Embed This!

Dear Readers:

The Bush administration is ready to “embed” journalists within military forces that may be fighting in Iraq.

“Embed” is an interesting choices of words, and few journalists will object to it in spite of inevitable implications that the press will be climbing “em-bed” with the administration. In Doonesbury, a soldier is already talking about his desire to “embed” Ashleigh Banfield.

The word “embedded” does, after all, have “bed” in the middle. But the linguistic association we may want to worry about is not conjugal but geological. Therein lies a problem.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded uses of “embed” date to the end of the 18th century. These are almost all scientific and mechanical:

1794: “Calcereous substances are in general found where flints are embedded.”

1812: “Crystals are said to be imbedded when they are completely enclosed in another material.”

1879: “Iron girders embedded in brickwork and cement.”

Along the way, some figurative senses begin to associate themselves with “embed,” but the denotations are always the same: The embedded substance is fixed, fast, surrounded, and cannot escape without extraction.

The advantages to journalists of “embeddedness” seem obvious: access to the action and to those fighting the war, the safety that comes from attachment to a military force. We will see if those outweigh the predictable disadvantages, including the inability to operate more freely and with less censorship.