What's in a Name?

Two weeks sounds like a big bowl of time until you start eating it, particularly when your mental tide has ebbed to the point that the back bumpers of extravagantly insured cars start peeping above the water. I could not possibly bring myself, at my current salary of $0, to further exegesis of war and truth and all that jazz. I am delighted that the U.S. has finally gotten off its national ass to go check the closets for a couple spare boxes of shotgun shells to Ukraine, frantically fending off the Russian bear. Whether it’s too little, too late, remains to be seen, but we can leave it for now. The war isn’t going anywhere for a while.

Since we’re already talking about war, let’s talk a little bit about how they get named. I get to thinking about this sometimes, often while visiting small town monuments upon which all of America’s major wars are inscribed along with a list of citizens, the length of which is proportionate to the majorness of the war. Lately the notion has been triggered by a presumption that once we arrive at the point where U.S. soldiers are shooting at Russian soldiers, this conflict will immediately aquire the sobriquet “World War III.” Given there are something like 59 countries already contributing to the welfare Ukraine, and given that being at war with Russia more or less means you’re at war with North Korea and Iran, World War III gets the job done. But it’s a name with a specific narrative punch that may or may not prove predictive. I’m not going to make an argument either way over whether World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, but this wouldn’t be the first time that nuclear powers have tangled, and whether or not you are skeptical of the ultimate utility of mutual assured destruction, it is a barrier to be cleared. A World War III that looks like more of what we’ve already been watching for the past couple of years would not exactly be a disappointment, but it might make us think about how we name these things.

“World War” isn’t a scientific term. It’s an awkward one for historians. There have been plenty of wars that involved large numbers of countries often on multiple continents. Why was the Seven Years’ War not a world war? The conflict spanned five continents. Here in the Americas we know it as the French and Indian War, but it involved 17 nations including Great Britain, Prussia, France, Russia, Sweden, the Mughal Empire and the Iroquois Confederacy. How is that not a world war?

Conversely, World War I didn’t directly touch the Americas, and World War II just nibbled at the edges. Were they really world wars?

Of course “First World War” is a revisionist take. For twenty years after its conclusion it was simply “The Great War,” or sometimes “The World War,” though a handful of prophetic writers began appending a Roman numeral as early as 1933. When Germany crossed the Polish frontier in September of 1939, the U.S. press immediately coalesced around “World War II,” to the consternation of none other than Franklin Roosevelt, who preferred “The Survival War.” Apparently “World War II” bothered him so much that in 1942 he put the matter to a survey, which produced such Madison Avenue-ready baloney as “The War for Civilization.”

Needless to say, consensus won, but this is an impulse that the U.S. can’t seem to resist, which is why those small-town monuments often feature, alongside the Civil War, the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, the twin marketing slogans “Operation Desert Storm” and “The Global War on Terror.” I don’t expect these names to survive the century honestly. The latter is just absurd and the former sounds like a variety of Mountain Dew.

All this said, I’m a big fan of practical naming. Simply enumerating the major combatants is a pretty good policy, and the Russo-American war, if it comes, sounds simultaneously unimaginably and comfortably 18th-century-ish.

I’d intended to give a little update on the state of my language learning but I find I don’t have enough time to do the subject proper justice. Next time maybe, unless I can get back on the thematic thread I was following before the Patrick situation metastasized.

I know some of you will want to know what’s happening with that. He tried to reach me a rather large number of times, which was deeply unpleasant. I didn’t answer and I feel bad for it. But I would have felt bad had I answered so I guess that makes it even. I do intend to do something with this story—it is obvious in fact, that my on-going research into the Richard Puddlicott heist (yes the subject matter has been a secret and yes this is the artless fashion in which I choose to reveal it) will have to be shelved until further notice. I’ve been organizing all our chat logs and media; I don’t yet know what form the work will take. I have half a mind to send it to This American Life, but we’ll see. It’s going to be a while: there’s a lot to catalog and I get hives when I think about it, so be patient. 

Until next time, take care.