>>Still, it is only a symptom. Whenever I saw language manipulated, there was a manipulator with an agenda completely outside of the linguistic area. The language is just a tool. And the whole PC speech is just an excuse for not really doing the right things. It gives polite names to real problems, and serves just as a pretext for not doing a thing about them.
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>Some of my favorites:
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>hobos, bums -- homeless
>swamp -- wetlands
>jungle -- rain forest
>criminal -- victim of some childhood or fetal malady like parental alcoholism

Back in the sixties, it became popular to steal cars for a night ride and leave them anywhere. The trouble was that when they caught the thie... crimi... perpet... perps, OK it's called perps now, they often turned out to be prominent politicians' children. So the press was told to downplay the phenomenon, and they invented the expression "borrowing a car", or if they were sure that nobody important was involved, "unauthorized borrowing of a car".

They pretty much stopped it only when the important kids started dying in stolen car crashes, and when there were enough cars around, so that there was a used cars market. Until then, it was impossible to sell a stolen car - anyone bying a car without paying months in advance and visiting the dealer (which was usually an outpost of the manufacturer, yes - the factory which made Yugos) a dozen times would be extremely suspect.

Or, in Croatian and Bosnian wars, you didn't hear of any front. Nope - it was always "ratište", which can be translated as "war grounds". Also, nobody was ever surrounded. They were "in encirclement".

Anything that will create confusion is welcome. For instance, what's a troop? Dictionaries say it's
1. a group of soldiers
2. a cavalry unit
3. a unit of girl or boy scouts
4. an orderly crowd

So, by all definitions, it's a group. When they say "3.000 American troops"... how many soldiers is that?