Jargon of war quickly crosses ideological gulf to daily usuage.

''Vertical envelopment'' could be a hot new techno band or a Back Bay zoning scheme. In fact, it's a term used by Pentagon officials -- masters of warspeak -- to describe the unleashing of massive air power on Baghdad, selectively targeting key installations, in the first phase of the war against Iraq.

Should the ''shock and awe'' campaign pave the way to ''catastrophic success,'' to borrow two more examples of current war lingo, then something besides an oxymoron worthy of Joseph Heller's ''Catch-22'' could be realized. ''Catastrophic'' in this context means supremely good, and leads to ''decapitation'' (the removal of Saddam Hussein) followed by -- all together now, class -- ''regime change.'' Or ''debaathification,'' as an Iraqi dissident called it this week.

''Every war is like a family tussle, with a general construct and its own characteristics,'' says Anne Soukhanov, US general editor of Microsoft's Encarta College Dictionary and a dedicated tracker of word usage. ''As those characteristics change -- weapons, location, the generation that's fighting the war -- so does the language.''

From the first Gulf War, says Soukhanov, we got Humvees and MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) and ''the mother of all battles,'' which proved to be the mother of all-purpose phrases. ''There's an example of how one side, in this case Saddam Hussein, uses an expression that captures the imagination of the other side and becomes a font,'' Soukhanov says. ''Now we hear things like `the mother of all traffic jams.' ''

Examples of freshly minted warspeak abound in newspaper columns, Web dispatches, and TV broadcasts. Terms such as ''embeds'' (reporters traveling with the troops), ''unilaterals'' (nonattached reporters), ''casevac'' (short for casualty evacuation), ''NBC assault'' (referring to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, not the peacock network), and ''target of opportunity'' have swiftly embedded themselves in the national lexicon, so to speak. (Dave Anderson wondered in a recent New York Times column which football coach might first use ''target of opportunity'' to describe ''how his team took advantage of a glaring weakness in an opponent's defense.'')

Just since Saturday, the phrase ''shock and awe'' has appeared more than 700 times in US newspapers and magazines. ''Collateral damage,'' a slightly older species of war jargon referring to civilian casualties, has taken on new currency as coalition forces pound Baghdad and other cities. ''Shaping fires'' -- an effort to weaken enemy forces so they can be wiped out by subsequent attacks -- appears to be gaining ground with military officials.

Sexy new acronyms and initials have become ubiquitous as well, from MOABs (''massive ordnance air burst,'' also ''mother of all bombs'') to UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle) to SSE (sensitive site exploitation) forces.

There is even a military alphabet -- S Day, D Day, A Day, G Day -- signifying moments in the battle, some occurring on the same day, when specific goals are realized by specific US commanders.

This process of lexical assimilation has happened before, though not with the same immediacy that today's all-access, instant-analysis style of warfare produces.

As far back as the Civil War, terms such as ''slacker'' and ''unconditional surrender'' moved from the language of the battlefield into mainstream society.

World War I popularized ''bombardment,'' ''trench warfare,'' ''no man's land,'' and ''shell-shocked.''

So many idiots, so little time...

"Vertical envelopment" refers to using aerial assets (usually helicopters) to insert troops forward of the FLOT (Forward Line of Troops, aka the front line).

The term "shock and awe" is taken from the book by the same name, Shock and Awe: Acheiving Rapid Dominance. I heard one of the authors on, of all places, NPR last week. He explained the concept behind the term; it involves more than just an overwhelming release of bombs on Baghdad:

The goal of Rapid Dominance will be to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and military objectives. To achieve this outcome, Rapid Dominance must control the operational environment and through that dominance, control what the adversary perceives, understands, and knows, as well as control or regulate what is not perceived, understood, or known.
In Rapid Dominance, it is an absolutely necessary and vital condition to be able to defeat, disarm, or neutralize an adversary's military power. We still must maintain the capacity for the physical and forceful occupation of territory should there prove to be no alternative to deploying sufficient numbers of personnel and equipment on the ground to accomplish that objective. Should this goal of applying our resources to controlling, affecting, and breaking the will of an adversary to resist remain elusive, we believe that Rapid Dominance can still provide a variety of options and choices for dealing with the operational demands of war and conflict.
To affect the will of the adversary, Rapid Dominance will apply a variety of approaches and techniques to achieve the necessary level of Shock and Awe at the appropriate strategic and military leverage points. This means that psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure, will have to be achieved. It is in this broader and deeper strategic application that Rapid Dominance perhaps most fundamentally differentiates itself from current doctrine and offers revolutionary application.
Flowing from the primary concentration on affecting the adversary's will to resist through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe to achieve strategic aims and military objectives, four characteristics emerge that will define the Rapid Dominance military force. These are noted and discussed in later chapters. The four characteristics are near total or absolute knowledge and understanding of self, adversary, and environment; rapidity and timeliness in application; operational brilliance in execution; and (near) total control and signature management of the entire operational environment.

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