Some of the words and phrases that caught my attention in coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death:
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Abbottabad: The city in northern Pakistan where bin Laden was found and killed is named for a British army officer, Major James Abbott (1807-1896), who founded the town in 1853. It’s pronounced with the stress on the second syllable: ah-BAHT-ah-bahd. The –abad suffix, also found in place names such as Islamabad and Hyderabad, comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “dwelling” or “town.”

New York Times

James Abbott dressed as an Indian nobleman, 1847. (Hat tip: @johmcquaid)
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Double tap: “After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured,” writes Marc Ambinder in “The Secret Team That Killed bin Laden” (National Journal). “One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face.” (Via @stevesilberman.) GunTec Dictionary defines “double tap” as a “colloquial term for the firing of two shots one immediately after the other at the same target.” UPDATE: As I note in a comment, below, the double tap technique is credited to two British police chiefs in 1930s Shanghai. They devised the method to overcome the limits of full-metal-jacketed ammunition.
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SEAL: The bin Laden mission was carried out by “the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group” (Ambinder). SEAL is a navy acronym for “sea, air, and land.”
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DevGru: A compression of “development group.” Ambinder writes that SEAL Team Six “was known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.” DevGru is part of the Joint Special Operations Command, “an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units” (Ambinder).
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Kinetic: Military euphemism meaning “lethal.” From the Ambinder article:
Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the National Counterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active “kinetic” -- or lethal – counterterrorism missions abroad.
Related: Read my April 2008 post on “post-kinetic development.”
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“Killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan”: Department of Defense code for “died in a JSOC operation that went bad” (Ambinder).
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Triumphalism: An attitude or feeling of victory or superiority. From the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog:
I’m not sorry to see bin Laden dead, but I can’t share in the triumphalism currently flooding the airwaves, nor do I feel any sense of relief, since I don’t expect this to change anything.
Related: Read my April 2011 post on triumphalism’s opposite, declinism.
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Honorific: “A title, phrase, or grammatical form conveying respect, used especially when addressing a social superior.” (American Heritage Dictionary) Media blogger Jim Romenesko reported this morning that the New York Times would no longer use the “Mr.” honorific in front of Osama bin Laden’s name, at the request of News Managing Editor Jill Abramson and Executive Editor Bill Keller. From the associate managing editor’s memo: “Without a ‘Mr.’ in front of his name, it was decided that we should capitalize the ‘B’ in Bin Laden on second references.”
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Halo effect: “How Big Will the Osama Halo Effect Be for Obama?” reads the headline on a post by Stephen J. Dubner on the Freakonomics blog. Dubner writes: “The halo effect is often short-lived — but will it, in this case, live long enough to power Obama through an election cycle?” The halo effect is “an effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in the whole” (American Heritage Dictionary). It was first described in a 1920 paper by the American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.”
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Also see this Visual Thesaurus compilation of notable words from President Obama’s May 1 announcement of bin Laden’s death.