Military euphemisms can be deadly. Yet the brutal rhetoric of the US and Israel is proving still more lethal<\/p>\n
\u201cMetaphors can kill,\u201d the linguist George Lakoff wrote<\/a> in an influential essay on the Gulf war. \u201cThe use of a metaphor with a set of definitions becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way.\u201d He described the effects of the US employment of business cost-and-benefit analogies, sporting comparisons and the fairytale of the just war with heroes and villains.<\/p>\n All veiled the reality of conflict. Euphemism was long the preferred choice for the US military. Spokespeople discussed \u201ccollateral damage\u201d rather than civilian deaths and \u201csurgical strikes\u201d, framing destruction as both precise and part of a necessary and ultimately healing process. Donald Trump chooses naked menace instead. This week he issued a genocidal threat against Iran, having previously threatened to bomb it \u201cback to the stone age\u201d and destroy bridges and power plants \u2013 schools and medical facilities having already been pulverised. He said that he was \u201cnot at all\u201d concerned about potential war crimes.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Military euphemisms can be deadly. Yet the brutal rhetoric of the US and Israel is proving still more lethal \u201cMetaphors can kill,\u201d the linguist George Lakoff wrote in an influential essay on the Gulf war. \u201cThe use of a metaphor with a set of definitions becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way.\u201d … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}