience of Words_ (N.Y.: Seabury Press) 153:
> That
> will at least be a worthy monument to our dead in the World War. The name
> of
> every one of our 1,800,000 casualties will be carved in granite!
>
> JL
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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