EDITORIAL

Wars often produce new words and the war against Iraq by the 'coalition of the willing' has been no exception. Perhaps the most unusual new meaning to come out of this war has been the use of embed as both a verb and a noun. As a verb, embed has been with us since the late eighteenth century, with the literal sense 'fix (an object) firmly and deeply in a surrounding mass (he had an operation to remove a dagger embedded in his chest)', and in figurative senses 'implant (an idea or feeling) within something else so it becomes an ingrained or essential characteristic of it (the Australian values embedded in Lawson's stories)'. The new military sense is closer to the literal sense of the verb than the figurative. Many reporters took up the opportunity to be located within US and British troop units, so that they could be close to the action, and they were described as being 'embedded' with these troops--though some commentators felt that this was being in bed in an even more literal sense! I have mentioned before in Ozwords a basic rule of English word formation: there is no noun that cannot be verbed and there is no verb that cannot be nouned. And so those reporters who were thus embedded were called embeds, with the stress quickly moving from the second syllable for the verb (em- bed) to the first syllable for the noun (em -bed).

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Frederick Ludowyk

Editor, Ozwords