Every war leaves its mark on the landscape, as anyone who has visited the artillery-pocked and trench-scarred fields of Northern France can tell you, even a century after the Battle of the Somme. Wars clearly leave their mark, too, on the people who fight in them, on the people who return. But a third and oft-missed way in which wars stay with us is in our language.
Booby trap, shell shock, police action, bikini, over the top, fubar (look it up), and goat rope are just some of my favorite things that have entered our language from military speak and either muddied how we use English or colorized it. Whether what the language absorbs from a war is useful, effective, slang, or obscurant euphemism depends a great deal on whether the political culture is processing the war in a healthy or unhealthy way. Which brings us to Iraq and to a week in which the political language of the Iraq War era has been violently abused and shoddily applied to Venezuela, where it just doesn’t belong.
