One of my favorite quotes comes from playwright Tom Stoppard. “Words are sacred,” he writes. “They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

In other words: Words matter. So, when we edit stories here, we spend a lot of time looking at not just structure and whether a scholar has backed up their assertions. We look at word choice. That careful approach actually led us to commission a story about the choice of a word used by both sides in the Israel-Hamas war: genocide. We wanted to help readers understand, was it accurate to use this word to describe the actions by either Israel or Hamas?

That question led editor Amy Lieberman to scholar Alexander Hinton, who is the director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University-Newark. Hinton understood the need for clarity about the word. “As the Israel-Hamas conflict grinds on amid continuing genocide allegations,” he writes in his story, “it’s crucial to understand what genocide actually is and how this term has been used for political purposes in the past.”

Hinton examines the initial meaning of the word, starting from when Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, devised it in 1944. But he points out that words don’t exist in a vacuum, and the political use and abuse of the word have purposely obscured its meaning: “There is also a long history of government officials arguing about the definition of genocide to deny that it was actually happening.”