Shellshock

[Wolfe, Skip]

>>The Huston film was Let There Be Light, about US troops treatment for what 

>>was then called shellshock.


The term shellshock always reminds me of what I find a disturbing trend in 
popular (and especially bureaucratic) terminology away from the casually 
evocative (shellshock), through the descriptive but bland (battle fatigue), 
 to the clinically precise but utterly prosaic (post-traumatic stress 
disorder).  Working for the government as I do, I notice a similar trend in 
the names of our offices, which tend to grow longer and more minutely 
descriptive of what the office does (leading to the formulation of Wolfe's 
First Law of Organizational Decadence -- "The more decadent the 
organization, the longer the names of the organizational units.").

Anyway, this is just an observation . . . not sure how it relates to 
Pynchon, other than to reflect the decadence he writes about in _V_ -- 
animate to inanimate, diversity to sameness, et cetera.  Actually, it's also 
reminiscent of the hilarious evolution of the phrases used to describe the 
"airborne toxic event," or whatever it came to be called, in Delillo's 
_White Noise_.

     Skip Wolfe
     crw4 at nip1.em.cdc.gov