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WORDPLAY: HOW HOLOCAUST INFLAMED OUR LANGUAGE
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
Feb 17 2015
Books
David Astle
Holocaust caused an unholy row in Parliament this month. Prime
Minister Tony Abbott summoned the noun to describe Labor's lollygagging
over submarine contracts: "There was a holocaust of jobs in defence
industries under member opposite."
To be fair to the PM, he promptly withdrew his remark, apologising for
any offence. Going by the media meltdown, that offence was palpable.
Forums erupted, intensified no doubt by the recent anniversary of
the Auschwitz liberation, some 70 years ago.
While the rhetoric was gauche, the analogy regrettable, the same gaffe
has lent us a chance to delve deeper into the word, to understand
how it's come to be such a sacrament.
Say the word in isolation, and almost every listener will link
holocaust to the murder of six million Jews during World War II. Even
without a capital H, that brutality has become the word's foremost
association.
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Dictionaries, however, tend to offer the older definition first.
Originally holocaust implied a burnt offering, deriving from Greek
where holos means whole, and kaustos is a cousin of kauein - to burn,
our source of caustic and cauterise. A Bible translator named William
Tyndale hoisted the word into prominence in 1526.
The verse in focus was Mark 12:33. In the King James Version of 1611,
the wording went like this: "... and to love [his] neighbour as
himself is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." Yet
Tyndale lent the Sadducee's remark a more purple shade, replacing
burnt offerings with holocausts.
In tragic irony, Tyndale himself was burnt at the stake for opposing
Henry VIII's divorce in 1535, the word he'd revived from obscurity
going on to thrive for centuries to come. First as a sacrifice, and
later a widespread massacre. Winston Churchill himself described the
Armenian genocide of World War I as an "administrative holocaust" -
in 1915.
A decade later, F. Scott Fitzgerald commandeered the word in The
Great Gatsby. Without spoiling the plot, a certain body is found in
the garden, one more death to add to the toll - "and the holocaust
was complete".
World War II changed the world, and the word, indelibly. What entered
the fray as a noun, fast emerged as a global lament. Auschwitz survivor
Elie Wiesel is deemed the writer to establish the association in
1963. Before then, the Jewish label for the Nazi savagery oscillated
between the Shoah (calamity) and the Churban (destruction).
Yet affirming the name took some time. The biggest obstacle was
the notion of atonement that underpinned the sacrificial sense. But
for Wiesel and others, the emphasis lay on those sacrificed, rather
than the Nazis, or so-called sacrificers. Come 1981, the grim nuance
arrived in mainstream dictionaries, its capital H one more tribute
to the victims.
Holocaust is not alone among nouns in possessing historical
sensitivity. Ground zero and pogrom have a similar potency, apartheid
and crucifixion, just as troubles with a capital T is a sacred
utterance in Belfast. Though for scale alone, holocaust has entered
its own exclusivity zone, as Mr Abbott was quick to see.
In our age of rage, as Richard King identifies our era in his book On
Offence, the sanctity surrounding the h-word has been a more recent
shift. I say this since three previous politicians - John Howard,
Bob Brown and Paul Keating - all enlisted the word separate from its
Jewish context, earning far less reproof. As a litmus test, Abbott's
cheap shot was conclusive.
Not that the PM was nimble in his retraction, replacing holocaust with
a word as likely to rile a different audience. By strict definition,
decimation means the killing of one in ten, just as Romans murdered
a tenth of mutineers, or enemy prisoners. Unless Labor's lull over
submarines wiped out 10 per cent of our defence forces, then the
Pedant Union demands an immediate correction.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/wordplay-how-holocaust-inflamed-our-language-20150217-13g2o5.html
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
Feb 17 2015
Books
David Astle
Holocaust caused an unholy row in Parliament this month. Prime
Minister Tony Abbott summoned the noun to describe Labor's lollygagging
over submarine contracts: "There was a holocaust of jobs in defence
industries under member opposite."
To be fair to the PM, he promptly withdrew his remark, apologising for
any offence. Going by the media meltdown, that offence was palpable.
Forums erupted, intensified no doubt by the recent anniversary of
the Auschwitz liberation, some 70 years ago.
While the rhetoric was gauche, the analogy regrettable, the same gaffe
has lent us a chance to delve deeper into the word, to understand
how it's come to be such a sacrament.
Say the word in isolation, and almost every listener will link
holocaust to the murder of six million Jews during World War II. Even
without a capital H, that brutality has become the word's foremost
association.
Advertisement
Dictionaries, however, tend to offer the older definition first.
Originally holocaust implied a burnt offering, deriving from Greek
where holos means whole, and kaustos is a cousin of kauein - to burn,
our source of caustic and cauterise. A Bible translator named William
Tyndale hoisted the word into prominence in 1526.
The verse in focus was Mark 12:33. In the King James Version of 1611,
the wording went like this: "... and to love [his] neighbour as
himself is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." Yet
Tyndale lent the Sadducee's remark a more purple shade, replacing
burnt offerings with holocausts.
In tragic irony, Tyndale himself was burnt at the stake for opposing
Henry VIII's divorce in 1535, the word he'd revived from obscurity
going on to thrive for centuries to come. First as a sacrifice, and
later a widespread massacre. Winston Churchill himself described the
Armenian genocide of World War I as an "administrative holocaust" -
in 1915.
A decade later, F. Scott Fitzgerald commandeered the word in The
Great Gatsby. Without spoiling the plot, a certain body is found in
the garden, one more death to add to the toll - "and the holocaust
was complete".
World War II changed the world, and the word, indelibly. What entered
the fray as a noun, fast emerged as a global lament. Auschwitz survivor
Elie Wiesel is deemed the writer to establish the association in
1963. Before then, the Jewish label for the Nazi savagery oscillated
between the Shoah (calamity) and the Churban (destruction).
Yet affirming the name took some time. The biggest obstacle was
the notion of atonement that underpinned the sacrificial sense. But
for Wiesel and others, the emphasis lay on those sacrificed, rather
than the Nazis, or so-called sacrificers. Come 1981, the grim nuance
arrived in mainstream dictionaries, its capital H one more tribute
to the victims.
Holocaust is not alone among nouns in possessing historical
sensitivity. Ground zero and pogrom have a similar potency, apartheid
and crucifixion, just as troubles with a capital T is a sacred
utterance in Belfast. Though for scale alone, holocaust has entered
its own exclusivity zone, as Mr Abbott was quick to see.
In our age of rage, as Richard King identifies our era in his book On
Offence, the sanctity surrounding the h-word has been a more recent
shift. I say this since three previous politicians - John Howard,
Bob Brown and Paul Keating - all enlisted the word separate from its
Jewish context, earning far less reproof. As a litmus test, Abbott's
cheap shot was conclusive.
Not that the PM was nimble in his retraction, replacing holocaust with
a word as likely to rile a different audience. By strict definition,
decimation means the killing of one in ten, just as Romans murdered
a tenth of mutineers, or enemy prisoners. Unless Labor's lull over
submarines wiped out 10 per cent of our defence forces, then the
Pedant Union demands an immediate correction.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/wordplay-how-holocaust-inflamed-our-language-20150217-13g2o5.html