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!
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. ↩
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. ↩
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.
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 ?
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? ↩
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 »
From excitingly named station WXYZ, which just looks like someone lazily chopped off the nearest end of the alphabet. ↩
And Cheney mutters back “Go fuck yourself” as usual. ↩
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).
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 »
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 »
Gentle readers often email me with examples of Unspeak, but I don’t find the time to post about them, and sometimes even fecklessly forget to reply. Sorry about that. I am happy to announce that there is an all-new Unspeak™ Forum™, where all are welcome to post links and comments on political language, interesting stories, or anything else at all they feel like discussing with the hydra-brained Unspeak™ Community™. Register (required to keep out the spambots, I’m afraid) and introduce yourself.
The British government, net exporter of liberty, is going to make it a criminal offence, punishable by a prison term of five years, to have in one’s possession an image or video of adults consensually engaging in a non-criminal act.
This ludicrous situation has arisen in the new Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, which outlaws the possession of “extreme pornographic images”. What is an “extreme pornographic image”? It is, of course, the Bill tells us:
an image which is both—
(a) pornographic, and
(b) an extreme image.
Don’t laugh yet. It does explain itself further. First, what is pornographic?
(3) An image is “pornographic” if it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.
(4) Where an image forms part of a series of images, the question whether the image appears to have been so produced is to be determined by reference to—
(a) the image itself, and
(b) (if the series of images is such as to be capable of providing a context for the image) the context in which it occurs in the series of images.
5 So, for example, where—
(a) an image forms an integral part of a narrative constituted by a series of images, and
(b) it appears that the series of images as a whole was not produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal, the image may, by virtue of being part of that narrative, be found not to be pornographic, even though it might have been found to be pornographic if taken by itself.
Yes: we all know that if it’s got a good story, it can’t be pornography. And if it hasn’t got a story, it must be filth. Producing something “for the purpose of sexual arousal”, without even a story, is the business of evil merchants of libido-terrorism. Photographs of American torture and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, can’t be “pornography”, because everyone knows they were produced not “for the purpose of sexual arousal”, but for shits and giggles.
Well, these things are easy to decide. But now you are chafing at the bit to know what an “extreme image” is. Is it an image with extremely high resolution, like twenty TERAPIXELS? Or is it a painting like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, shocking to all notions of art and good taste? Or is it a racist Danish cartoon? The Bill rolls imperturbably on:
(6) An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following—
(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,
(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,
(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal,
where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.
Is or appears to be real? Here is the crux. Not satisfied with outlawing the possession of images of actual sexual violence, necrophilia or bestiality, the Bill seeks to criminalize the possession of images that only simulate them. As you can imagine, I am glancing nervously at my DVD of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò right now, and wondering whether some buffoon will consider that it was produced for the purposes of sexual arousal. Bizarrely, while the Bill’s definition of “pornography” seems designed to include the “Hey, it’s art!” defence, the subsequent definition of an “extreme image” seems to shut it out. Mimesis or not, it — or rather the consumer of it — is to be stamped upon.
So we have before us another case (as in the case of simulated child pornography) of thoughtcrime. The government, it appears, seeks to criminalize the possession of images that record people merely pretending to do something it thinks shouldn’t even enter virtuous heads. It is at times like this that one remembers to be grateful that the House of Lords hasn’t yet been completely “reformed”. In its debate on the Bill last week, Baroness Miller pointed out that the Bill’s new criterion of something having been “produced for the purposes of sexual arousal” is in conflict with the established criterion of the Obscene Publications Act of whether material is “likely to deprave and corrupt”, which already causes juries “difficulty” enough.1
All this talk of sex, meanwhile, seemed to cause a rush of blood to some noble members. Lord McIntosh confessed:
I spent nearly 20 years on one Front Bench or another, and during that time I never quite had the guts to say what I really thought about these issues. I never quite had the guts to quote Kenneth Tynan, who in a review of eastern erotic art said, “All my life I have enjoyed having erections, and I have been grateful to the people and the works of art that made them possible”. Now I have said it, and no one can accuse any political party of having any involvement in that.
But he then went on to make an impeccable liberal case against the Bill:
Before I went on to any Front Bench, I was involved in the proceedings on the Video Recordings Bill 1983, which became the Video Recordings Act 1984. Three of us — Douglas Houghton, Hugh Jenkins and I — fought against that Bill all by ourselves and to no real effect. The starting point was that what we do in our homes — the possession of books or images — is no business of the Government or the courts. What we have on our bookshelves is still not their business, but something has encouraged Governments of both persuasions to think that what we may have in terms of video recordings or pornographic images on the internet, or whatever they may be, is the concern of government.
Of course, if any of those images involves the commission of a crime in their production, an existing law deals with that, which none of us can contest. This is not an argument for child pornography, for bestiality, for snuff movies or anything like that. No one is defending that and there is a perfectly good law to deal with it. Having said that, what does it matter to the Government whether what we have in our homes for our own purposes is for sexual arousal or not? What is wrong with sexual arousal anyway? That is not a matter for Parliament or government to be concerned about. I am opposed in principle to interference in the private lives of adults as long as what they do does not cause harm to anyone else, or arises from or causes any offence under criminal law.
One small victory for the critics was that Lord Hunt of the “Ministry of Justice”, defending the Bill on behalf of the government, promised to introduce a defence for images recording acts of consensual S&M, which are also criminalized by the Bill as currently drafted (clause 6(b))— but that defence, it appears, will only be available if the possessor of the image was also an actor in the image. Own a video of strangers engaged in bondage and you’re shit out of luck.
On the matter of thoughtcrime, meanwhile, Hunt would not budge an inch. The bill must criminalize simulations, rather than being limited to images that show real crimes, Hunt said, “because the material itself, which depicts extreme violence and often appears to be non-consensual, is to be deplored”. And only Big Brother the government can save us from this tsunami of depravity:
As a society we have a duty to protect people. It is appalling that this material is available and we have to do something about it.
We have to do something — anything, even if it’s passing yet another crappy piece of ill-thought-out legislation. At least, you know, it will send a message. Baroness Miller responded:
[T]he Minister is in danger of leading his Government into becoming the thought police. There is no direct connection with committing a crime.
Of course, that did not stop them with ASBOs. And, as Miller was not successful in proposing her amendments to this Bill, it seems it won’t stop them here either.
Have you got any “extreme images”, readers?
It’s interesting to note that the established criterion for obscenity is at least predicated on some notional concern for the consumer’s moral welfare, whereas the new one talks about the intention of the producer, but is really worried about the consumer’s sexual arousal. ↩
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