Word of the Day

[muninnhuginn]

Merriam-Webster's word of the day was amerce. But that's not it.

Seems like it's endgame to us.

• It's the subject line of The Wrap, from Guardian Unlimited.
  
• It's a headline in the New York Times
  
• We've mislaid another instance somewhere.
  

Well it might be fine and dandy, if flattening and poisoning a huge area of the planet and devastating the lives of those civilians to actually survive, were the end. And it won't be. Unless we really do end up exchanging nukes all round.

What are all these endgamers thinking of? Chess? We doubt it (though who are we to crow? We didn't progress beyond the Batsford volume Unorthodox Openings). More likely the flashy combat at the end of Highlander: Endgame (we're actually rather fond of the movie, despite Adrian Paul surviving over Christopher Lambert). Except it won't be like that. And the new beginnings, the children dying of childhood leukemia with no hope (assuming sanctions continue) of modern medical intervention, the babies born deformed due to chemical and radioactive contamination, the children and teenagers forced to live through this, having known only the aftermath of the last time, the people lucky (if that's the word to use) enough to survive the last time to then go through it all over again, let alone the returning combatants also suffering from the aftermath, physically and spiritually.

We thought experience had disproved the old lie of a war to end all wars and the like?

So, it's not actually endgames. Maybe amerce was apposite, though maybe the unilateral court of Bush 'n' Blair have set the fine way too high.

Comments

yes, "endgame"...

[prufrock.livejournal.com]

it's a loathsome euphemism for what those butchers are planning, and i too have noticed the sudden fashion among the B 'n' B crowd for using it. pf.

Re: yes, "endgame"...

[muninnhuginn]

Rather enjoy words metamorphosing over time, new strains appearing in a Mendelian fashion, but that kind of wholesale mutating, linguistic GM-ing, of perfectly innocuous words hurts.