From WNYKRC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration was retiring the phrase war on terror in favor of a new moniker, the global war against violent extremism.

We heard a prototype as early as five months ago. Donald Rumsfeld tried it out

at a Pentagon briefing in February. An overriding priority must be to ensure that commanders

have the troops and the equipment that they need to prevail in the global struggle against extremism.

By June, one more word had been added to the slogan, violent.

Here's General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

at a congressional hearing on June 23rd.

Iraq isn't just a battle in the struggle against violent extremism and al-Qaeda.

But before we turned to the new phrase, we thought we'd recall how he fixed on the old one.

Soon after 9-11, we spoke to Stephen Sloan, author of the historical dictionary of terrorism,

who told us the word had quite a different meaning when it was first invoked.

It really appeared during the French Revolution, what was called the Great Terror, under Ropes-Bier. What Rospier did was focus on the

emergence of state terrorism. You mean terrorism committed by the regime? That's right. The systematic

use of terror to enforce compliance to the regime's dictates. Certainly the word, I think, has really become very significant.

I would use, in the modern age, the Munich Massacre, as the beginning of modern terrorism.

By the Munich Massacre, you mean an extremist group that targeted the Israeli wrestling team at the Munich Olympics.

That's exactly right.

And the reason it became a defining moment, I think, was twofold.

One, the terrorists were using as their mode of operations, aircraft, in essence, they were delivery systems to launch attacks at an area far away from their disputed homeland.

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