What's in a Word?

The latest proclamation to come out Iran is that it will target Israel first if the United States does anything "evil", a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards said on today.

"We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel," Revolutionary Guards Rear Admiral Mohammad-Ebrahim Dehqani was quoted as saying by Iran's student news agency ISNA.

Experts said recent wargames, in which Iran said it had tested new missiles and torpedoes, were a thinly veiled threat that it could disrupt vital Gulf oil shipping lanes if it was attacked.

This word "evil" seems to be causing a lot of problems in the world, so much so, that perhaps we should blast the word itself from all languages. The first time I came across this evil word was at church as a child. Everything that was not of God was evil I quickly realised. Then, for the first time I heard a teacher call a mischievous individual the "E-word." The whole class was shocked. This was unprecedented. Now this boy would forever bear the mark of E. We even wondered amongst ourselves if his being the "E-word" meant he was a child of the devil. Afterall, people could be "naughty", "bad", a "nuisance", "insolent", "terrible" but never would they be called e-v-i-l unless they really deserved the scar of the most awful of words. Fastforward twenty years to the present and it seems every nation calls a friend it just fell-out with - evil. Up to twenty-seven years ago, Iran and the US were best friends; Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi being returned to power in Iran with US help after he had fled the country in 1953.This was achieved by overthrowing the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, done through the aid of a joint CIA and MI6 covert operation, Operation Ajax.

Now Iran calls the US the E-word, the US calls any of its friends who've developed a mind of their own - the E-word or worse: being on the axis of the E-word! How do you get to be on the "axis" of a word? It's not geometry! Funnily enough, not too long ago the E-word was known by another word, the C-word. No, not that one, the other one. But I feel sympathy for this poor little word that has been used and abused so unceremoniously to mean v-i-l-e. Evil is so much more than that, on a good day when you see him from behind he can mean l-i-v-e! At night sometimes he can be enignmatic wearing a v-e-i-l of mysteriousness. But most of all, just like Communism which in its heyday was equally infamous causing much anxiety and fear, evil will always be just a word; words don't destroy - people do.