triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Fuzzy Thinking

Living as I do in an emerging urban neighborhood, I see a lot of bumper stickers with which I disagree. One common one caught my eye this morning, and I finally realised just how wrong it is. "Peace is patriotic" is exactly the same grammatic and epistimological error as "Patriotism is peaceful". The two words describe different sorts of things which cannot directly be compared. One could assert that a belief in the importance in peace is patriotic. This would not represent the same sort of error. Given that the word "peace" in that statement would remain a gloss for "not resorting to icky unpeaceful activities in the face of an idealogical enemy which has committed acts of war against our nation and has sworn to destroy it" the thinking would remain fallacious.

Update:

This isn't the only bumper sticker out there with an error in it's English usage.