december and Col digressing in this thread.
A bomber presumably wants to kill people. Otherwise he’s just a demolitions expert. Suicide bomber tells us the method of delivery. Furthermore, when looking at the numbers of dead, we know to subtract one for the putative civilian casualties.
Other examples include mail bombers, car bombers, pipe bombers, etc.
OTOH, homicide bomber is redundant. Isn’t it?
Well, I guess you could bomb empty buildings. But, yeah, “suicide bomber” seems more precise than “homicide bomber”
Langauge is in the first instance meant to communicate facts and meaning. If I’m listening to the radio, hearing that a bomb went off in a crowded market and killed twelve people tells me something – that some jackanapes decided to kill a bunch of people – a homicide.
Telling me that it was a suicide bombing adds additional content to the message – the guy didn’t try to get away, and was one of the twelve killed.
Telling me it’s a “homicide” bombing adds no content. All fatal bombings (except the hapless Palestinians’ “own goal” fiascos) are homicide bombings because they “kill men.”
Language also can convey messages or values. But because comparatively few people in the U.S. really need to be bludgeoned over the head with the notion that “homicide” is bad, or reminded that “suicide bombers” also kill other people, this phrase leaves me queasy, especially when used in “objective” sources such as radio news (and also when used by politicians and commentators).
It’s moronic, it’s bad communication, and it smacks of totalitarian/Newspeak manipulation of language. Robbing perfectly good words of meaning is not a step forward in our political discourse.
I’m for suicide bomber. I think the term homicide bomber is just the result of the frustration people have at these bombers and the desire to describe them as negatively as possible. But suicide bomber is more descriptive, and homicide is redundant, as other posters have noted.