Shocked and Awed

Far more than just a military conflict, the `War on Terror' has been a struggle over values and meanings, a desperate contest for hearts and minds in which language has become its battlefield. In this highly original book, Fred Halliday takes us on a tour of this new war-zone, its artillery and trenches, minefields and booby-traps.

Drawing on years of painstaking collation, Halliday shows how the `War on Terror' has brought us not just new words and acronyms, such as `Gitmo' and `IED', and new imports, such as `jihad' and `Salafi', but also new - and distinctly sinister - ways of using existing language, such as `extraordinary rendition' and `enhanced interrogation techniques'.

Halliday chronicles the use and development of all the neologisms produced by the `War on Terror', and examines the underlying dynamics driving them. He argues that the increased use of everyday words from Arabic, for example, reflects not only increased interest in the Arab world but also hostility to it, a sense that its references points are `untranslatable' in our own culture. Scanning the pock-marked semantic landscape of the post 9/11 world, he uncovers hidden twists of phrasing and word associations which in themselves tell a story about the violent clash of ideologies that has marked the opening of the 21st century.

Part indispensable reference, part polemic, part entertaining snapshot of our times, Shocked and Awed is a bristling arsenal of the 21st century's most potent weapons: Words.

Fred Halliday, who died in April 2010 aged 64, was Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. He was familiar with 10 languages, including Arabic and Persian, and published over 20 books, including Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (I.B. Tauris).