Meaning
Harm inflicted unintentionally on people, property, or interests other than the intended target, originally of civilian deaths and destruction in military operations; now widely used of secondary damage in politics, business, medicine, or daily life. Frequently criticised as a euphemism that converts civilian casualties into a tidy accounting term. Formal register tinged with cynicism; applying it to human deaths implies the speaker is playing them down. Regional use: General English (Cold War military-strategy origin).
Origin
Often credited to American military planners, but the earliest documented use sits in Cold War nuclear strategy: the economist Thomas C. Schelling used it in a 1961 Operations Research article on dispersal and deterrence. It circulated inside US armed-forces jargon from the Vietnam era onward, and military reference works of the 1980s defined it with only vague reference to lack of intent. Television briefings during the 1991 Gulf War carried it into everyday speech, after which general dictionaries added definitions stressing that the damage is inadvertent. In 1999 the German loan translation Kollateralschaden was voted Germany's 'Un-word of the Year' as an inhuman euphemism.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- collateral casualties
- collateral harm
- counting the collateral damage
Usage Examples
- The strike destroyed the depot, but the admiral refused to discuss collateral damage in front of the cameras.
- Aggressive chemotherapy kills the tumour, and doctors weigh the collateral damage to healthy tissue before every cycle.
- The restructuring saved money; the collateral damage was two hundred careers and the morale of everyone left behind.