'Adults and children hacked the bodies to pieces, before lynching two of the charred remains from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River.'- words from a BBC report on the Fallujah atrocities.


Bad Word Selection. Un-r-us drew my attention to the BBC's use of the word 'lynching' to describe the stringing up of the already dead and dismembered bodies of the contractors murdered by Fallujans yesterday. I thought it was poor word selection, but when I consulted a dictionary I was really dismayed. You see, my casual British understanding (the general sense here I think), is that 'lynching' is simply another word for 'hang in order to kill'. However, that's not what my dictionary says. It describes it as 'to judge and put to death without the usual forms of law'. It has nothing to do with hanging per se.


So was that what was going on in Fallujah yesterday: an extra-judicial killing? Not even that. Was a kind of discernible judgement taking place among the local people and the only thing missing a courtroom for full justice to be served?


Of course, the Beeb couldn't have meant that, could they? Only someone inclined to believe that Fallujan hangers-around-street corners with guns represent some kind of default, popular Iraqi authority, could take the word 'lynching' in this literal sense. But as I've already stated, the uneducated view of 'lynching' was the one I lazily held. If they were lazy, like me, or uneducated, they would never have used it. That leaves us with only one option: they knew what they were implying and they meant it that way- even if the use of it contrary to a popular misunderstanding of it tempts people like myself to dismiss it as a slip.


The Beeb just couldn't be as stupid as to use such a meaningful word so meaninglessly. Why choose it in the first place when the simplest word by far would have been 'hung'? Why, when they used the word 'hung' through most of their coverage, did they interject the word 'lynching'?


To be fair, to have used the word in this way would only be consistent with the BBC's refusal to refer to Palestinian suicide bombers as murderers and terrorists. What else can we expect?