🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <21446@skye.dcs.ed.ac.uk>, cc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Chris Cooke) writes:
|> Hmm - it seems that North Americans use the word "terrorist" in a totally
|> different way to the way it's used here in the UK.  Here, it generally
|> means "violent political murderer with no conscience".

No, that's pretty much what it means today to the average North
American person on the street, too.  The people quoting from Webster's
are missing the point.  Instead of freely admitting that their
description of a computer manufacturer as a terrorist organization is
hyperbolic rhetoric (and mind you, I have nothing against rhetoric),
they trot out outdated definitions in an attempt to lend further
weight to their argument.

Dictionaries are updated notoriously slowly; I would expect that any
dictionary which has been edited in the last few years would include
some mention of violence and political agenda in its definition, since
that is the commonly accepted connotation today.  Ignoring this
reality is silly.

|> I'd guess the
|> difference comes from the fact that this sort of activity is much less
|> common in North America.  Anyway, to British ears it's rather upsetting
|> to hear the word debased by being used casually to refer to non-violent
|> non-murderers who happen to be nasty in some other way.

Points well taken, in my opinion.

-- Russell S. Finn
rsfinn@lcs.mit.edu