Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, we read here yesterday, has been eliminated. Or, if you watched the 10 O'clock BBC news, "terminated". As the announcement was made in Arabic by Iraq's new prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the two words are presumably both attempts to translate an Arabic euphemism.
One wonders if the euphemism there is anything like the Latinate English words used by the translators; eliminate comes ultimately from a word meaning "to put beyond the threshold", that is, to kick out of the house. Terminate still means "to bring to an end" from terminus, again still a current word.
The similarity between the two translations does suggest they were both accurate. Watching the clip of Maliki announcing the "elimination" to a delighted room full of Iraqi journalists, I wondered if this was what the scene resembled in 63 BC when Cicero told the Roman forum that the "enemies of civilisation" of his own day, the Catiline conspirators, "had lived".
Killing is one of those taboo subjects that inevitably attracts euphemisms, and it is surprising how often those euphemisms become the standard term. Uccidere in Italian comes from a Latin word meaning to fall (or cause to fall). Latin itself used interficere, a word whose etymology could be interpreted as "do in". Probably the most chilling is French, whose tuer comes from tutare, a Latin word meaning "to look after", to call "tu"; a euphemism reborn in mafia films as "take care of".
The etymology of our own word "kill" is uncertain. Collins says it may in some way be related to the word "quell" - which would fit the pattern - but the OED is inclined to demur, saying that the earliest uses of "kill" are about hitting violently (without necessarily ending the life). Perhaps "kill" is a rare instance of a straight-talking word for it. As before, I would love to hear from readers with knowledge of more interesting languages; does the Farsi word for kill also mean "have a nice little chat"? Does Estonian use a word which once meant "pickle"?
Meanwhile, I'd like to know if anyone else is worried, now that "eliminate" means "bomb into smithereens", and now that the police are less reticent than they once were about using guns, by their frequent wish "to eliminate people from their enquiries"?
