End the ‘Surge’ Surge: Find a New Verb!

As the calendar ticks into the slow month of August, and columnists begin to scramble for ideas to write about, I ran into good luck. A mother at our church told me she hated the word “surge.” And she’s right. This word entered our politics 15 years ago and mounted a takeover campaign. We need to end the surge of surges in American life. Because “surge” is used liberally as a verb and noun, we can surge on the surge. History will recall the surge against surging.

You remember it really got started with “the surge in Iraq” in 2007. Which was an attempt to end another surge, though we still mercifully called it an “insurgency” in the Sunni Triangle. If it had been 2022, we would surely have called it the Sunni Surge, a surge that would bring about the Delta wave of dhimmitude to Chaldean Christians in Northern Iraq. But, fatally to our political vocabulary, this time the surge was on our side. General Petraeus would mastermind the deployment of an additional 20,000 soldiers and Marines to Iraq. Oddly, the surge in Iraq was our exit strategy. We can get out of it by going in deeper. This also turned out to be General Petreaeus’s philosophy of biography-writing. America got its exit from that surge. And Petraeus got a flattering biography: All In: The Four-Star Who Surged Me. Just kidding about that subtitle. It really was called All In, though.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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As the calendar ticks into the slow month of August, and columnists begin to scramble for ideas to write about, I ran into good luck. A mother at our church told me she hated the word “surge.” And she’s right. This word entered our politics 15 years ago and mounted a takeover campaign. We need to end the surge of surges in American life. Because “surge” is used liberally as a verb and noun, we can surge on the surge. History will recall the surge against surging.

You remember it really got started with “the surge in Iraq” in 2007. Which was an attempt to end another surge, though we still mercifully called it an “insurgency” in the Sunni Triangle. If it had been 2022, we would surely have called it the Sunni Surge, a surge that would bring about the Delta wave of dhimmitude to Chaldean Christians in Northern Iraq. But, fatally to our political vocabulary, this time the surge was on our side. General Petraeus would mastermind the deployment of an additional 20,000 soldiers and Marines to Iraq. Oddly, the surge in Iraq was our exit strategy. We can get out of it by going in deeper. This also turned out to be General Petreaeus’s philosophy of biography-writing. America got its exit from that surge. And Petraeus got a flattering biography: All In: The Four-Star Who Surged Me. Just kidding about that subtitle. It really was called All In, though.