Opertaion Slick Monicker

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, took a break FROM the coffee to check out this
morning's NYT, thought this might be of interest to a
language-sensitive crowd such as ours.  From Sarah
Boxer, "Operation Slick Moniker: Military Name Game,"
New York Times, Saturday, October 13th, 2001 ...

   "For a few days in September it looked as if the
United States would be fighting a war named Infinite
Justice. By late September the name was gone. The
Council on American-Islamic Relations had found the
name offensive because it sounded too much like
Eternal Retribution. In other words the United States
seemed to be assuming God's role. On Sept. 25 Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced that the
military operation would be called Enduring Freedom. 
   "Never mind that Enduring Freedom presented its own
troubling ambiguities ....
   "This is not the first time that the name of a
military operation has been floated then grounded. The
history of naming such operations shows how an art
that
was once covert has slowly become bureaucratic
propaganda....

[...]

   "Robin Tolmach Lakoff, a professor of linguistics
at the University of California, Berkeley, and the
author of 'The Language War,' a book about the
unintentional overtones of language, said, 'Whoever
gives the name has control over it.' Naming an
operation is like naming a baby, she added. 'Your
creation is opaque, but the name suggests what you
hope it will be.' What then was the hope with Infinite
Justice and then with Enduring Freedom? 
   The nouns in the name of the operation, she said,
were no problem: freedom and justice. It was the
adjectives that presented problems. The name had to
please so many different kinds of people that every
adjective seemed fraught with offensive overtones. 'It
is a virtue in times of peril,' Ms. Lakoff said, 'to
find words without meaning.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/13/arts/13NAME.html?todaysheadlines

And I hope y'all are familiar with Robin Lakoff,
though not to be confused with George (Metaphors we
Live By; Fire, Women and Dangerous Things; et al.)
Lakoff (married, however? both at Berkeley, at any
rate) ...

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