Deconflict

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Zach McCarley. I’m calling from China Lake, California right now.

Zach in China Lake?

Yes.

Okay. What’s up, Zach?

I’m an F-18 pilot, an instructor at Miramar.

And we were having a conversation in the red room the other day about the word deconflict.

And what we do, we put it on flight schedules or talk about each other.

If we’re going to share an airspace or a piece of sky, we have to deconflict that airspace to make sure that we don’t have conflicts, so we don’t hit each other.

And I was using the word in the right room the other day, and somebody pointed out that it was not a word.

And so I thought that was kind of strange.

I argued with them until we looked it up, and they were right, it’s not a word.

I’m not sure if any other word works for it or what else to do without it being a word.

Well, let’s talk about a couple things here.

So the word is deconflict.

Will you spell that, please?

Right.

It’s D-D-E, then the word conflict, so C-O-N-F-L-I-C-T.

And you use that mean to remove yourself or your equipment from a kind of possible conflict situation, right?

Right, right.

So like two airplanes, we could deconflict the altitude, like pick different altitudes to fly, or different laterally, say, hey, I’ll be north of this point and you’ll be south of that point.

In some way, they removed the conflict and the possibility of collision.

Where did you look this word up?

I looked it up in a couple dictionaries, one of the Websters, and then on dictionary.com online, and they had nothing for it.

Here’s the thing, the bottom line.

Deconflict is a perfectly fine word.

It is a word, absolutely, 100% sure.

There’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever it’s a word.

Paul McFedry’s at WordSpy has an entry for it.

He traces it back to, oh, about 20 years or so.

It’s probably older than that.

He does spell it D-E hyphen conflict, but either spelling will work, and they both are used in exactly the same way.

And here’s the why.

Here’s how we know that it’s a word.

You say it, and your coworkers understand it.

That’s it.

That’s all that it takes for that to be a word.

Somebody says it, and somebody else understands it.

It does not require that it be imprinted on the onion skin pages of a dictionary.

Yeah, and it’s a really important word, right?

I mean, you guys have to understand it, and you have to get that idea out there really quickly, right?

Right.

Without the concept, obviously, you can fly safely.

That’s right.

It does its job.

Without the word, you have to communicate that concept.

Right.

In any case, even if you did think having it printed somewhere was somehow kind of a validation of this word, I can offer you evidence.

Go to the Department of Defense websites, and you will find thousands, thousands of uses of this word.

Deconflict, deconflicting, deconfliction, all the different kind of conjugations of the verb and the noun forms as well.

This word is widely used across all branches of the service, throughout the defense and the military, even in the private sector, in the public sector, everywhere.

Everyone uses this word.

It is a real word that’s doing a good job.

You should continue to use it, as you always have.

Awesome. Well, that’s great news.

I appreciate your time.

It clears it up a lot for us, so I’ll pass that.

Thank you for your work, Zach, and thank you for your call.

Hey, thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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