"boots on the ground"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 9/26/2014 12:01 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>...  Speaking of which, does anyone have a take on why the U.S. 
>government (and maybe U.K., I can't remember) insists on referring 
>to our enemy as ISIL when everyone else calls them ISIS?  Whenever 
>someone explains that ISIL is for "the Islamic State of Iraq and the 
>Levant", I keep thinking of Oscar Levant and his spoken punctuation marks.

Perhaps a week or so ago I heard a TV head say that the government 
doesn't want to use ISIS because of the ready availability of "ISIS 
crisis".  I don't recall the following being mentioned specifically, 
but nearby are the "-itis" and "-osis" sufffixes, both with 
connotations of disorders.

Joel


>LH
> >
> >
> >> 
> http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/09/24/roundtable-more-u-s-ground-troops-likely/
> >>
> >> (Read the text for the three additional "boots on the ground.")
> >>
> >> Plus. OED actually wants to link the "boot" in "boots on the ground" with
> >> def. 1d, namely "A recruit at a boot camp."  So what these people  are
> >> "really" talking about, I mean etymologically, is "untrained recruits on
> >> the ground."   Make sense? It does to somebody.
> >>
> >> The service paper "Stars and Stripes" adds that "boots on the ground" is
> >> "slang."   How would that be?
> >
> > Because it confused "slang" with "metaphor"?
> >
> > Joel
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org