Shocked and Awed ─ A Dictionary of the War on Terror

Part reference, part polemic, part compelling snapshot of our times, Shocked and Awed is a bristling arsenal of potent weapons: words. Fred Halliday's unorthodox dictionary defines hundreds of words and phrases used about 9/11, the wars and other events that have followed it, and ongoing issues linked to those events. He shows how the War on Terror, itself a fascinating linguistic construct, has brought us not just new words, such as "Gitmo," and new imports, such as "jihad," but also new ways of using existing language, such as "extraordinary rendition." His definitions include religious, political, and military terms; famous quotes and phrases; cultural phenomena and personalities; euphemisms of war; important Middle Eastern vocabulary; stereotypes and insults; and much more. Taken together, these words tell a new story about the global vocabulary war that is being waged around us in the twenty-first century.

Fred Halliday (1946-2010) was ICREA Research Professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies and the author of numerous books.