Editor’s Note: This piece was composed with AI assistance, channeling Ambrose Bierce’s voice and style to comment on contemporary events. Bierce himself wrote nothing here — the words are generated, guided by editorial direction, in the spirit of the satirical tradition he practiced. History Connected to Today’s Issues: the more things change, the more they stay the more they stay the same.
by “Ambrose Bierce,” channeled
The lexicographer’s labor is never finished. Language, like the republic it describes, corrupts by increments too small for any single citizen to notice, until one morning he wakes to find that self-defense means something his grandfather would not have recognized, and that a man may be murdered by an adjective. I offer the following supplement to my dictionary, compiled from the public statements of officials who, I am assured, mean every euphemism they utter.
SELF-DEFENSE, n.The condition of a government agent who has shot an unarmed man from a position of complete safety, and who now requires the dead man’s silence to complete the argument.
FEARED FOR PUBLIC SAFETY, n. A phrase issued twelve hours after a killing, timed to arrive after the grief but before the questions. Its grammatical subject is always the officer; its object is always the corpse.
NARCO-TERRORIST, n. A man on a boat, deceased, about whom no court has been troubled to inquire. The word does the work that evidence used to do, and does it faster.
TARGETED ENFORCEMENT OPERATION, n. A raid conducted with such precision that it regularly strikes persons other than its targets, in the manner of a marksman who insists on his skill after every miss.
DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION, n. A designation requiring no statute, no charter, and no membership rolls — only an enemy sufficiently diffuse that anyone may be discovered to belong to it, and sufficiently unpopular that no one will object on his behalf until it is his own turn.
MATERIAL SUPPORT, n.The moving of a cardboard box. See also: seventy years.
BODY-WORN CAMERA, n. A recording device deployed everywhere except the scene of the incident, owing to a shortage explained with great sincerity and renewed at every subsequent incident.
TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS, n. A legal shelter, so called because it may be withdrawn at any hour by the same hand that granted it, leaving the word protected to do decorative work only.
ANKLE MONITOR, n. A bracelet awarded to the law-abiding, distinguishing them from the merely accused by the fact that no accusation was required.
INVESTIGATION, n. A word attached to a killing to indicate that time, rather than justice, will now be permitted to pass.
ARMED CONFLICT, n.The legal condition said to exist between the United States Navy and a fishing vessel, entitling the former to a battlefield and the latter to a grave.
I am told these definitions are unfair to the officials who supply them, that context and split-second judgment must be allowed for. I allow for them gladly, in the same spirit that I allow the crocodile his tears — as a feature of the animal, not an argument against observing it closely.
— A. Bierce (channeled)
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