Impending conflict spawns its own lexicon, slang

We’ve got ‘‘Winnebagos of Death,’’ Hooah! bars, ‘‘shock and awe,’’ freedom fries and cheese-eat...

We’ve got ‘‘Winnebagos of Death,’’ Hooah! bars, ‘‘shock and awe,’’ freedom fries and cheese-eating surrender monkeys. The ‘‘coalition of willing’’ will take on ‘‘axis of evil’’ and all its WMD and if it is not the ‘‘mother of all wars’’ as in 1991, ‘‘mother of all bombs’’ may make an appearance.

All this sounds light-hearted than a war against Iraq will be, and that may be the point. Every conflict comes with its own lexicon, if only to explain food — from hardtack to K-rations to MREs (meals ready to eat). And already, the Iraq war has spawned its shorthand, which differs slightly from war jargon of the past.

The proliferation of media looking for the next hot headline phrase has created a linguistic mint set on overdrive. Even front-line journalists have a new verb to contend with — the Pentagon announced that reporters would not just join or cover troop movement, they would be ‘‘embedded’’ within them. Like the literal and figurative flag-waving that swept the nation post-September 11, a new vernacular has a soothing effect on those fearful and feeling powerless.

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‘‘When you’re afraid, you like to be part of a group,’’ says Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University. ‘‘And the proliferation of media allows public to function more like private groups used to. People under stress — doctors and nurses, for example — often have a joking way of talking.’’

Some of the new terminology, like ‘‘coalition of the willing,’’ is government spin of the ‘‘homeland security’’ variety. Some is simply social irreverence — the first reference to French as ‘‘surrender monkeys’’ came on TV’s The Simpsons, but it was Internet bloggers who helped it, and its fraternal twin ‘‘axis of weasels,’’ make the news.

But war lingo, like any other ‘‘speak’’ is usually about feeling in control, safe and hip. ‘‘Everyone’s fighting for ink,’’ says Geoffrey Nunberg, a researcher at Stanford University and author of The Way We Talk Now. ‘‘So everyone’s looking for the phrase that will get them the Internet link or a mention on TV.’’ ‘‘The administration,’’ he adds, ‘‘is trying to package this war, and if the president coins a term, then obviously it’s going to get more attention.’’

According to Nunberg, the proliferation of the lexicon means that fewer are going to stand the test of time — Hooah!, an energy bar named for old military exhortation that may accompany MREs, will probably not be another ‘‘victory garden,’’ and ‘‘axis of evil’’ will, in all likelihood, not bump ‘‘England’s finest hour’’ from Bartlett’s.

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The success of Desert Shield and Desert Storm made it clear that naming things properly is half the battle. President Bush went off the radar when he dubbed the war on terrorism ‘‘Operation Infinite Justice.’’ Many found this a bit heady, so it was changed to Operation Enduring Justice abroad and Operation Noble Freedom at home.

Likewise, weaponry is always domesticated if not anthropomorphised. ‘‘Winnebagos of Death’’ refer to the trucks that, according to US intelligence agencies, the Iraqi military uses to disguise mobile biological weapons labs. The ‘‘mother of all bombs’’ seemed the perfect nickname for the new massive ordnance air burst, or MOAB, and a pointed reference to Saddam Hussein’s ‘‘the mother of all battles’’ remark.

And ‘‘shock and awe’’ is a battle technique of massive bombings. Like Nunberg, Tannen thinks that most future terminology will go the way of ‘‘Scud stud’’ but, she adds, after the Turkish-Greek conflict over Cyprus, Greeks began referring to Turkish coffee as Greek coffee and thus it has remained. (LATWP)