Word: lemkin
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MORE THAN 60 YEARS ago, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin fled Nazi-occupied Europe, arrived in the U.S. and invented a word that he thought would change the world. Lemkin believed that genocide-- from the Greek geno (race or tribe) and the Latin cide (from caedere, killing)--would carry such stigma that states would be loath to commit the crime--or to allow...
...Lemkin, a haunted refugee and relentless lobbyist, managed to construct a lasting norm, as Webster's and the Oxford English Dictionary granted his coinage lexicographic admission. In 1948 he went door to door at the new United Nations and persuaded representatives to endorse the Genocide Convention, the U.N.'s first human rights treaty, which committed signatories to "undertake to prevent and to punish" the monstrous horror...
...first and most extensive story she told was that of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who mounted a campaign before World War II to outlaw genocide--a term he invented...
...Forty-nine members of [Lemkin's] family were exterminated in the Holocaust," she said. Lemkin eventually migrated to the U.S., where, according to Power, he worked tirelessly to convince the U.N. to ratify the Genocide Convention...
Even when the U.N. approved the convention in 1948 it was a bittersweet victory for Lemkin, according to Power. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the convention, and Lemkin died a year later...