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by Jim Evans
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Friday, 18 April 2008 |
 SMART TALK
by Dr. Winton
"Windy" Prolix
TOUR: At the Institute for
the Linguistically Impaired, tour has two related meanings for common
usage. It can mean a pleasure trip,
perhaps a tour of the attractions around Underbelly, Texas, where we can show you Summit Peak and Vista View
overlooking Glendale and the Rio
River.
Now that's a tour,
the kind of experience that tourists endure franchise food for.
We also recognize the tour
that's a guided presentation of, say, an olive pitting facility, or of a converted
shipping container the realtor is trying to sell.
In both cases, the tour
is a voluntary travel-through, often for the pleasure of learning but at least
with an expectation of getting home unharmed.
On a military tour, however, the odds of returning
unharmed are greatly reduced, and said tour
is often involuntary. The more reality
based might call it a hitch, or an assignment; the disgruntled, a
sentence. But it's not a tour, and the Institute for the
Linguistically Impaired deplores this misuse of the word.
Since they have too much
invested in always being right, military officers don't often appear for
treatment at the institute, so we helplessly watch the involuntary sense of tour grow through the decades, much as surge instead of escalation probably
will.
Tour in place of assignment, or even term, is as
cynical as enhanced interrogation
rather than torture.
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