RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: This review is made possible by a dictionary sitting beside the radio - a recommended resource for listeners dazed by the mismatch between what they're hearing and their own knowledge of the English language. Here's a tiny sample from this week's well-thumbed pages.
"Exuberance: an abundance of high spirits and good health in a person." Lexicographers will take some persuading that the word should apply - à la military analyst Duncan Bullivant on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) and other commentators - to the tendency on the part of certain US soldiers to fire bullets and cannon rounds into the heads and bodies of unarmed civilians. As documented carefully in Nassiriya by journalist Mark Franchetti in the Sunday Times, this behaviour has more to do with a deadened human spirit and decidedly dodgy mental health than their opposites. The sickening euphemism is scarcely excused by the fact that "exuberance" is employed by Bullivant and other Englishmen to advance a condescending contrast between the naïve Yanks and the "precision, guile and forbearance" of Our Boys (hard-earned in Northern Ireland, but of course).
"Accident: an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause." Bullivant again, along with Gareth O'Callaghan (2FM, Monday to Friday) and others, chose such terminology to describe the slaughter of women and children at a checkpoint near Najaf by soldiers who, we're told, were acting in a fashion consistent with their orders and with the statements from their superiors that it is becoming impossible to distinguish civilians from combatants in this conflict (funny, invader/occupiers do tend to find that). Sympathy for the dilemma of the lads involved didn't tend to extend to their victims: a commentator on 5 Live Drive (BBC Radio 5 Live, Monday to Friday) attributed the incident, like most road accidents, to driver error. Surely the guy trying to drive his family through a war zone should have known the rules of the road about how to approach an invading army's checkpoint?
"Rescue: save from a dangerous or distressing situation." The teenage Pte Jessica Lynch was certainly rescued once, by the Iraqis who plucked her from the streets of their increasingly pulverised town and brought her to their hospital to treat her gunshot wounds. But the word was used on Wednesday's Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and elsewhere only to describe the process by which she was removed from that hospital and brought to a no doubt better-equipped US field hospital. Admittedly, the term may be applicable, since Lynch could have been in a "dangerous situation" in the Saddam Hospital given the Americans' propensity for attacking such facilities.
"Humanitarian: concerned with or seeking to promote human welfare." Used repeatedly to describe: a process by which people tear each other apart to get their hands on food and water; the ambitions of a force outside Basra besieging and shelling the city; and the cargo of the Sir Galahad. Last week, BBC reporter Owen Bennett Jones steamed elatedly into Umm Qasr parroting assurances that the ship's tiny photo-op cargo fell exclusively into the "humanitarian" category. Perhaps it was such transparent PR that caused that US navy dolphin to go AWOL from mine-sweeping - whatever about humanitarian, the effort must have been insufficiently sensitive to qualify as cetaceanarian.
We count on poets to be guardians of the language, and Paul Durcan seems to believe that the best way to do that is to take it out for some vigorous exercise. His diary on Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday) featured phrases about US power that you wouldn't see, well, even in this column. In a (probably unconscious) inverted echo of a US soldier who told Franchetti "The Iraqis are a sick people and we're the chemotherapy", Durcan told of his realisation, over time, "that the cancer that was destroying the human species was in fact located in Washington".
Shifting metaphor, as Durcan does, he said "the American Empire" was "like a crazed dinosaur" that, "having devoured and spat out the Soviet Union", was now roaming the world in search of fresh meat. It was, he said, "a parody of Christian ethics", with Bush "hell-bent on crucifixion of the human family".
Finally, back to our dictionary, and back where we started, in E. "Exclusive: not published or broadcast elsewhere." Des Cahill used it early on Wednesday to describe Radio 1's coverage of Albania v Ireland. By the time he reached Pat Kenny's studio at 11 a.m., however, the word was quietly dropped, perhaps out of respect to NewsTalk's herculean (if not quite successful) efforts to match 'em in Tirana, man for man.