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Smart TalkSmart TalkSMART TALK
by Dr. Winton "Windy" Prolix

TOUR:  At the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired, tour has two related meanings for common usage.  It can mean a pleasure trip, perhaps a tour of the attractions around Underbelly, Texas, where we can show you Summit Peak and Vista View overlooking Glendale  and the Rio River.

Now that's a tour, the kind of experience that tourists endure franchise food for.

We also recognize the tour that's a guided presentation of, say, an olive pitting facility, or of a converted shipping container the realtor is trying to sell.

In both cases, the tour is a voluntary travel-through, often for the pleasure of learning but at least with an expectation of getting home unharmed.

On a military tour, however, the odds of returning unharmed are greatly reduced, and said tour is often involuntary.  The more reality based might call it a hitch, or an assignment; the disgruntled, a sentence.  But it's not a tour, and the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired deplores this misuse of the word.

Since they have too much invested in always being right, military officers don't often appear for treatment at the institute, so we helplessly watch the involuntary sense of tour grow through the decades, much as surge instead of escalation probably will.

Tour in place of assignment, or even term, is as cynical as enhanced interrogation rather than torture.

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