| Russ Allbery > Eagle's Path > April 2003 | Mozilla roadmap > |
Casualty does not mean death. Casualty means a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture, or who is missing in action. In other words, casualty means "someone who can't fight any more."
Free hint to news agencies: every time one of your reporters says something like "there were no casualties, but twenty people were seriously injured," you look like idiots. And the casualty figures are not fatality figures, so stop providing fatality figures and introducing them as casualty figures. And when you compare a war to a previous war, try to compare fatalities to fatalities and casualties to casualties, rather than using both terms interchangably leading to numbers that don't make any sense because you're comparing apples to oranges.
Posted: 2003-04-02 20:22 — Why no comments?
Hello,
I have a question. Is a casualty the person or the instance of injury-in a military context? I read somewhere that same soldier's being injured more than once counts as a corresponding number of casualties. Consequently number of soldiers injured in the long term is not as great as number of casualties.
I am particularly interested in WW1 Allied casualties.I'd be very grateful if you could answer my query. Best regards, Hugo Holesch
Posted by Hugo Holesch at 2003-09-30 02:28
You know, that's a really good question, and I honestly have no idea. My guess, if I had to make one, would be that it's per instance of serious injury, not per soldier, so your description would be correct. I'm thinking that just because it would be far easier to keep the statistics that way; I'm not sure that if you look at historical data that there was really the correlating capability to count per soldier without a heck of a lot of paperwork.
Posted by eagle at 2003-09-30 09:50
| Russ Allbery > Eagle's Path > April 2003 | Mozilla roadmap > |
*meow*. me too. i really think the military ought to have a liaison officer at those press briefings who understands the difference between milspeak and civspeak. i noticed "destroyed" in regard to enemy divisions also doesn't mean what one might think it means, nor does "secured" in regard to places.
Posted by piranha at 2003-04-03 15:27