In the book "Rumor of War" by Philip Caputo, he discusses how the military uses ambiguous language on forms to describe soldier deaths in a more sterile manner. For example, losing a leg to a landmine would be labeled a "traumatic amputation" rather than a more accurate "traumatic fragmentation". While amputation implies a clean surgical procedure, the reality is the human body is often shattered by explosions. This shows how language can distort reality and lead people to make incorrect assumptions based on their own preconceptions of what certain words imply.

1. Language: Comment on Rumor of War (caputo) or post-language artifact.
In “Rumor of War” by Philip Caputo, it is possible to see the way language
can be twisted to make things seem different than they truly are. This shows both the
flexibility and sometimes unreliability of language alone as a Way of Knowing. When
Caputo is in charge of filling out form for the soldiers killed in fighting around Da
Nang, he follows military procedures for recording the ways the soldiers died on the
forms. For example, a leg being blown off by a landmine would have been called
“traumatic amputation.” While there is no doubt the leg was missing, the word
“amputation” implies a sense of surgical precision. Caputo says, “After I saw some of
the victims, I began to question the accuracy of the phrase. Traumatic amputation,
was precise, for losing a limb is definitely traumatic, but seemed to me, suggested a
surgical operation. I observed, however, that the human body does not break apart
cleanly in an explosion. It tends to shatter into irregular and often unrecognizable
pieces, so "traumatic fragmentation" would have been a more accurate term and
would have preserved the euphemistic tone the military favored.”
This shows the way language can be made to mean something else, because in the
mind of a reader or listener, the language is taken in using Perception and processed
using Reason, which leads the reader or listener to perceive the meaning of the
language based on their preconceptions. Because people perceive amputation to have
a medical connotation, this is the way it is processed in their mind, leading them to an
untrue conclusion.