burlies: archaic military slang for troops formally designated, at the time, as grenadiers; specifically, those equipped with a BRL (“Backpack Rockets Launcher”) as their primary weapon, specializing therefore in high-angle indirect fire. While the derivation from the acronym is obvious, a secondary cause was the effect of the BRL and its control package on the profile of those equipped with it.
(Just a random thought I had today. Incidentally, today I also learned a new word: flathatting.)
Just a quick snippet today, as I’ve been composing stuff for use elsewhere:
“absolutely sure”: A rare example of the double-positive negative grammatical form in the wild. “Absolutely sure”, in technarch jargon, means “educated conjecture”, or indeed “wild-assed guess”.
See also: “reasonably sure”, qualified certainty, dubifier, Rationalist-Empiricist Pissing Contest.
Deadly Euphemism: Outside certain specialized and arguable applications, the Imperials don’t really go in for euphemisms. Some of their terms sound a bit like euphemisms, but “erased” reflects the technical difference between cognicide and corpicide – namely, that you have to kill people in the information-theoretic sense (see: Final Death) if you expect them to stay dead, and just killing the body won’t help you much. It’s more like sending a really strongly worded message.
Likewise on a bigger scale, use of the term “cauterize” to describe an operation is entirely literal. Were you to see what a deployed antimatter bomb does to its target, I think you would have to agree that it is, indeed, pretty damn cauterized.
And while for perfectly obvious reasons no-one can now say “this is not war, this is pest control”, that wouldn’t be a euphemism either.