Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Right after my son deployed to OIF 2, he called on the Satphone and referred to "Hajis." I asked if he knew the meaning of the word and pointed out he was insulting about a billion people. Told him he ought to forbid his Platoon using the term, period and try to get the rest of the Bn to quit. He did that, with some success -- but that was one Bn out of 12 or more...
At a different place in a different time, I once encountered a U.S. infantry battalion commander who had banned the Arabic word for "friend"--"sadiqi"--because his troops were using it perjoritively (along the lines of "gook," I suppose, in still other places and times) to describe the local friendlies and contractors.

At the time, I thought it to be a potentially futile (and Orwellian) attempt to control thought through vocabularly. Looking back, however, I have to report his order had the desired effect: It did not allow soldiers to dehumanize the very people they were there to help.

To expand on your point, then: I guess it pays off not only to recognize What the Other Guy Means by Using a Given Word, but to continually calibrate on What Your Troops Mean by Assimilating Some of the Local Terms.