"We frequently call them insurgents," US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a news conference late last year. "I'm a little reluctant to, for some reason. They're against a legitimate government."
General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at Rumsfeld's side, told the reporters that US, Iraqi and coalition forces were "taking cities from the -- I have to use the word `insurgent' because I can't think of a better word right now .... " Rumsfeld quickly put in, "Enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government -- how's that?"
Insurgent, from the Latin insurgere, "to rise up," means "a rebel, one who revolts against an established government."
The insurgent in rebellion does not have the status of a belligerent, rooted in Latin for "waging war," and thus does not have the protections in law of a member of a state at war.
Why, then, was Rumsfeld eager to get away from the term insurgent?
One reason, I think, is that the word has gained more of a political connotation than a legal one in the US; it is often applied to a group seeking to oust the leadership of a political party or a union, and insurgents in that context can refer to admirable "underdogs" in a struggle against the established order or entrenched leadership. Another reason: It unifies disparate elements into an "insurgency."
The day after that news conference, US President George W. Bush delivered a speech to the Naval Academy defining the enemy in Iraq as "a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists."
Gone was insurgents; in addition, a previous category of "Saddam loyalists" was shortened to Saddamists because loyalty, even to a tyrant, can be seen as an attribute.
In the Bush lexicon, rejectionists are mainly resentful Sunnis who can be brought into the Iraqi democratic fold; Saddamists are the tyrant's favorites "who still harbor dreams of returning to power;" and terrorists, a term from the French Revolution, are al-Qaeda "foreigners who are coming to fight freedom's progress in Iraq."
By refusing to accept the lumping of the three disparate groups into an insurgency, the Bush administration hopes to publicly separate the most violent factions from the more reachable current rejectionists.
In wartime, words are weapons; we have seen how Israelis and Palestinians are highly sensitive to connotations in their conflict.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preferred to refer to land in dispute west of the Jordan River by biblical names: Judea and Samaria, evoking Hebrew origins; Israeli diplomats long tried "administered territories." Palestinians call it the West Bank and have won that terminological battle.
On another word-war front, the construction within the West Bank to protect Israelis from rocket attacks and penetration by suicide bombers is called "the wall" by Palestinians intending to evoke memories of the cold war's hated Berlin Wall.
Israelis counter by calling it "the fence," a less onerous and more familiar description of a line of separation, recalling to Americans the Robert Frost poetic line "Good fences make good neighbors." (In fact, it is both fence and wall, depending on the place.)
After perusal of thesauri, the Bush administration adopted the undeniably accurate word barrier, which has been accepted as neutral by much of the news media and stirs no objection by Israel.
TO IR- IS HUMAN
The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, Steven Erlanger of the Times reported, noted that more than half the violent deaths in areas controlled by the Palestinian authority were from gunshot wounds caused by other Palestinians; the group deplored the authority's "irresponsiveness to the civil unrest in Gaza and the West Bank."
We will now veer from Mideastisms to deal with an English prefix.
That was the first time I had seen irresponsiveness. Although the noun can be found in some dictionaries and a few hundred times in a search-engine roundup, it is rarely used.
Even the adjective from which it is back-formed -- irresponsive -- is not part of our working vocabularies, as most of us prefer near synonyms like "sullen, close, tight-lipped" or choose phrases like "lack of response" or "failure to react." You can find unresponsive, but thereby hangs a tale:
That got me wondering about "ir-" words, from irresponsible to irreverent, and irrespective to irrational. There's no doubt about the meaning of the prefix "ir-"; it means "not." Why, then, don't we use the standard prefixes that turn around a word's meaning, like "in-" or "un-"?
The reason is that language is created to fit the mouth. It is easier to pronounce irresolute than inresolute or unresolute, which is why those clunkier forms never got off the ground. Somewhere in the mist of early mouthings, English speakers found the "n" uncomfortable before words beginning with "r."
So -- why not scrap the "inr," with its two separate sounds, and go with a simple "ir-"?
In most cases we dropped the "n" of "in-", leaving only the "i," pronounced "ih." Then, because spelling is the handmaiden of pronunciation, when it came to writing down the way the word sounded, we decided to double the "r."
Who is this mysterious "we" telling us what sounds to elide and how to spell them?
It is the native speaker -- our malleable paramour, Norma Loquendi -- who makes changes in language to make it easier to communicate, irregardless of the strictures of formalistic word mavens.
And what of irregardless -- as so many readers ask, is that a word?
The opening "ir-" means "not" or "without" and the closing -less also means "without," which turns the locution into arrant nonsense.
First cited in Harold Wentworth's dialect dictionary in 1912, irregardless was probably intended to be a joke, and the deliberate mistake is today used with humorous intent, although some don't get the joke and make the mistake.
Because it is mainly a jocular word, the answer is yes, irregardless is a word, and that is why lexicographers put it in dictionaries with a rolling of the eyes and a warning not to take it seriously.
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