Welcome to listeners of PRI’s The World, where Lisa Mullins today interviewed me about Unspeak, on the occasion of the announcement of a treaty to ban “cluster bombs” (which hasn’t been signed by the major users and manufacturers of “cluster bombs”). The term “cluster bomb” itself, as previously noted here, is Unspeak — since a cluster is a collection of things that are “close together” (in two OED definitions), and yet a “cluster bomb” is designed to spray its separate explosives over a large area. (One of its applications is “area denial”, as in southern Lebanon in 2006.)

The phrase is so familiar nowadays that it is one of those Unspeak terms (like “concentration camp”) that has been leached of all its obfuscatory power. We know that the thing it denotes is nasty. However, it’s interesting to note that the first usage recorded by the OED, from a 1967 Guardian report, shows the writer knew what was up: it’s handled gingerly, in scare quotes:

‘Cluster bombs’ which, on impact, spray bullets around.

Actually, we can antedate that right away, thanks to Google News Archive, which records this inspirational Washington Post headline from 1965:

Speedy Jets Using New Cluster Bomb Against Viet Reds¹

Quite. Meanwhile, another result from a 1967 New York Times article shows that the official terminology back then was not “cluster” bombs but “fragmentation bombs”. Update: see correction here. Perhaps that fell out of favour after the negative publicity that attached to the phenomenon of “fragging” among US forces in Vietnam, in which dangerously incompetent officers were killed (originally with fragmentation grenades) by their subordinates.²

Sources agree that “cluster bombs”, before their enthusiastic adoption by the US, were first invented by the Nazis, but they were Unspoken differently back then. The German armed forces in 1939 called their weapon the “Butterfly” (Schmetterling or Sprengbombe Dickwandig ), which actually named the individual “bomblets” whose casings hinged open like wings. (Later, the Soviet version was popularly called “Molotov’s breadbasket”.) More ominous than the term “butterfly” was the name for an advanced new “cluster bomb” announced by West Germany in 1971: the “Dragon Seed”.

One American “cluster bomb dispenser unit”, the SUU-30, can be modified into an LBU-30, which drops leaflets instead of “bomblets”. LBU stands for, and I kid you not, “Leaflet Bomb Unit”. You know, because words are weapons too!

1. Presumably these were the same “cluster bomb units” that had been tested in an exercise reported in the Great Bend Tribune (full text paywalled) of November 9, 1964: google news archive’s earliest result. ↩
2. I can’t quite decide whether the fact that “fragging” now just means shooting someone’s avatar in a videogame should count as a trivialization of the word’s origin or as a llinguistic tribute to the soldiers who took such action. ↩

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The bizarrely cosy relationship between the “Church” of “Scientology” and the London police is something I blogged about at CiF last year, and it is only getting more peculiar. Now comes the news that a teenager has been served a summons by City of London police for participating in a peaceful demonstration outside the shiny new £24-million London HQ of “Scientology” with a placard that called the organization a “cult”:

[T]the teenager facing court said: “I brought a sign to the May 10th protest that said: ‘Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult’.”

“‘Within five minutes of arriving I was told by a member of the police that I was not allowed to use that word, and that the final decision would be made by the inspector.”

A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and “strongly advised” him to remove the sign. Section five of the Public Order Act prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.

The teenager refused to back down quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a “cult” which was “corrupt, sinister and dangerous”.

Quite. If you live in France, you can call “Scientology” a cult or secte with impunity, because that is how it is defined in law. And as a point of fact, the “Church” of “Scientology” is not a religion under UK law either.

If it’s inaccurate, then, to call “Scientology” a religion, is it nonetheless correct, as the police claim, that to call it a “cult” is “threatening, abusive or insulting”? The OED actually offers a perfectly neutral usage not yet marked as obsolete:

2. a. A particular form or system of religious worship; esp. in reference to its external rites and ceremonies.

However, it must be admitted that these days, the word “cult” does usually signal disapprobation, as the draft additions of May 2004 to the OED entry record:

A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

Perhaps this definition helps us out even so. For it can hardly be denied, even by a “Scientologist”, that some “others” regard the organization as strange or sinister. In which case, to call it a cult is merely to acknowledge that some people hold a low opinion of it. And indeed, the existence of such benighted folk would seem to be required by the organization’s own “philosophy”. It is only natural, after all, that people outside “Scientology” should think bad things about it, because they are still infected by the ghosts of dead aliens.

What would you call “Scientology”, readers?

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Dude, that is one awesome new laser you’ve got there. But I’m a little alarmed by the description of the OMEGA EP. It’s going to be involved in extreme-field experiments. Not only that, it will interrogate high-temperature and high-density regimes.

So basically we have here a bunch of extremist scientists, practising what John Ashcroft would rightly call evil physics, who are planning to “interrogate” — ie talk to — “high-temperature and high-density regimes”, rather than promising to obliterate them, as any sane public figure would.¹

Can it be very long before such irresponsible appeasement is rightly denounced by those who stand up for sound science ?

1. Yeah yeah, the laser boasts that it “supports a wide variety of target irradiation conditions”, but really, merely irradiating these regimes is too good for them: you might as well offer them a glass of milk and a hot bath, like Barack Obama wants to. In fact the laser sucks so hard it won’t even make a “thermonuclear burn wave”. So what possible use is it in Middle Eastern negotiations? ↩

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Blogger: A’s proposition p about B’s sentence s is false.

Reader 1: Oh my god, I can’t believe you are defending everything B ever wrote!

Reader 2: But my completely different proposition q is true, so even if p is false, A is still right to say it!

Reader 3: Yes! Even though p is wrong, A is, er, morally right, because of yet another different proposition r !

Reader 4: Why won’t you also condemn the notorious E? Oh my god, you must be a crypto-e-ist!

Blogger: Sigh.

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Barack Obama seems to have a habit of calling women “sweetie”:

Back in Pennsylvania in early April, Senator Barack Obama took some heat for calling a female factory worker “sweetie,” in Allentown.

He did it again today at a Chrysler Plant in Sterling Heights, asking a reporter to “hold on one second there sweetie” when she asked, “How are you going to help the American auto workers?”

Obama later left a voicemail message apologizing to the reporter in question:¹

Second apology is for using the word ’sweetie.’ That’s a bad habit of mine. I do it sometimes with all kinds of people. I mean no disrespect and so I am duly chastened on that front.

“All kinds of people” — sure! No doubt Obama calls Dick Cheney “sweetie” when they cross paths on the Senate floor.² It’s easy to believe that Obama also uses “sweetie” as a pet name for Hillary Clinton, isn’t it? continued »

1. From excitingly named station WXYZ, which just looks like someone lazily chopped off the nearest end of the alphabet. ↩
2. And Cheney mutters back “Go fuck yourself” as usual. ↩

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Update: For those in a hurry, I have boiled this post and responses to it down into this handy schematic drama (which is also a pretty good précis of this old thread).

Noted obituarist and music critic Oliver Kamm is baffled by the lack of tributes to his interpretive genius:

As far as I know, no one else in print has picked up the fact that Eric Hobsbawm implicitly believes the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 was “a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion”.

No one has picked up this “fact” because it is not a fact. It is a weaselly and fantastical insinuation that purports to be confident about what Hobsbawm believes while, at the same time, daintily acknowledging (”implicitly”) that he did not actually say it. As evidence for his assertion, Kamm links (faute de mieux, since no one else has recognised the brilliance of his discovery) to his own 2004 article in the Times. There, however, he was not so circumspect, and simply stated a falsehood:

Moving to more recent panegyric, Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.” He means the 27 Soviet divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to snuff out political reform.

Uh, no, Hobsbawm doesn’t mean the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, as cannot fail to be clear to anyone who reads the chapter in question. continued »

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This is my latest rant at Comment Is Free. Faithful unspeak.net readers might find some of it tediously familiar, but I hope they will at least enjoy the Brass Eye reference.

Since its electoral meltdown, the Labour party wants to send a message. Unfortunately, Labour’s idea of “sending a message” over the past decade has not meant saying something directly in a poster campaign or a massive round-robin email. The approved manner of sending a message is through tortuous Unspeak and idiotic legislation, and the subsequent public insistence that, however boneheaded its decisions may look, they will at least “send a message”. Thus the government chirruped that its plan to “upgrade” cannabis (a curious verb, as though the public were being encouraged to buy new cannabis because it was so much better than the old stuff) would “send a message” to the yoof that drugs are bad, mmmkay? This plan, of course, depended on young people being too deliciously off their faces to notice that the government’s own scientific advice was that cannabis didn’t actually warrant the new classification. It was impossible to hear ministers defending the idea without remembering the immortal line from Brass Eye, “There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact!” continued »

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