Eviscerate: A Verb That Goes for the Guts

님이 올린 글 아주 재밌게 읽었습니다. 읽고 있자니 몇 일전에 읽었던 사설중 일부가 생각나서 올립니다. 9월 11일 테러 사건 이후 자주 들리는 단어중.. eviscerate도 있더군요.. By WILLIAM SAFIRE A word with a fearsome and odious primary meaning has been adopted by our military to describe the effect of our air power on the enemy in Afghanistan. At a Pentagon briefing, Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold informed reporters that ''the combat power of the Taliban has been eviscerated.'' The vivid verb became the basis of a front-page headline in The Washington Post, ''Pentagon: Taliban Forces 'Eviscerated.''' Eviscerate has to do with the removal of the viscera, or ''internal organs.'' A visceral reaction is also called a gut reaction, because the noun gut means ''intestine, entrails.'' (Only in the plural, guts, does that word gain the meaning of ''courage,'' or ''intestinal fortitude.'') Thus, the literal meaning of the verb eviscerate is ''disembowel, gut.'' It evokes the image of medieval combat with swords. But it gave rise to a figurative sense, less bloody-minded: ''to deprive of essential parts, to remove the essence of.'' Interviewed by Fox News the day after the Pentagon briefing, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel, said that in considering the possibility of a Palestinian state, air and water rights would have to be restricted: ''You'll eviscerate a lot of those powers that are normally associated with sovereignty.'' Also using that figurative sense, Seth Waxman, solicitor general in the Clinton administration, wrote in The Boston Globe, ''Statutory provisions that permit information-sharing relating to terrorism do not eviscerate constitutional freedom.'' Headline writers have to be careful to apply the verb to a power, using the figurative sense, and not to military forces made up of people, seeming to take the original sense. Such disempowering, rather than disemboweling, is what the Pentagon general surely had in mind.