homicide bombers

At NiT, Brittney links to a few discussions about the trend in using the term “homicide bomber” in place of “suicide bomber”. In short, I think it’s stupid, but I think there’s an even more depressing undercurrent to all this.

Often times in the media and in public discourse in general, a certain word or phrase will get bandied about so often that it loses all impact on the public – it’s just something you see in the headlines enough that it’s really no longer news. I think the word “deficits” and their associated economic ills are a good example. Despite being a rather ominous thing, the actual word doesn’t have any impact on the average person anymore. I have talked about this before.

So I find myself wondering if this attempt at vocabulary revisionism isn’t an attempt to underscore the horror and brutality of these attacks – are they happening so frequently that the term “suicide bomber” is just another phrase to skim over in the daily news with a yawn? These are sad times.