You need to be careful with your words and use them as accurately as possible. Recently I witnessed a moving scene in the Gávea district of Rio. A thin, ragged boy of five or six asked a welldressed lady leaving the supermarket full of bags and said, “Can you buy me a snack, aunt?” I haven’t eaten in two days.”
He didn't earn money to eat, but something even more valuable, a lesson that will stay with him for the rest of his life perhaps a short measure of time, patience. “Pay me, no! You don’t start a sentence with an unstressed oblique pronoun,” the woman replied before continuing on her straight and powerful path.
Another example of sloppy language that the woman could point out: She calls what is happening in Gaza a genocide. It appears that, in addition to many White House sensitivities and policies, this also runs counter to the legal definition of the word. But there are alternatives.
For example, one might describe Israel's methodical massacre of Palestinian civilians as a “bloodbath.” It is difficult to raise reservations about such a precise expression, which refers to the extermination of women, babies, children, young people and the elderly in their homes, hospitals and refugee camps, and which vetoes all attempts at humanitarian aid.
One advantage of “Bloodbath” is that since there are no signs of blood when people are suffocated in gas chambers, any parallels to the Holocaust are immediately ruled out and the speaker cannot commit the rhetorical crime that led the Brazilian president to make the statement “Persona non grata” by the morally unassailable Israeli government.
It is true that the term “bloodbath” brings to mind in the minds of those who hear or read it other massacres of defenseless populations, such as those committed against the Armenians in World War I and the Tutsis in the 1990s Rwanda fell victim. Occasionally there was a lot of blood, like in Gaza. The problem is that this would bring back the unwanted and persistent word “genocide.” On second thought, it is better to look for another solution.
Who knows, maybe the old carnage will help? Or massacre, hecatomb, butcher shop? Ethnic cleansing is best avoided, no matter how much the noun and adjective seem to fit together and correspond to reality, but the vocabulary of inhumanity and lavish carnage is far from limited.
Razia, slaughter, slaughter there are many lexical options for the speaker who finds it difficult to carry on with his normal life while watching on his cell phone screen, almost in real time, innocent lives being slaughtered in droves day after day, in front of an apathetic one or powerless humanity.
A certain amount of discomfort is natural: this is exactly what we had never experienced before after connecting. And it is clear that decent people do not want to be accused of antiSemitism a word used with obscene imprecision in calls for unconditional moral surrender, as if criticizing the Israeli government was tantamount to defending Hamas' indefensible terrorism.
It's just that they don't think it's right, these people who cling to old humanist values, that the Palestinian people are being treated like a termite colony by a farright supremacist government while we silently watch everything, hostages of Biden, Netanyahu, etc other children of a mare or stuttering words in front of Madame da Gávea, who points at us with her finger made of expired nail polish and teaches us the acceptable use of words.