Gotta admire those Marines
It’s somewhat old news, but I only recently went over the two latest issues of World Wide Words, and saw this lovely bit. I probably wouldn’t have picked on this one if it didn’t involve the Marines, but having a friend who’s a JAG addict, and so turning from a sporadic to a regular viewer myself, I tend to pick on anything amusing involving the US Navy or Marines…
This is an official Marine Corps release announcing a training mission on Wake Island.
And there are several problems with it…
According to the Marines, Wake island is uninhibited. Although maybe they got confused and meant uninhabited. Could be. If you want to run training with missiles and explosives, and choose a small island with nothing much but and old and abandoned military base, it makes sense. Except that the island have about 200 residents1, civilian contractors for the US military. That doesn’t quite fit the definition of uninhabited. I’m sure if during training a Stinger missile kills some of these people, a claim of "They weren’t there. The island is uninhabited." won’t convince anyone…
But then again, they couldn’t have meant uninhibited as well. It’s not as if the people there run around naked and have wild orgies all day, or whatever. It’s not even some indigenous tribe. They’re Americans brought there by the USAF years ago. And have reportedly not descended into barbarism…
And if this poor choice of words isn’t bad enough, according to one Maj. Tracy L. Peacock “The importance of this training cannot be understated”. Which should make about anyone wonder why bother, no?
Maybe the Marines should supply their forces a few less Stingers and a few more dictionaries. At least to those who are expected to interact with the media…
1. Which is agreed upon not only by those residents, but also by the official CIA world factbook, and the Wikipedia entry. Which I only bother mentioning because, well, if you’re the sort of person who really doesn’t trust governments, but do trust "the people", don’t bother, as the relevant part from Wikipedia seems directly copied from the CIA. Or at least I assume it’s not the other way around ;-)
November 9th, 2004 at 11:56 EET | Categories: Language |
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