[lg policy] Noah Webster's Word of the Year for 1828 was 'torture' too.

[Baron, Dennis E]

There’s a new post on the Web of Language: Noah Webster's Word of the Year for 1828 was 'torture' too.


It’s December, and time to choose the Word of the Year, the word or phrase that represents the very best of 2014. That’s a heavy burden for a year full of very worsts, from ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Pakistani Taliban to Ebola, Hands up! Don’t shoot, and I can’t breathe. The promising Arab Spring has faded, not so gracefully, into the Arab Winter, and the umbrella protests in Hong Kong this Fall did little to improve the climate of democracy in China.

Speaking of winter, December brought enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, back into our vocabulary. This euphemism for torture resurfaced with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA detention and questioning of terror suspects. Coming as it does at the end of a year of one bad thing after another, torture is my choice for the 2014 Word of the Year: it’s the epitome of what went wrong, not just with counterterrorism, but with everything.

Read the whole post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/weblan

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