Waterboarding Is Not A Virus

Waterboarding was always a stupid term for what had previously been known as the drowning torture. Waterboarding sounds like some fun form of surfing. Guess what? It isn't.

But waterboarding was the term the media adopted. Now that more information is coming out about how often and how sloppily it was used by interrogators authorized by the Bush Administration, how useless and counterproductive it was in obtaining information, and how cynically it was used to extract predetermined and false information, the word is more current than ever.

And so it is being bandied about with little regard to its gravity or to its specific meaning. Comedians like Limbaugh and Wanda Sykes use it for punch lines, and others are adopting it, mostly for its current attention-getting value, and using it where it has no specific meaning.

The worst offenders I've seen so far are environmentalists. The failure of the Obama Administration to extend habitat protection to the polar bear that includes the effects of global heating--a decision I strenuously disagree with--has been stupidly characterized (in the message line of an email from the Center for Biological Diversity) as a decision that "waterboards polar bears."

That is a misuse, though it has some metaphorical claim, since the effect of global heating is to melt the ice, and polar bears drown. But now another environmentalist headlines his piece "EPA clears waterboarding for Appalachia." The topic is mountaintop mining, a horrifically destructive practice. But it has nothing whatever to do with the drowning torture. Nothing.

Language is not a virus. Memes don't exist. Words and expressions get adopted--more swiftly now in the age of Twitter--and so they are fads for awhile, or perhaps slang, until they fade away or are adopted as useful.

But people can choose what words they use, and how to use them. The use of a word is either apt or wrong, intelligent or stupid. The use of waterboarding in these contexts is wrong and stupid. The word becomes watered down to the point that it becomes meaningless, and why? To capture somebody's roving eye in the fast and heavy competition for attention. At best, these misuses of "waterboarding" are lazy, at worst exploitative.

We ruin our language at our peril, especially now, when small ripples of information make enormous changes quickly, and as attention moves on, those changes can keep operating in unforeseen ways. When we diminish our language, we lose another tool of insight and communication, when our survival and our future depends on them.