Supposably NATO

Just to be clear: it is called a "pact" because it is an agreement. It is called the Warsaw Pact because it was signed in Warsaw.

On the first of May, 1955, in beautiful downtown Warsaw, eight friends sat down around a table and signed up to be Best Friends for Life. On that day, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union signed the "Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance," aka "The Warsaw Pact."

At the time, everyone (except Albania) had friendly Soviet troops marching around their streets.

Many people think the Warsaw Pact was signed as a direct response to the post-war alliance set-up in Belgium in 1949 called the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization", aka "NATO."

Today, the term Warsaw Pact (formally dissolved in 1991) has sinister connotations, bringing back memories of the Cold War, of Stalinism, Soviet oppression, and the Iron Curtain.

When people say "NATO Pact" and "NATO Pact countries," therefore, I am bothered by more than one question. First, is it possible that people do not know what they are saying? Some of the users (no finger pointing) of this term are professors of history... Second, is it possible that people are saying this with an agenda to disparage NATO? To many people, NATO is already a four-letter word and does not need anything else to make it darker and more menacing.

A deep background, unnamed, and unidentified source, deep within the machinery of the American government, until recently posing as a maple tree in Warsaw, Indiana, told me: "We say NATO alliance not pact as the latter sounds too Soviet."

Aha! Lexically speaking a pact and a treaty and an alliance and an accord and an agreement all speak to similar ideas. So we could say pact, but we don't. We don't like the way it sounds.

But I must take issue with Maple Tree on this point: we do not say it because it is not its name. Just as we never said "Warsaw Volunteer Society."

It's just wrong.

Enough people say "supposably" so as to have earned it a place in a few dictionaries. History may never record any controversy around whether or not it was a word and whether or not "supposedly" would have been the correct usage.

If enough people say it, does it become fact? Supposably....