There are some jobs so challenging, so emotionally stressful, that a culture of biting black humor is needed just to get through the day.

Fire fighters who talk about "crispy critters" don't do it because they fail to understand that the remains found in a smoldering house are someone's friends, someone's family. They do it exactly because they know these pitiful remains are all that's left of living, breathing people, and if they don't distance themselves emotionally from what they're seeing, they won't be able to do their jobs. If they don't place a box around what they're experiencing today, they won't be able to work tomorrow -- and tomorrow they just might save someone who can still be saved. Part of that box is language that seems cruel or dismissive to a casual observer.

The same kind of humor pervades police work and those facing combat in the military. They have to not only find a way to cope with violence, gore, and the loss of friends, but have to find a way to live with knowing that sometimes they're the cause of suffering. They have to find a way to dehumanize the people at the other end of the gun. Have to, if they're going to have a chance to stay relatively healthy in the rest of their lives. Have to, if they're going to prevent more pain in the future.

Anyone eavesdropping on their conversations, whether in person or in a "raw" documentary, is bound to be subjected to language that sounds heartless or prejudiced. Sometimes that's true. Far more often it's just people saying what they have to say, building those boxes in their mind that separate the awfulness they're experiencing from real life -- the one where they have husbands, wives, children, parents and moments of blessed peace.

Of the occupations that speak in their own special language, none may be as well developed as that of the intelligence community. Whether it's a John le Carré recounting the fictionalized lives of spies in the Cold War, or a more recent book giving the all too real details of the run up to Iraq, intelligence officers have a dialect as complex and full of intentional misdirection as the plot of any thriller. Of course they do. People in this line of work don't even get to relax around their families. Very little of what they do can be shared. They're told to confront -- or cause -- potential horrors, and then shut up about it.

Three years ago, before she was a contributing editor, Laura Clawson searched out the origin of the term "waterboarding." As it turns out, that origin is very recent.

Back in 2004, it was "water boarding," two words. The New York Times first used it on May 13, 2004, in an article by James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis titled "Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited In Top Qaeda Interrogations."

That was the first public use of the term. No doubt it had been circulating around the CIA for some time before. Probably at least two years. As we now know, the CIA used the procedure as early as the spring 2002, when they subjected a prisoner to more than eighty immersions in a single month.

Here's the Washington Post description of "waterboarding" from an article in 2007.

Waterboarding as an interrogation technique has its roots in some of history's worst totalitarian nations, from Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition to North Korea and Iraq. In the United States, the technique was first used five decades ago as a training tool to give U.S. troops a realistic sense of what they could expect if captured by the Soviet Union or the armies of Southeast Asia. The U.S. military has officially regarded the tactic as torture since the Spanish-American War.

The thing is, when we look at the Nazis and the Inquisition, we don't use the term "waterboarding." While you might find it in new articles about a Texas Sherrif who was prosecuted for using the technique on prisoners in 1983, you won't find the term in news accounts of the day. You won't find it in soldier's recollections of World War II or Vietnam. You won't find it, because the word didn't yet exist.

Up until that New York Times article in 2004, it had other names. In the 1800s, it was "the water cure." In the 1950s, it was "the water treatment." At at all times, it was simply referred to as "water torture."

Why the change in terminology?

"There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding" — a word found as early as 1929 — "they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them."

That quote makes it sound as if the inventors of "water boarding" were not only doing a cruel thing, but are innately cruel people. I don't believe that's being fair. Why the term was invented is completely understandable. What do you think the guys who carried the towel and hose into Abu Zubaida's room each day told their colleagues down the hall? Morning, Jim, I'm going to go act like a Nazi today. Hey, Phil, did you hear how many times I tortured that guy yesterday? What do you think they told themselves when they looked in the mirror?

Like people everywhere, the men in that room where torture was happening put language between themselves and the violence they saw. The pain they caused. They invented a term laced through with dark humor, because that was the shield they needed to protect their own core from the horror right at hand. It came from the same place as "crispy critter," and almost surely from the same underlying impulse -- just live with what's happening today, in hopes that you can be helpful tomorrow. That doesn't for a moment excuse what was going on in those damp chambers, but the use of such deflecting language isn't necessarily a sign that the people involved didn't know what they were doing was wrong.

There's one big difference. When the news media is reporting on a tragic fire they don't tell you that two crispy critters were found among the ashes. When they're reporting from Iraq, they don't tell you how many hajis got waxed in the sandpit. It's one thing for the people caught in the tension of the moment to use some term in bitter jest, it's another thing for the press and public to do so years after the fact.

But in this case, the press has decided we should all be in on the joke. Rather than using the term "water torture," they're indulging in the dark humor of the people who watched men's eyes go wide before the sopping towel was pressed against the face. For that there's no reason, no reason at all. Because when it comes to matters like torture, the last thing the public needs is a media that's trying to insert itself between Americans and the ugliness of our government's actions. Giving us that kind of emotional out isn't going to protect us, it just makes it easier for us to repeat this horrible era.

Saying "waterboarding" trivializes what we've done. It's not a neutral term, it s dismissive term, created with the purpose of snickering at pain.

The term is "water torture."