Comment by helaoban
8 hours ago
It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.
8 hours ago
It SHOULD be called the Department of War, as it was originally, since it makes its function clear. We are a society that has euphemized everything and so we no longer understand anything.
It's a funny thing that the most war-loving people and the most peace-loving people both love calling it "Department of War" - just for different reasons.
But the reason for "Department of Defense" name was bureaucratic. It's also not true that DOD is hard to understand.
The Department of the Army is what was previously called the Department of War. The Department of Defense is new, dating to just after WWII.
Pedantry.
The Department of War was responsible for naval affairs until The Department of the Navy was spun off from it in 1798, and aerial forces until the creation of the The Department of the Air Force in 1947, whereafter it was left with just the army and renamed the Department of the Army. All three branches were then subordinated to the new Department of Defense in 1949, which became functionally equivalent to the original entity.
The Department of War is what it was called when it was first created in 1789 by the Congress (establishing the department and the position of Secretary of War), the predecessor entity being called the The Board of War and Ordnance during the revolution.
The Department of "Defense" has never fought on home soil. Ever.
Naming is important because it intuits what we expect to do with a thing. The Department of Defense invading Greenland is more invocative to inquiry than the Department of War invading Greenland because that's what a department of war would do.
It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that they should be putting mental effort into understanding why they're current mental model doesn't fit. It's much easier to ignore and be comfortable if there's not glaring sirens saying you've got some learning to do.
Most of us can't (or won't) be aware of everything that should be important to us, having glaring context clues that we should take notice of something incongruous is important. It's also why the Trump media approach works so well it's basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would normally side against any particular one of his actions don't listen because they agreed with some of the actions that democrats previously raised alarms about.
> It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, [...]
It's worth noting there's an overabundance of legitimate reasons people get annoyed at these two thing, making them bad examples.
Doublespeak, so to speak.