Thursday, January 11, 2007

Surgalation

A nonsense word? There's plenty enough nonsense around the terms it's coined from : surge - escalation. the President calls it a troop surge, some in the press buy that term, Democrats have been using escalation and a few of the press prefer that term.

Webster's 9th Collegiate has a couple definitions of surge:
a large wave or billow
or
a sudden jerk (you'd have to ask Laura)

For escalate we have:
to increase in - extent, volume, number, amount, intensity, or scope ( a little war threatens to - into a huge one) and no I didn't mess with this.

Webster talks about waves, billows and even links surge to electricity but they just don't mention warfare or troops. I'm aware that a crowd might surge forward, etc but that and waves and electrical phenomenon are very quick events, nothing I can see that's measured in weeks, months, or years. Somehow it's considered partisan to not use the term just because BushCo likes it.

Awhile back I wrote an article that stated that words have meanings and that meaning is important if we are to expect to communicate with each other. If word meanings suddenly are optional to the situation one would reasonably expect that the goal is to not communicate, but rather to confuse. The word "spin" comes to mind.

Now if you want to lie to me and I'm not smart enough to catch it or at least smack you for it, bad on me. But this crap of using a perfectly good language to mean what it does not mean is offensive to my intelligence and should be damn offensive to anybody who makes a living using words. Do you catch my drift, media enablers? If you want to play along with this word weasel nonsense then you should have no doubts about why your credibility sucks.

Try this, quit kowtowing to the Media Bias fear mongers and try using facts and the language that used to be so advanced that most of the civilized world tried to be competent in it. I don't give a rat's patoot what political party thinks misuse is a great idea, it isn't. It also isn't a great idea to try to be inoffensive about facts and words, all you do is offend everybody. There are not two points of view on what escalate means, it has a definition and that's it. 2+2=4 is not subject to countervailing points of view. Get over it, insulted power is not going to like you when you tell the truth, not ever, and if you do something else - you're pointless.

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