Language games

    I met and talked with Dr. Jeffrey Lewis (whose excellent blog on all things nuclear - www.armscontrolwonk.com - you should take a look at) when I was in Washington recently and we were talking, among other things, about euphemisms. Euphemisms abound in discussions of nuclear weapons. And that has always interested me. It reminded me of a short thing I wrote some time ago when I was thinking about the anthropology of nuclear weapons. [Someone, it seems to me, ought to approach the field of nuclear weapons as an anthropologist would. Imagine you are on an island of strangers and observe their behavior.]

    I've dug up the piece and put it on a page at right called "language games."  Please comment.

Comments

[Robert Norris]

Hugh Gusterson has approached the study of the inhabitants of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an anthropologist in a book entitled Nuclear Rites (1996).

[Russ Wellen]

Maybe the reason they talk in those antiseptic terms isn't to hide the implications of what they're weighing from themselves. Just as likely, it's to hide the heights of their bloodlust from others. Achilles writ large.