WORD PROBLEM.(The Talk of the Town)(definition of genocide and the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Turks)

Among the many peculiarities of Times house style--such as the tradition, in the Book Review, that the word "odyssey" refer only to a journey that begins and ends in the same place--one of the more nettlesome has been the long-standing practice that writers are not supposed to call the Armenian genocide of 1915 a genocide. Reporters at the paper have used considerable ingenuity to avoid the word ("Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915," "the tragedy") and have sometimes added evenhanded explanations that pleased many Turks but drove Armenian readers to distraction: "Armenians say vast numbers of their countrymen were massacred. The Turks argue that the killings occurred in partisan fighting as the Ottoman Empire collapsed."

The quirk was not strictly policed, and a small number of writers, intentionally or otherwise, managed to get the phrase into the paper. Ben Ratliff wrote, in 2001, that the Armenian-American metal band System of a Down "wrote an enraged song about the Armenian genocide of 1915." Another writer who slipped it in was Bill Keller, in a 1988 piece from Yerevan, during his time at the paper's Moscow bureau: "Like the Israelis, the Armenians are united by a vivid sense of victimization, stemming from the 1915 Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians. Armenians are brought up on this story of genocide."

Keller, who became the paper's executive editor last July, finally changed the policy earlier this month. During a telephone conversation the other day, he said that his reporting in Armenia and Azerbaijan "made me wary of reciting the word 'genocide' as a casual accusation, because in the various ethnic conflicts that arose as the Soviet Union came apart everyone was screaming genocide at everyone else." He said, "You could portray a fair bit of the horror of 1915 without using the word 'genocide.' It's one of those heavy-artillery words that can get diminished if you use them too much."

Most scholars use the United Nations definition of genocide, from the 1948 Genocide Convention: killing or harming people "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." But, Keller says, "we were using a dictionary definition that was the purist definition--to eliminate all of a race of people from the face of the earth." The Times' position was based on the ...