Saturday, October 3, 2009

Sophisticated Explosive Devices

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

George Orwell
Politics and the English Language
Essays, Knopf, Toronto, 2002, pg. 964

What is an "Improvised Explosive Device"? It's a bomb. Like the one dropped on Nagasaki, which of course was an atomic bomb, and delivered from the air, it was definitely "improvised" because it had never been tested. The technology of course was very sophisticated, but so what? The technology of "explosively formed penetrators" is also sophisticated. The whole thing is sophisticated enought to have killed 76 of the 131 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

So call rewrite. Substitute every reference to Improvised Explosive Device, or IED, with Sophisticated Explosive Device, or SEP, and see how it reads.