Going To Your Dentist About Terrorism I've come across a startling amount of linguistic relativism these days and the root of it seems to be the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, available online and on CD, which should know better. The problem is a whole lot of people are insisting that terrorists blowing themselves up in supermarkets are martyrs. It's one thing for other terrorists to allege it ... they are, after all, out to get opinion on their side. It's another thing to be able to fall back on the kind of definition gerrymandering that has occurred in the definition of martyr. 1. Eccl. a. The specific designation of honour (connoting the highest degree of saintship) for: One who voluntarily undergoes the penalty of death for refusing to renounce the Christian faith or any article of it, for perseverance in any Christian virtue, or for obedience to any law or command of the Church. A sect which regarded its distinctive principles as part of the Christian faith could apply the title, in this strict sense, to its own members who died under persecution, while by others the application would be repudiated, or only conceded ironically. Popularly, however, this sense has long tended to be apprehended as a specific use of sense 2. 2. a. One who undergoes death (more loosely, one who undergoes great suffering) on behalf of any religious or other belief or cause, or as a consequence of his devotion to some object. Const. to. 3. hyperbolically. a. One who suffers tortures comparable to those described in the legends of martyrs; a constant sufferer. Const. to (an ailment, etc.). Clearly definition 2 is a complete backflip of common sense, especially regarding what has been given usage for 2000 years. By this definition, St. Peter would have been a martyr if he had been simply jailed for a few years. More importantly, it's given the left-wing a published source of stipulating that the palestinians are indeed martyrs on the same level ... because they are suffering or dying for a cause or belief. Religion is not mentioned. Clearly palestinians aren't being persecuted because they practice Islam ... they are being shot because they keep shooting at Israeli soldiers. Yet because this cause, no matter how contrived, fits into the Oxford definition of martyrdom, we have demonstrators carrying around their children playing dead, as if they were holy relics. When I argued the point recently, one person wrote to me, "that's just your definition of martyr" ... as if the common language we share was something that could be arbitrarily decided. What's next, I asked him ... you'll call a cat a dog instead and insist it's only my definition of cat? So I am now going to call terrorism "tooth decay" instead and insist it is my valid definition. This way I can read about 'tooth decay' in the middle east every day and feel a lot better. I only hope those running the Oxford Dictionary see it the same way.