waider | semantic wankery

One of the more irritating side-effects of the so-called "war on terror" is the co-opting of words derived from "terror" to describe any person, group or act you disagree with sufficiently. If you're not sufficiently supportive of a cause, for example, you're somehow "aiding the terrorists". The phrase, "the terrorists have already won" was so overused that it's now a wholly ironic statement completely devoid of whatever usefulness it might once have had. People who were formerly dissidents, freedom fighters, rebels, insurgents, or any other not-aligned-with-establishment-thinking label are now almost invariably terrorists. Security alerts are now almost invariably "terror alerts". Any time something falls over, crashes, floods, collapses, or otherwise fails, officials hasten to assure us - frequently, it seems, before any facts have been discovered - that it's "not a terrorist incident". All this overuse is weakening whatever effectiveness the various phrases might once have had, although given the general cynical nature of the world and the media that reports on it, I'm not even convinced the words had useful currency before they started being overused.

I've more to say on this, but I do need to think some more about it. Ultimately, I feel the devaluation of phrases is at least in part attributable to the rise of soundbite news media, where a stock phrase with no useful meaning is more important than an even slightly indepth item.