Dr. Daniel Gamper Sachse is a professor of moral and political philosophy at the UAB, has extensive literary and academic production, as well as a translator (Nietzsche, Habermas...), and won the Anagrama essay prize 2019. It is a luxury for the Reader's Ombudsman to have a reflection from him, in this case regarding the use bring down as a synonym for kill. Your communication refers to the news of a shooting in Calldetenes, in which the Mossos d'Esquadra intervened, published in the news section on the 8th. Gamper writes:
"For some years now, it has become common for journalists, in Spanish and Catalan, to use this verb to describe police actions that intentionally end a person's life. Often, terrorists or murderers are the ones who are "killed." There is complete agreement among journalists to use this expression; all media outlets do so. The desire to avoid the term murder, which, by definition, is not something that police officers can do in the exercise of their duties (just as, by definition, in a democracy there are not and cannot be "political prisoners").
"If we consult the DIEC2, we are told, among other meanings, that "abatir" is "1 3 v. tr. [LC] by ext. To shoot down a bird, a plane. They shot it down. It is not people who are shot down, but animals or objects. It is a term we associate with hunting. Therefore, if we use the term bring down We are treating the person who is killed like an animal, something common in the history of Western civilization, which usually describes the criminal as a non-human being, a beast. We must ask ourselves, in my opinion, if we want to maintain this vision of criminality. I understand that police officers, when they kill terrorists, or in the case at hand here, do so in self-defense. They are not hunting that person down, but rather they kill them as a last resort in self-defense.
"I'm not sure what the alternative would be, or even whether we should abandon this usage, but with this message I would like to underline what the verb implies and call the attention of journalists who use it so that, at the very least, they become aware (if they haven't already). One option would be to write "kill", "give kind, in my opinion, as "abatir") as "liquida", or euphemisms like "neutralize" or "finalize".
I first referred the matter to Pau Domènech, Head of Language, who responded:
"Regarding Dr. Gamper's reflection, it is always pertinent to stop and think about what we say, how we say it and why we say it. In this case that he presents to us, I do not quite agree with him on the basis of his case. We found an exact definition ofbring downIn the sense that concerns us, for example, in the GDLC, in its point 5: "5. Killing. The police have shot a terrorist.".
"I agree with him, yes, that sometimes this verb is used to the detriment of other more common, or if you prefer natural, verbs, like nowkill. It could perfectly well be said "Police shoot dead an armed terrorist," although due to space constraints, the other option is sometimes more useful. In short, it's a matter of alternation, of not systematically overriding more natural options, and often also of space, but I wouldn't rule out its use. Aside from being widely used (in journalistic and police language), it is supported by prestigious lexicographic works.
David Miró, deputy director in charge of policy, to whom I have also referred the issue, argues:
"The truth is that I had never looked up the meanings of the verb bring down in the dictionary and, therefore, I was unaware both that the DIEC uses it to kill animals (birds) or objects (airplanes), but not people, and that the GDLC does include the current journalistic definition of killing someone, especially if the person doing the killing is a police officer or a member of any other law enforcement agency. I'll leave the purely linguistic criterion to Pau Domènech, but as a journalist, Gamper's writing makes me reflect on how we use language. In this case, journalists use the verb bring down as a kind of code to inform the reader that the subject of the act of killing has, in some way or another, legal authority to do so. It's probably unconscious, but it's true. We might encounter, for example, a sentence like "The alleged murderer has been shot by the police," and therefore we have one person who murders and another who shoots, even though the final result of both verbs is the same. Therefore, there is a nuance that provides information. However, this doesn't exclude the possibility that the word bring down "It may not be the most appropriate one because it's also the one we use in contexts involving animals, such as hunting. Likewise, I think journalists don't have (or we have) this in mind when they use the verb, but Gamper's comment makes me realize that you can write without any bad intentions, but someone outside could interpret it differently, and therefore it never hurts to double-check our lexical choices."
The criterion of this Ombudsman is that when the serious violation of human rights – starting with killing – goes beyond the personal sphere and moves into society or politics, the denotations suffer an overload of connotations in order to absolve, as would be the case with others, bring down, or to criminalize, and then we would use murderLet us remember the solemn end of the Prosecution testimony from the brilliant duo Christie/Wilder, when Marlene Dietrich stabs Tyrone Power, and Charles Laughton, when someone in the courtroom shouts "She murdered him!", he replies: "No, she executed him!"
In political conflicts, absolving and criminalizing language is created according to the source's side; right now, the deep-rooted tradition of placing the war between Israelis and Palestinians on the soldiers-terrorists axis is evident, while we see that the extent of politically motivated terror defined by the word is divided... "murder."
As Deputy Director Miró suggests, journalism should carefully consider what word it chooses in each specific case and not just give encouragement on such sensitive issues; instead, it should do so in a partisan, positive way in favor of the victims, such as that a woman was "murdered" and not "killed" by her husband in a case of gender violence. Or, a sensu contrario, the journalist makes his own – buys, as they say now – the language of a certain source, let's say, referring to bring down, euphemistic police language. I find it an atavistic flaw in journalism to uncritically accept police language, such as "the police were forced to intervene" in a demonstration.
When in doubt, it never fails to refer the term to a source, who says what, or to opt for the clearest, whitest terms, uncontaminated by hermeneutics beyond natural law or morality, in this case kill. The ARA newspaper of the 15th headlined a news story along these lines, "A man shot dead in Barcelona's Eixample district in broad daylight," but a later expansion referred to the text as "execution." Indeed, precision journalism must begin with vocabulary. Let's not lose our dictionaries, especially when we have the convenience of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans' online application. And writing with a view to the Alcover-Moll Mountains brightens and broadens our horizons.
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