Humpty-Dumpty teaches Linguistics.

As any fule know, a word's meaning is dependent on its context. When we read that a carpenter is cleaning his plane we don't immediately picture a jolly artisan buffing up a Boeing 747 with an oily rag.  Similarly, when Tony Blair assured the nation that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass-destruction and was about to use them against the West, the picture which sprang into our minds was that on the left rather than the one on the right. 

  Last Tuesday, however, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction - a pressure cooker - we discovered that the Americans have once again rewritten the dictionary; and, taking their cue from Through the Looking-Glass,  perverted the way language works. “When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” 

   Despite what Humpyty-Dumpty and his disciple, US attorney general Eric Holder, would have us believe, a pressure-cooker is not a weapon of mass-destruction. It is a household appliance. Like almost any artefact it can be used  to inflict injury. In common with many otherwise useful machines - the motor-car  springs to mind - it can be misused to kill a number of people simultaneously. But that does not make it a weapon of mass-destruction, merely an object used to inflict mass-destruction. For the term 'weapon' refers to an object designed to have the sole function of inflicting injury: a gun, a cosh, a stiletto. Other objects - baseball bats, kitchen knives - are frequently used as weapons, but to simply call  them weapons would be absurd. Jamie Oliver no more handles weapons in his kitchen than Babe Ruth handled one at the Yankee Stadium. 

   Again context is crucial. If a friend told you that she'd gone to John Lewis to buy some luggage one would expect her to return with a suitcase rather than a carrier bag. However, if the same friend turned up at to stay at one's house and, pointing to the carrier-bag she was carrying, said, 'That's all the luggage I've brought', one wouldn't be puzzled. For the context would indicate the understood qualifier: 'in place of a suitcase'. This does not however mean that deprived of its original context it would make sense for us to report to others that she'd arrived with a single piece of luggage: they would immediately picture a suitcase. Instead we'd say, 'She turned up with just a carrier-bag'. So, why didn't the Attorney-General avoid abusing the English language and charge Tsarnaev with using a pressure-cooker as a weapon of mass-destructon?
   Perhaps it's because - as New Thump pointed out the other day -  if pressure-cookers are weapons of mass-destruction Tony Blair was telling the truth about Iraq after all!