I know this is hardly the most important aspect of the issue, but it is annoying: the misuse of English by the governments involved in the current fight against terrorism. The worst one is the war on terror which sounds as winnable as the war on being very frightened, which is what terror is. If it was a war on terrorism I might be able to understand, though even that is stretching the point. Then there are the weapons of mass destruction which sound to me like the rodents of unusual size or another name for Protestant tracts. The term is used to describe dirty or persistent weapons rather than necessarily destructive ones. No-one considers the firebombing of Dresden as the use of a WMD, for example. The abbreviation is just as annoying, but offers a solution: why not refer to WMD as NCB, for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological weapons, which is what most people actually mean by WMD?
While I’m on a rant, what about 9/11? Nothing technically wrong with it, except that it should, of course, be 11/9. Aside from the British media’s acceptance of the term (along with Ground Zero: properly the site on the ground of a nuclear explosion), it canonises and romanticises the whole day in a way the phrase terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center does not. Terrorism seems to be like bullying: the more you react to it, the worse it will get; and, seeing as we cannot punch Mr Bin Laden or any one person on the nose to make it stop, the kind of propaganda, misdirected aggression, and publicity will only make the situation worse.
Just as bad is the way the increasingly lazy media, who rely more and more on government handouts for their information, swallow this ridiculous terminology whole. Quite refreshing is the following Grauniad Unlimited article:
Powell speaks with forked tongue, which looks at the use of the terms cowardice, international community, and war. It says of the phrase war on terror, “You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can’t wage war on an abstract noun.”