I cannot imagine that anyone who has come under fire in combat would describe the sensation as friendly – no matter who is pulling the trigger. "Friendly fire" is the prime example of an institution's attempt to sanitise language to the extent that we know what a phrase is trying to tell us, yet reflect little on its actual meaning.

The US military has mastered newspeak in a manner that would be the envy of the Ministry of Peace (Minipax) in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it peddles the phrases – usually simple phonetically, vague semantically and inscrutable technically – with such bombastic precision that they enter the popular lexicon.

As revelations of deaths of coalition troops caused by allies surface in Iraq and Afghanistan, an issue for editors is whether the phrase "friendly fire" should have quote marks around it.

It is a military term, designed to shield the horrors of death and prevent animosity towards a war mission, argues one camp; so why should we be the agents of the phrase's recognition? It is as if we accept its premise – that it is just one of those things that happens in war, and we should just, you know, get over it.

But it is such a common phrase, declares the other camp, that to put it in quotes would be to suggest we are unfamiliar with it, or worse still, do not understand it. Just as an anachronistic MP might put air quotes around the word internet, we would seem out of touch.

I am in the first group: I still believe drawing attention to the term's inherent paradox by using quotation marks reminds our readers of its ludicrous demands for emotional and cerebral suspension of the information we are being given. Saying British troops were killed by US gunfire would present the facts as we know them, without speculating as to method or motivation, accidental or otherwise.

After all, we would certainly treat some of the US military's more colourful terminology, mostly heard in Hollywood films rather than news reports, with a mixture of bemusement and alarm: "bent spear" (breach in handling protocols of nuclear weapons), "empty quiver" (theft of a nuke), "faded giant" (matters affecting a nuclear reactor but not weapons) or the worst of the lot, "blue on blue" – another term for "friendly fire", which sounds like something from a computer game, which you could argue is often how some generals and politicians seem to view war – and not just in Dr Strangelove.

And what of the dastardly doublespeak of other institutions – from governments to private business? Should we accept "passenger action" as a sensitive euphemism for suicide by tube? The comedian Eddie Izzard puts it eloquently when discussing airline terms. "'Bird strike?' That's a total misnomer – it's not as if the birds are sitting around saying: 'C'mon! Who's for bird strike?' It should be called 'engine suck'."

What do readers think? Do we just accept that certain phrases will be repeated into daily usage no matter how unsavoury their intent? Or should the media remain circumspect about these terms, acting as a buffer between misleading jargon and what it is trying to distract us from, no matter how it makes us look?