The Power of Words in Wartime

1. According to Lakoff, the power that the words have on the soldiers is that when they make a reference to the soldiers on the other side, thy automatically talk about them as if they were an object, rather than other human beings. They, the government militants, want to have their soldiers to be completely objective to the fact that they are taking another humans' life, and they don't want their men to be overcome with the "unholy" fact of mental mutilation that they are causing their own guys.

2.I think the way we put things is very critical to the way we think, believe and even act. Or, at least, it leads to those things. I was born into the world in a very racist town. We, kids my age, were bred to believe that black people and illegal immigrant Mexicans were to be made fun of and more often than not were. You could tell the kids who were racist because of the way they would say the "n" word so negatively, or at all for that matter. Because of the way that they were spoken about. My parents were never racist around me about African- Americans, but they constantly spoke out about immigrants and made slurs. To this day I tend to have a negative mindset towards illegal immigrants... Illegal ones.

3. I think it does exactly what it is supposed to do, talk about the effects of language through the specific situation of war.

4.I think the way that she puts it, makes everything a real happening. I mean, she makes very valid points about how we put things..."We" meaning the American soldiers. The Abu Ghraib was a really unfortunate situation that ended badly, and should have, for the Americans that decided to let their hate for "them" get in the way of what they were really there for. To protect our freedom.

5. Her point is to get across that WORDS ARE HARMFUL. Period. She only states the American side because SHE is American, thus really only capable to express her personal values and experiences through her own ethnicity. At least, that's what I would do. The essay is directed towards the U.S. and it gets the point across well...