Weaponise! ​The meaning of 2017’s political buzzword

Sex, the NHS, Brexit, loose tal ​k – all have been ​described as ​‘weaponised’​. But what is the effect on the public when ​language is constantly on a war footing?In our embattled age, it seems everything can be turned into a weapon. The Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, has frequently accused Nicola Sturgeon of “weaponising Brexit” to break up the union. Donald Trump ’s “loose talk about Muslims”,the Washington Post reported, was “weaponised” in the courtroom battles over his travel ban. The Greenham Common protesters, Suzanne Moore wrote in this newspaper the other day,“weaponised traditional notions of femininity”. A recent New Yorker article on the jurisprudence of sexual questions was entitledWeaponising the Past. Ed Miliband, it was reported back in 2015,even planned to “weaponise the NHS” in the general election, a characteristically tin-eared piece of forlorn machismo. Other things that may be weaponised, according to the internet, include autism, Twitter, campus safe spaces, memes and the humble lentil.To weaponise something means, straightforwardly, to turn it into a weapon, but what sort of thing originally counted as weaponisable? Surprisingly, the earliest use (predating the Oxford English Dictionary entry by nearly 20 years) that comes up in a Google books search is a metaphorical one:in 1938, one William John Grant wrote in The Spirit of India of a certain group who were unable to “weaponise their strength” by ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Language Science Source Type: news