Actually, these are not quite homographs, since one
is capitalized and the other isn’t.
They are thus, rather, what I dubbed “Confusables” when introducing the
feature of Confusables ® (paronym-disambiguation) into the Franklin spellers
and dictionary products.
Anyhow, you probably haven’t heard of either; but this one is a doozy.
(1)
The better-known of these is written in all capitals: ZOG, in line with its origin as an acronym. It stands for “Zionist occupation
government”; and no, it does not
refer primarily to the West Bank.
As to what-all it does refer to, you can easily find by googling (just
be sure that you have your anti-malware software set on HIGH).
What is interesting about this is that it is among
the very few terms -- and virtually unique among monosyllables -- whose mere
utterance brands the utterer as a very particular political breed of beast.
These are harder to find than you’d think. The only one that springs immediately
to mind is “Social-Fascist” (and its German equivalent), whose use invariably
revealed the user as a Third Period Stalinist (or at least someone parotting
their patter). The use of the term
liberal as a sneer-word (as opposed to simply denouncing concretely various
policies of liberals) does tell the listener quite a bit about the user, but of
course the word is used objectively as well. The term reactionary
is almost always a sneer-word for conservative
(thus revealing much about the speaker), but it can also be used, cavalierly,
as a defiant synonym of laudator temporis
acti (indeed, the historian John Lukacs self-applies the label). The concept Antichrist makes sense only in a Christian context, but you can
easily discuss the term (say, in comparing it to that of
the Dajjâl
) without subscribing to any of the
tenets of that belief-system. ZOG is different.
It’s not just that most people don’t believe a “Zionist
occupation government” (in the intended sense) exists. After all, people use terms like Santa Claus, unicorn, phlogiston, Higgs boson, and will even predicate
positive qualities of them (“Santa wears a red suit”, “the Higgs boson is
necessary for the consistency of the Standard Theory”) without thereby making
any existential commitment (Quine’s
term) at all.
(2) As
a (somewhat nonce) term in physics, it is written in lower-case. Here is the first (and only) passage in
which I encountered the term:
Massive
particles of spin 1 can be described as having three ingredients: a
left-handed zig (helicity 1), a right-handed zag (helicity -1), and a
non-spinning ‘zog’ (helicity 0).
-- Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (2004), p. 653
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