A war of words has broken out between the US and Iran. The US fired question marks and exclamation marks with occasional dashes and hash signs even as Iran shot back a barrage of semicolons,comas, hyphens and full stops. There was an occasional diplomatic exchange over syntactical correctness but mostly it was an explosion of bombastic words.
Early reports about casualties were unclear but eyewitnesses spoke of many fractured and fragmented sentences strewn along the border. Several dictionaries were standing by to receive badly wounded words for emergency surgeries. Synonyms, a sort of national reserve guards, were on the ready to replace the wounded and antonyms were being dressed up to counter Iran’s phraseology.
While most of the exchange was conducted in English in keeping with the Geneva Convention, Tehran craftily employed its ancient war tactic of waylaying the enemy by using some complex Farsi phrases. War experts were surprised that Iran would use its choicest weapons so early in the conflict but that was attributed to their new war strategy to overwhelm the adversary early.
Unprepared for the rarely used weapon of Farsi, the US forces had to go into a strategic retreat, reload its arsenal with Google Translation and return. What was expected to be a brutal ambush, in fact, turned out to be surprisingly gentle as the translation revealed that Iran was actually using Saadi’s more spiritual poetry.
I can go on about the war of words but I suppose you get the drift. I think the world should try war of words more often than it does whenever countries have serious disagreements. Words don’t die and they certainly don’t cost. So why not?
