This is off-topic, granted, but I’m a writer and every now and then I’m struck by the peculiar usage of words and phrases. That’s why, as soon as I saw this AP article entitled “Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely”, I was baffled by the title.

They think World War III is likely? We’re in a World War right now. And frankly, this is World War IV because the Cold War will come to be regarded as World War III.

Wars are generally named by historians upon their conclusion, after the event can be evaluated in retrospect. Nobody fifty years into the Hundred Years War called it the Hundred Years War, right? And we all know that World War I was called “The Great War” until after World War II. People don’t know how wars are going to end.

What the writer is meaning to say is that a “nuclear exchange will take place within the polled Americans’ lifetime.” The misuse of “World War III” to mean a nuclear exchange is because, as I said, people in the events as they happen don’t know how they’re going to conclude. During the Cold War, it was widely assumed that someday there would be a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers, and at that point the Cold War would have heated up and become “World War III.”

In retrospect, we can see that the Cold War was obviously the third world war: dozens of nations on each side were involved, after all. There were numerous battlefronts in the war, including Korea, Viet Nam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and numerous Asian/South American countries. We just didn’t recognize it as a war because it didn’t take the shape we were used to. Instead of being fought by thousands of soldiers in trenches, it was fought by covert operatives and proxies.

The War on Terror, involving dozens of allied nations on one side fighting terrorist groups everywhere from the Middle East to islands in the Pacific, may someday be called World War IV. (It’s a better name anyway.)