Sometimes you need to take a step back and look at oddities of the language. Two examples from the news have been bothering me recently.
The first is Weapons of Mass Destruction, particularly the mass part. Mass, according to the OED, is A body of coherent and (really or apparently) ponderous matter; in short, mass == matter. Any physicist will tell you that matter is a form of energy, and any good physicist will point out that the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. What does this mean? Not only do WMD not exist, the laws of physics say they cannot exist!
SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is the second odd phrase, because it’s redundant: severe and acute are synonyms. (The OED even uses severe in its definition of acute.) It’s also vague; SARS could refer to any number of bronchial diseases. Diseases like tuberculosis and leukemia and AIDS have meaningful names: tuberculosis is a disease characterized by the formation of tubercules, minute nodular lesions; leukemia is a formation from the Greek leukamie, meaning white blood; and AIDS is the descriptive Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
These examples won’t be shocking to anyone who’s at all familiar with the English language; I acknowledge that I’ve deliberately misread the adjective mass as the noun mass in the first and that no one understands the second well enough to name it more specifically (except perhaps researchers in British Columbia). The point is, we take a lot of these terms in stride without acknowledging that they’re sometimes ambiguous or unclear.
