The argument is that using euphemisms must serve some purpose, or otherwise they would not be used.

That purpose is to hide the brutality of war, from either the writer, or the reader.

In either case, allowing to hide the brutality makes it arguably more palatable to commit it (writer) or legitimize it (reader), and therefore contributes to it.

I can’t put numbers on this, obviously, because nobody can. But just denying the argument with a sort of its-not-guns-that-kill-it’s-people-argument is intellectually dishonest.

I think you, or the original comment author, are mistaking technical language for euphemisms though and so the psychological analysis that euphemisms are hiding the brutality of war is not even wrong because there is no euphemism. As another comment points out "concrete penetrating" is a description that tells the class of weapon and the reason the weapon was chosen (to attack a target protected by concrete). The author isn't euphemisming but rather just using language appropriate to the context and the intended audience.

If it’s just language, what does “drop the building” actually mean? Last I checked, you can only drop stuff you can actually pick up. You can, however, drop things onto buildings, some of which may collapse them.

If you insist that “dropping” is for some reason preferable to “demolish” or “collapse”, say because it’s shorter or the military has trouble spelling those actual terms, I am sure you can find me a reference in non-lethal industries involved in the destruction of construction using the term. My superficial research seems to indicate that those wielding wrecking balls instead of laser-guided missiles see no need to obfuscate their doings.

"Drop" is a widely used colloquialism in demolition, to the point that it's practically a term of art. It's ubiquitous both in civilian demolition work and in the Army Corps of Engineers. In demolition work you'll hear it at least as often as "demolish". Nothing wrong with "collapse"; it just isn't used much. I've never heard anyone use "destroy" when talking about demolition.

I just searched google both for [drop building] and [drop demolish]. Neither search yielded examples for the use of “drop” in such a way. I was similarly out of luck with the Oxford American dictionary, Googl New, and Scholar. Ca to link an example?

From http://www.controlled-demolition.com/biltmore-hotel:

> precisely placed explosive charges dropped a 28-story building almost in its tracks.

> "It's the heaviest steel we’ve ever worked on," says Mark Loizeaux, of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI), Towson, Md., which dropped the brick-clad structure for contractor Wells Excavating Co., Inc., Oklahoma City.

> CDI’s detonation sequence aimed to drop the building in a southerly direction in what is called a controlled progressive collapse in order to lay out the demolished structure to ease removal of debris.

> In 1975 CDI demolished a 32-story reinforced concrete building in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the only building taller than the Biltmore to be dropped with explosives

From http://www.controlled-demolition.com/travelers-building:

> Controlled Demolition Incorporated’s team was able to complete asbestos abatement/environmental remediation, prepare the structure for implosion and drop the massive structural steel building just 2 weeks

> Controlled Demolition Incorporated's DREXS (Directional Remote Explosive Severance) System sequentially severed the 4 inch thick flanges of the buildings' support columns to drop the structure without damage to a Boston Fire Department facility just 30 feet away.

The query demolition "drop a building" yields a plethora of results.

Can you pick up a database?

Edit: to be clear, I’m against the pedantry at play here. Subject matter experts talk in their specific jargon. We do it in tech, why would the military be any different?

First, a minor point, but it's not true that "drop" refers only to things you might pick up. You could drop an egg which would break, you could drop something down a bottomless pit, you could drop a facade, etc. It's also not the case that you couldn't "pick up" a "dropped" building, either by cleaning the rubble or rebuilding it.

Second, "drop" may be colloquial but I don't see how it's disguising the action and the consequences. It seems to me there are similar objections to "demolish" - it's like a construction project, or "collapse" it's an unintentional tragedy. If I had to argue for "drop" I suspect it's advantage is that it describes how you want the building and the rubble to fall - down instead of out.

I'd be willing to consider the merits of different word choices, but what I think we should be hesitant about is drawing deep psychological conclusions from word choices that may be entirely coincidental or have a different motive than you think. E.g. "The author uses terms like 'drop' to disguise the horror of war and if such language weren't used we'd have less war." That feels like an overreach to me.

I was referring to picking stuff up before dropping them.

Not that the specific example is that relevant, as others have notice. I think it’s hard to deny that the military uses euphemisms: “soft targets”, “neutralize”, and “collateral damage” come to mind.

From there, it’s a small step to wonder what the intend may be. And even independent of intent (I could see an argument for using euphemisms with good intentions, or just to avoid very human emotions, much like medicine does), if that choice may still have the consequence of making difficult choices easier than they should be.

In any case, I was mostly just arguing that the idea that “language is meaningless, bombs kill people” is somewhere between ignorant and naive.

It's pretty hard to argue with that last sentence, but I think your armchair analysis of language used outside of your realm of experience is leading to you to take unecessary offense.

"Soft targets" include people, yes, but the term generally refers to any unhardended, unarmored, or unprotected thing.

"Neutralize" encompasses any kind of condition that removes a soldier from the battlefield, including death, injury, debilitating trauma, etc.

"Collateral damage" is similarly broad. It's any shit you didn't mean to fuck up.

No doubt these terms are used euphemistically at times. But I also can't, off the top of my head, think of any others that could directly replace them accurately and concisely, while also satisfying the demands of folks who lack the experience (or the desire perhaps) to understand their utility in context.

This is, honestly, quite ridiculous in context. It might be true that, say, someone launching an ICBM might be shielded from the horror of the violence with clinical terms. When you are in urban ground combat it's not as if you say "hmm, it makes it feel better if I think of it as only shooting the building!" You are perfectly fine with killing because YOU'RE BEING SHOT AT and you're afraid you're going to die. The correct criticism, if you're looking for one, is that Soldiers and Marines learn to put on a facade of ultraviolent aggression so as to not confront the reality, and as a result they lose perspective and maybe go too far in some cases, and that's what you need to watch for (I was a platoon leader in Iraq)

This is simply how military tactics and strategy are talked about in an academic sense. It might be weird to think that Military Science is an academic discipline when you're not used to talking about war all the time, but when you're at West Point you take these classes and this is the tone. It's because you're not going to stop every 5 minutes to reflect on those who died in combat -- that would be kind of crazy, and there are plenty of other contexts where the moral and ethical issues of war and combat are discussed in great depth.

To make an analogy, your comment would be like my reading a Computer Science paper about something technical and then commenting: "why is this person writing about technology in such technical terms? Is it because they don't want to confront the negative consequences of technology on our political and social fabric? Don't they care about the privacy issues?" It's kind of just a way to say that you wish they were talking about what YOU want to talk about.

It's not a euphemism. It's an accurate description of what matters. I would have chosen "collapse the building" or "level the building", despite being undisturbed by the death. The writer isn't about to distract from the topic at hand by going off on an opinionated tangent about death.

Wow, I wish you had written my comment. Well put!

It’s an unfortunate symptom of our times that we need to spell out every argument in minute detail, lest someone will do a bad-faith hack job willfully misunderstanding it.

They died because the military chose to level an entire building to kill a single person.

No, they demolished the building to prevent it from being re-occupied by more fighters. Remember, U.S. forces were prohibited from entering Sadr City, so they really had no other way to do so.