Medal Of Honor Warfighter Sound Problem
Magdalena Liendo
He continues in the same general vein for few dozen clauses, and throughout his review, he makes a point of emitting a loud fake laugh whenever he mentions the game's name. But I thought I'd stop with his question "Why didn't anyone involved in its development put their hand up?", because even though he means this to be a rhetorical question, in fact it has an easy answer.
The reason that no one involved in the game's development objected to the word "warfighter" is that the U.S. Defense Department has used "warfighter" as a standard term for military personnel since the late 1980s or early 1990s: Thus Earl L. Wiener et al., Eds. Human Factors in Aviation, 1988:
I think Bill was too hasty in announcing the failure of "warfighter(s)". A search of the current DARPA web site, for example, turns up 39 pages with "warriorwarriors", compared to 226 pages with "warfighter(s)". I haven't done a systematic check, but I have the impression that warfighter has an implication of direct involvement in combat which warrior sometimes lacks. An interesting recent illustration of the available options can be found in Maureen Dowd, "Listen to McCain (Mrs.)", NYT 12/4/2010:
I fail to see what objection (linguistic) anyone could have to this word. It distinguishes someone who fights in war from those who fight for other reasons or causes (boxing, cancer, crime, etc.). And, as noted, it encompasses the various military branches.
On a related topic, it seems to me that the term 'warrior' has gained popularity of late (recency allusion?). It seems to carry a more positive connotation that words like 'soldier' and the like. I think it also implies that the person has served in combat.
Because it's a long compound piece of jargon to replace words that have long established themselves in the English language. Soldier or warrior work just fine, unless your dialect has specialized those words until they can't be used for the general meaning.
Calling a soldier a "warrior" sounds a little odd to me personally, but I can see how it could have positive connotations since it resonates with some ancestral, pre-Roman concept of an idealized fighter.
I wonder: If someone who is serving actively in the US Army but has spent an entire career pushing a pencil around in the Pentagon can be called a soldier, can that same person be called a warfighter/warrior?
I'm a bit disappointed that you, as a linguist, just accept the marines' (i.m.o. chilish) insistence on that the common word 'soldier' doesn't apply to them. This entry and Croshaw's post are good examples of how it prevents the use of language that would be natural and understood by everyone, and forces the use of clunky nelogisms that do nothing but confuse and annoy. The marines' prescribism ought to be far more worthy of a language log entry than the fact that somebody is rightfully annoyed by one of its consequences.
Does "warrior" connote primitivism? Sometimes. My sense is that when American high schools went politically correct, those that called their athletic teams "Warriors" always changed if they had identified that term with Native Americans (tomahawk logo, etc.) but did not necessarily do so otherwise.
I think we've been leaving out the context of Mr Croshaw's remarks. Within the walls of the Pentagon, "warfighter" may not have sounded ridiculous, since "soldier" there means "one who is committed to a career as a uniformed member of the United States Army" (and is therefore either a skilled bureaucrat or a fool) and "warrior" means "a character in a movie where they wear loincloths and fight with swords." In that social context, "warfighter," like "muddy-boot soldier" within the Army specifically, is a pious way of referring to the people who actually set out to engage the enemy and destroy him, as opposed to the people who are likeliest to be promoted. That piety is what gives "warfighter" the edge over "combatant." Not only is "combatant" a relatively colorless term, it is also well-established in legal language. So any emotional force it may have is likely to be colored by the idea of legal judgment, not uncritical reverence.
In Mr Croshaw's world of gaming, the distinctions have a very different force. The guys with loincloths and swords are very much of a piece with the masters of the contemporary battlefield, while bureaucratic skill is a topic for peace-minded games based on Facebook. And game developers are out of line if they delve to deeply into legalisms; in a properly functioning MMRP community, legalities are to left to the users to work out.
The Safire piece mentioned by fev above says "serviceperson" is the preferred term of art; politicians seem to prefer "service-men and -women" (your hyphenation may vary). Safire also says an "airman" may be female. Not that Safire is authoritative. mind.
The US "tomb of the unknowns" isn't restricted to soldiers; airman Michael Joseph Blassie was disinterred not because he wasn't a soldier but because he wasn't unknown. (Hope my negation polarity is correct there.)
This isn't even the first game with "warfighter" in the title. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter came out in 2006, and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 came out in 2007. I've never heard anyone laugh about or object to those names.
This is reminiscent of another bit of peeving among gamers. When the people behind the game Dungeons & Dragons named one type of character a "Battlemind", many people thought it was ridiculous and mockingly renamed it "Fightbrain", although it turns out that "battlemind", too, is part of U.S. military jargon. The point Acillius made about context applies here, too; outside of Pentagon discussion of combat resilience, "Battlemind" sounds ridiculous, complete inappropriate for games about fantasy warriors.
"Warfighter" may well be standard Defense Department terminology, but to me it evokes Geoff Pullum's notion of "nerdview": that is, just because it's the internally-used technical term doesn't mean it's suitable for general use. (Which isn't quite what Geoff means by it, but as I say, it's evocative of it.)
The problem with "warfighter" is that it has been a long time since the U.S. has engaged in war. It once had a War Department. Now that it has no "War Department", but only a "Defense Department", the term might be "defendist", "defensialist", "defendante".
Yahtzee does say in his postscript text quip (which as always appears below the "fair use" bolierplate) "And yes I know Warfighter is the name of a real life military communications system but that is somehow even more laughable".
Another problem with "warfighter" is its lack of euphony. Wharfedale is a lovely place, has been for centuries, yet no one, to my knowledge, has ever written a poem about it. And why not? Maybe because you stumble when you have to enunciate that "f" so soon after a "w."
As far as I know, Yahtzee is a British man working for an Australian publication (he may well reside in Australia). So while he might be unaware of the context in which an American game developer might have no problem using 'warfighter', there is the issue of what that sounds like in other countries, not to mention the point Acillus makes about the gaming culture. It wouldn't surprise me to find them, but are there equivalent issues with terminology for the UK/Australia armed forces?
I know something about this! I work with engineers on military contracts, doing documentation work, and we've JUST been given new rules this year. It used to be that "warfighter" was standard, but they have just decreed that "soldier" is the new standard. I don't know why. I know they avoided using "soldier" because of the many other terms for people in the military, but I don't know why they changed their minds, except that perhaps "soldier" has become more of a generalized term in people's minds?
I was really disappointed about the change because I was looking forward to working "warfighter" into as many conversations as possible ("yes, this is the most convenient solution, but is it good for the WARFIGHTER?")
I think that part of the reason this sounds ridiculous is because it is the latest game in the Medal of Honor series, which according to Wikipedia has more than a dozen entries, including "Medal of Honor: Frontline", "Medal of Honor: European Assault", "Medal of Honor: Infiltrator", etc. They're ALL about warfighters, but they usually have a somewhat more specific and evocative title. That the next in the series should simply be "Warfighter" does invite speculation that the level of inventiveness (or just availability of fresh angles) has dropped, e.g.:
Maybe because "seaman" denotes a fairly specific and rather low-level position, in the terms "able seaman" and "able-bodied seaman," while an admiral, or anyone who serves under him, can be called a sailor.
The fact that "seaman" is a homophone for "semen" might be a significant factor in the change. Compare the replacement of "ass" with "donkey" and "cock" with "rooster" in modern standard English, and the disappearance of the word "coney" (originally pronounced the same as "cunny").
The term "seaman" has not been replaced. The lowest ranks in the US Navy still have this word in their names, as the lowest ranks in the US Air Force have "airman" and the lowest ranks in the Army and the Marine Corps have "private".
Air Force Doctrine Document 1: Airman. The term Airman has historically been associated with uniformed members of the US Air Force (officer or enlisted; regular, reserve, or guard) regardless of rank, component, or specialty.
"Warfighter" feels silly to me, maybe because of the redundant redundancy of it all. I mean, "warfighter" as opposed to what? Warsleeper? Warartist? Wargoofer? To an amateur who's neither a gamer nor a military-whatever, there's a sense of trying too hard in that word. It's as if "fighter" was too plain, so someone thought they'd kick it up a notch to fightfighter.
Is "warfighter" in the defense industry a word that refers only to people who could potentially be in combat, as opposed to the 90% of the armed forces who are involved in support activities? Or does it mean anyone in uniform?