On Language; Balloon Goes Up on War Words
BY WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: February 3, 1991
SECRETARY OF STATE James A. Baker 3d called Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador, into his office and informed him: "The balloon is going up. This is your notification." And so a piece of military slang from World War I was used to carry out a formal agreement of notification before an attack was launched on Iraq from United States bases in Saudi Arabia.
The balloon in question was set aloft by British artillerymen in 1915 to notify gunners along the line to commence firing; the easily seen visual signal was more reliable than rudimentary methods of courier or telephone (although the sound of one gun might have been a sufficient signal to the other artillery teams). The phrase was adopted by the military in the United States and was extended to any signal of the beginning of any enterprise, action or excitement: advertising executives liked to refer to a planned start of a campaign with a crisp " The balloon goes up next Monday."
Artillery in the war on Iraq also appears in an abbreviation used by airmen: viewers heard debriefing pilots say triple A , or A.A.A., which means "antiaircraft artillery," in reference to cannons and machine guns but not surface-to-air missiles, or SAM's. Missiles are frequently acronymed; the TOW stands for "tube-launched, optically traced, wire-guided," the SLAM stands for "standoff land attack missile," and the Iraqi FROG stands for "free rocket over ground." The missile that resisted the trend toward acronyms is the Tomahawk , from the Algonquian for "tool used for cutting or chopping." (Scud is not an acronym, but a NATO code word for the Russian missile.)
The war itself has not been named; that may have to wait until its end. (World War I, known at the time as the Great War , was not numbered until the onset of World War II; the comedian Sid Caesar, playing on the anachronism, did a skit of a doughboy in a tin helmet who shouted, "World War I is over!") It cannot be "the Kuwaiti war," though some called the day the balloon went up, Jan. 16, K-Day , on the stretched analogy of D-Day . The usual method of naming a regional war by using the names of its participants does not apply: this is not the Iraqi-Multinational Force War because that is too mouth-filling, and because the allied side has not settled on the coalition (as used by the White House) or the allies (as used by most newscasters).
The hot word at the start of the allied bombing was decimate : our side's aircraft was hailed far and wide on the air and in print for "decimating the enemy air force." Walter Cronkite on CBS corrected a colleague's use of the verb, which means "reduce by one-tenth," originally Latin for "kill every tenth man as punishment for mutiny"; sloppy writers use it as a confused intensifier after using devastate , which hardly needs emphasis. In time, unless purists persist, decimate will come to mean "destroy a large part of."
Briefingese soon became the language of military-civilian communication. Mission , in its old sense of "a single attack by a single plane," was replaced by the French-derived sortie , from sortir , "to go out," first used in this sense in a 1918 book, "En l'Air"; pilots could claim 20 sorties, leaving mission to a more strategic sense of "military or diplomatic goal."
French also triumphed in the briefing by Air Force Lieut. Gen. Chuck (Charles) Horner. He said, "In many cases, though, when there are ground forces deployed, you have them in deep revetments and bunkers." A revetment is "a protecting embankment or wall made of sandbags"; it comes from revetir , "to reclothe," the sense extended to the protection of sand-clothed positions. The general paired this noun with the more familiar bunker , an 1839 noun from the Scottish bonker , "chest, box."
Even after being hit by Iraqi missiles, Israel was asked to maintain a low profile ; this was synonymous with lie low , and though no dictionary I can find cites a military origin, I speculate that it originated in the description of tanks; a tank with a low profile is set low to the ground and more difficult to hit. (Lexicographical fame awaits the finder of an early military citation for this phrase.)
Euphemism is almost as central to briefingese as acronymism. Avoidance of collateral damage means "trying not to kill civilians"; collateral means "side by side; parallel." Targeting is used as a kind of euphemism for "aiming at," which is not such a terrible phrase, yet President Bush, when asked if we were trying to bomb the person of Saddam Hussein, fell back on the boilerplate "We are not targeting any individual." This is because of the policy against assassination.
The euphemism for bomb is ordnance , a newer spelling of ordinance , a word meaning "command; directive; law." Without the i , ordnance is a general term for weaponry, but is used when bomb, rocket or napalm would seem indelicate. Thus, Gen. Colin L. Powell in a briefing: "The aircraft got to its target, delivered its ordnance , and returned."
Reporters like the term carpet bombing , a dysphemism for "bombing in a close pattern to destroy a large area rather than specific targets." (A dysphemism , obviously, is the opposite of a euphemism.)
"I don't know if the bogie was chasing him," said Capt. Steve Tate, an American pilot, "but I locked him up , confirmed he was hostile and fired a missile." This bogie means "an enemy aircraft," but bogie can also be "an unidentified aircraft or a suspicious blip on a radar screen"; to lock on is to fix a weapon on a target through electronic means. This can happen in a fur ball , meaning "dogfight," or more generally, the hectic tangle of aerial combat.
War also churns up old phrases. Marlin Fitzwater, the President's press secretary, said just before the Jan. 15 deadline that any period Saddam Hussein's forces remained in Kuwait after that was on borrowed time . This was first spotted in an 1854 variant in Notes and Queries, quoting an 81-year-old Yorkshireman: "I'se livin' on borrowed days"; the English Dialect Dictionary reported this 1898 use in Lincolnshire: "A man who lives on borrowed time lives on trespass-ground." It was popularized in American by Raymond Chandler, the mystery writer, in the 1939 novel "The Big Sleep" and by the movie "On Borrowed Time" that same year. It means "an unexpected extension of one's life."
Finally, Zulu. This name of a South African tribe is used by military men to stand for the letter Z , and -- for no known reason -- the letters BZ are used to transmit a message meaning "job well done." This is then extended to the phrase "Bravo Zulu." To the military, Zulu has a second meaning: Greenwich mean time, or G.M.T. When it is 7 P.M. on the East Coast of the United States, and 3 the next morning in Kuwait, in Great Britain, where time begins, it is 0000 Zulu .