The arms trade, and the UK’s role within it, relies on business-speak and foggy language, writes Will Self.
One of my favourite cartoons was published by the New Yorker magazine way back in the early 1980s.
It shows some soignee types consorting – their diaphanous gowns suggest that they’re divine, their cocktail glasses that they’re merely sophisticated. The location for this party is one of those chimerical realms that only the sparse pen-and-wash of a first-class cartoonist can summon up – it could be Mount Olympus, but it could just as easily be the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Anyway, a svelte, gowned female is introducing another more robust, gowned male to a third partygoer, while announcing, “I believe you know Mars, god of defence.”
Euphemism – along with its kissing cousin, jargon – is integral to modern warfare – indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a conflict in recent years that hasn’t spawned its own little lexicon of obfuscation designed to sanitise the miserable and sickening business of uniformed young men eviscerating one another with high explosive, while drawing a veil over the so-called “collateral damage” wreaked upon civilians.
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