Frag
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de:Fragfr:Frag Frag is a term from the Vietnam war, most commonly meaning to assassinate an unpopular member of one's own fighting unit by dropping a fragmentation grenade into the victim's tent at night. The idea was that the attack would be blamed on the enemy, and, due to the dead man's unpopularity, no one would contradict the cover story. Fragging could also imply intentional friendly fire during combat. The victim of fragging was given three warnings, the first would be a grenade pin on the sheet of the victim if the victim continued their ways of commanding then a Tear Gas grenade was thrown in.
Fragging most often involved the killing of an unpopular or inept commanding officer or a senior noncommissioned officer. If a C.O. was incompetent, the belief was that fragging the officer was an extreme means to the ends of self preservation for the men serving under him. The nightmarish vision of fragging served as a warning to the junior officers to avoid earning the ire of the enlisted men being commanded through recklessness, cowardice, or lack of leadership. Fragging also occurs when the commander of the particular unit was either harsh and took on dangerous and suicidal missions.
As of March 22, 2005, there have been at least two cases of fragging in the US army in Iraq.
External links
- Walden Bello, "With the US Army on Trial, Can "Fragging" be far behind? (http://www.focusweb.org/popups/articleswindow.php?id=437)", FocusWeb, May 16, 2004.
Frag is a computer game term, used in first-person shooter deathmatch. A frag is a killcount; one gets a frag if one kills ("frags") another player. In some games, one also loses a frag for killing oneself (called a "suicide", even if unintentional), for example, by falling a long distance or discharging a rocket directly into a nearby wall. The origin of this term is most likely related to the military definition above, possibly stemming from Doom deathmatch in which the object is to kill other marines.
One does not usually lose frags for being killed by another player. This leads to the game theoretical consequence that one should engage in combat with another player unless severely outmatched because the potential benefit (one frag) outweighs the potential harm (lost time for respawning and the opponent, who may not be ranked first, getting a frag).
In this context the term "frag" is used to replace 'killing' or 'dying' as these terms are final - whereas first person shooters usually allow respawning (instant reincarnation). The usage of the term fragging is also a response to advocates of computer game censorship, who argue that violence in games can cause violence in real life. Most FPS game players maintain that the obvious fantasy of computer games acts as a barrier preventing this cause-effect relationship. The term 'fragging' rather than 'killing' thus becomes a semantic indicator of the distance of the violence from any real act.
Fragging is sometimes contrasted with "gibbing", or blowing the enemy player into smithereens. When one shoots another player's character, they have been fragged. When one shoots another with a rocket launcher, and little bits go flying everywhere, they have been gibbed. (The smithereens are called 'gibs'.) Both can be referred to as 'frags', however.
A computer hard drive is said to be fragged (short for "fragmented") if a large portion of its files are not contiguous (those files are also fragmented). See fragmentation.
Frag is also sometimes used as an euphemism for fuck and/or shit in certain gaming circles.
Frag is also used as a military term for a fragmentation grenade.