Judith Matloff considers the language journalists use when writing about military violence:
Covering conflict often entails hanging around political and military officials—at briefings, at press conferences, during embeds—and reporters can absorb the jargon without even realizing it. These sterile euphemisms are familiar to any news consumer. The sanitized and manipulative "collateral damage" refers to an unintended killing of civilians; one has to look beyond the words to photographs of massacred wedding parties to fully understand what actually happened. The phrase "smart bomb" conveys intelligence instead of carnage. My 11-year-old son was astounded to hear that "friendly fire" was not friendly at all. "You’ve got to be kidding," he nearly spat when he learned the definition: killing fellow troops by accident. "I thought it meant you shot at but didn’t hurt someone. Why don’t they just say it’s like a home goal?"
The Dish 