Welcome to the latest installment of “Five Words From …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland starts and ends with the disappearance of 38-year-old mother-of-ten Jean McConville, taking the reader through The Troubles and the lives of several prominent Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) figures including Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams.

privation
“There were privations, to be sure, but nothing out of the ordinary for a working-class childhood in postwar Belfast.”

Interestingly, privation and deprivation have similar definitions, although privation tends to connote basic necessities of life.

quartermaster
“Francie’s father was a quartermaster, in charge of weapons and ammunition.”

At the start of The Troubles, the Provisional IRA was still using World War II-era weapons. This changed once they began to import firearms from the United States. Earlier quartermasters were also responsible for providing housing (or quarters) for soldiers.

inveigle
“In fighting an insurgency, Kitson realized, quality intelligence is essential, and one way to obtain that intelligence is to inveigle some members of the insurgency to switch sides.”

Inveigle (to win over by flattery) was borrowed from a French word aveigle, meaning ‘to blind’. The ‘a-‘ of aveigle was analyzed (according to the OED) as a prefix, turning into en- and then eventually in-. There’s also an obsolete word veigle which has a similar meaning.

strafe
“The gunmen had orders not just to kill the young pair who operated the laundry service, but to strafe the ceiling of the van with bullets, in order to kill the sapper inside.”

The word comes from German “strafe” meaning “to punish” like in the German World War I slogan, Gott strafe England which meant “God punish England.”

tout
“Anyone who violated the credo of silence could be branded a ‘tout,’ as informers were known. And touts got killed.”

In Northern Ireland, informers were referred to as touts and supergrasses. The term grass is more popular in the United Kingdom. The IRA had its own internal unit tasked with identifying and executing touts.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five Words From …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Kylie Cheung’s Survivor Injustice: State-Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy analyzes the connections between domestic abuse and state violence, dismantling assumptions about a dichotomy between the personal and the political.

copaganda
“If galling stories like this surprise you or challenge any of your preconceived notions about law enforcement, then pro-cop propaganda, or copaganda, might just be to blame. It exists all around us, with tremendous implications for how the public understands (or rather, misunderstands) gender-based violence and all violence.”

Pro-police media is extremely prevalent in the US. Police procedurals are one of the most popular and long-standing genres of television.

adultified
“The bill would allow victims age twelve or under to receive abortion care up to 10 weeks into their pregnancies, and adultified these child victims by referring to them as ‘women.’”

Adultification refers to treating a child like they are an adult, usually in a harmful way that obscures their immaturity and inability to consent. Cheung is discussing legislation limiting rape victims’ access to abortion that refers to girls under twelve as women.

deepfake and stealthing
“Amid endemic male hysteria about abusers facing consequences, we rarely hear about the ways sexual violence is actually expanding rather than narrowing in scope—alarming surges in online sexual harassment; cyber rape, or ‘revenge porn,’ the nonconsensual distribution of women’s nude photos on the internet; deepfake artificial intelligence-generated porn depicting real individuals without their consent; and new, ‘trendy’ forms of rape like stealthing, when a man removes the condom without his partner’s knowledge or consent.”

The “deep” in the term deepfake refers to deep learning, a type of machine learning. As artificial intelligence technology advances, the quantity and quality of deepfakes proliferates. Deepfake porn is an ongoing issue globally. Paris Hilton and Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez put forth a bill in early 2026 allowing victims of AI-generated porn to sue the creators and distributors of it.

Non-consensual condom removal, also known as “stealthing,” is a difficult to track form of sexual violence. Prominent convictions have occurred in the UK, Netherlands, and New Zealand in recent years.

transformative justice
“Transformative justice is broader—it requires us to proactively work to change the social conditions and systemic inequities that cause harm to happen in the first place.”

Transformative justice is a framework that is closely related to restorative justice. A transformative justice approach thinks about mitigating harm before it occurs by imagining new and different systems.