journal article
What message does 'send a message' send?
Abstract
The violent acts of post-modern war are sometimes represented as long-distance communication. This paper examines the phrase send a message and others like it when used to refer to bombings, firing missiles, shooting civilians, etc. The metonymic reduction of killing and destroying to communication promotes message-sending as the single goal of a military enterprise. We provide relevant historical, cultural and political contexts that account for this increasingly prevalent framing: the imperatives of justifying aggressive war in a Post-Nuremburg international legal order, the emergence and intensification of "message culture", and the increased strategic importance of "perception management" and "information warfare". The paper includes a richly illustrated analysis of the metonymic structure of send a message and its relationship to the common, well-studied metaphor for communication, "the conduit". We argue that the use of send a message to describe acts of violence does more than simply euphemize: it positions the message-senders as rational agents engaged in communicative action, and it displaces responsibility for suffering onto those who "fail to get the message". © John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Author keywords
euphemism, metaphor, metonymy, political discourse, propaganda, rationality, rhetorical displacement, war