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Calling Things by Their Right Names

By Jack M. Balkin

Kudos to William Safire for his "On Language" column today, in which he writes, unequivocally, that "if the word torture, rooted in the Latin for 'twist,' means anything (and it means 'the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce'), then waterboarding is a means of torture."

Safire also pointedly ends his column with this quote from Darius Rejali, on why "waterboarding" has recently been coined to replace "water torture," the "water cure," and the "water treatment":

"There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding" ? a word found as early as 1929 ? "they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them."

Most important, and most striking, however, is Safire's lede, in which the language maven, our most prominent popular word dissector, refuses to mince words:

Some locutions begin as bland bureaucratic euphemisms to conceal great crimes. As their meanings become clear, these collocations gain an aura of horror. In the past century, final solution and ethnic cleansing were phrases that sent a chill through our lexicon. In this young century, the word in the news ? though not yet in most dictionaries ? that causes much wincing during debate is the verbal noun waterboarding.

Full post as published by Balkinization on March 09, 2008 (boomark / email).