EDITORIAL - Bomb

A woman from Cebu City is in a bind. Make that a double-bind. For she not only has estafa cases pending in court, she now has to explain two letters she sent by courier to two judges, both warning of a bomb attack by Moro rebels.

But wait, is a warning of a supposed bomb attack the same, or even similar, to a threat of a bombing? In our simple understanding, a warning of a bomb attack may sound like this: "Hey, a bomb may explode in your building!"

Contextually, that does not sound as ominous as a bomb threat, which can go like this: "I will bomb your building!" In a world under terrorist threat, however, the authorities are in no mood to dabble in contexts.

Technicalities can now get anyone in trouble. For example, you can no longer utter the word "bomb" in a plane, no matter how contextually you intended the utterance as a joke, or as innocuously as reading it out loud as a clue from a crossword puzzle.

Just say the word bomb in a plane and everyone will descend on you as if you were Bin Laden himself. And for good measure too. At 30,000 feet and nothing between you and mother earth except Kingdom Come, the word "bomb" can reverse hernia into goiter among the faint-hearted.

But the Cebu City woman was not in a plane, although it remains doubtful if the circumstance of her location can mitigate the delicious fright the word bomb can instill in people, especially judges not used to hearing anything more explosive than a gavel banging.

That the woman appears to be in trouble with the law because of her estafa cases already gives us a fair idea of how she intended those letters containing the word bomb to be. And she could not have meant them to be some rather early Christmas cards.

Still, she has a whistler's chance of scraping through, if only because she is not in a plane where no ambiguity about the word bomb suffices. On terra firma, we are more open-minded, and a bomb can mean anything, like letters that fail to deliver, or a woman who fails to pay up.