When teaching my students to look at bias in articles or essays, I tell them to pay close attention to diction. Word choice can alter one’s perception of a topic, idea, person, etc. The battle of word usage is most prominent in politics. For example, the only difference between the ‘Estate Tax’ and the 'Death Tax’ is the party discussing the topic. What is ‘pro-life’ exactly? Are supporters of a woman’s right to abortion ‘pro-death’ by default? How an issue is framed is often just as or more important than the content of the issue.

David Bromwich’s essay, "Euphemism and American Violence ," in last month's New York Review of Books, discusses the intentional use of euphemisms (literally 'good speak') most notably in our media to give us a sanitized view of the violence we perpetrate.

Euphemism has been the leading quality of American discussions of the war in Iraq. This was plain in the run-up to the war, with the talk of "regime change"—a phrase welcomed by reporters and politicians as if they had heard it all their lives. Regime change seemed to pass at a jump beyond the predictable either/or of "forced abdication" and "international war of aggression." Regime change also managed to imply, without saying, that governments do, as a matter of fact, often change by external demand without much trouble to anyone. The talk (before and just after the war) of "taking out" Saddam Hussein was equally new. It combined the reflex of the skilled gunman and the image of a surgical procedure so routine that it could be trusted not to jeopardize the life of the patient. It had its roots in gangland argot, where taking out means knocking off, but its reception was none the worse for that.

In addition to ‘regime change’ the most striking euphemism is the phrase ‘War on Terror’ as many have addressed in the past.

The "global war on terrorism" promotes a mood of comprehension in the absence of perceived particulars, and that is a mood in which euphemisms may comfortably take shelter. There is (many commentators have pointed out) something nonsensical in the idea of waging war on a technique or method, and terrorism was a method employed by many groups over many centuries before al-Qaeda—the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, the Irgun, to stick to recent times. But the "war on crime" and "war on drugs" probably helped to render the initial absurdity of the name to some degree normal.

We are also letting the use of words cloud even the most obvious of details. Mercenaries have become legitimated through the use of words.

A far more consequential euphemism, in the conduct of the Iraq war—and a usage adopted without demur until recently, by journalists, lawmakers, and army officers—speaks of mercenary soldiers as contractors or security (the last now a singular-plural like the basketball teams called Magic and Jazz). The Blackwater killings in Baghdad's Nissour Square on September 16, 2007, brought this euphemism, and the extraordinary innovation it hides, suddenly to public view. Yet the armed Blackwater guards who did the shooting, though now less often described as mere "contractors," are referred to as employees—a neutral designation that repels further attention. The point about mercenaries is that you employ them when your army is inadequate to the job assigned. This has been the case from the start in Iraq. But the fact that the mercenaries have been continuously augmented until they now outnumber American troops suggests a truth about the war that falls open to inspection only when we use the accurate word.

The entire essay is a worthwhile read pertaining to how diction helps constitute our thoughts much as I discussed in a former post .