26 March 2023 - Mission Design Series

Some linguists say that vocabulary is arbitrary; most words are meaningless strings of sounds with an assigned meaning. Let’s test it! Here’s a good experimental subject, the bureaucratese term “Mission Design Series” from the Pentagon dialect. Mission design... that sounds like military planning. Series... well, an operation may be made up of a lot of missions, and you have to get them in order, so something like operational planning? Time to look it up: Mission Design Series is... a naming convention for aircraft. Wow, words really are arbitrary!