humanness.html - noun
(Politics) (War and Weaponry) A person or group of people placed in the line of fire so as to fend off any kind of attack. Etymology: Formed by compounding: a shield made up of a human or humans. History and Usage: The idea of the human shield has been known for some time, and the phrase itself had appeared in print before the end of the seventies. In the late eighties, there was a concentration of uses in connection with the situation in Lebanon. The greatest concentration of all, though , came in 1990-1 with President Saddam Hussein's holding of Western citizens in Kuwait and Iraq, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990; some of these people were transferred to military and industrial installations in order to dissuade Western forces from attacking. The human shield policy in Iraq was reversed in December 1990 and most of the hostages were allowed to return to their own countries, but the term human shield was by that time very familiar both in the UK and in the US, and continued to be used in news reports in relation to the holding of prisoners-of-war in the Gulf, and in other contexts. For example, when the Red Army arrived in Lithuania in mid January 1991 to seek out draft-dodgers there and take control of strategic buildings in Vilnius, Lithuanians were described as forming a human shield to defend those buildings. There is some variation in usage as regards whether it is the whole group of people who are thought of as forming a single human shield, or whether each individual person is regarded as a human shield (in which case the term can be used in the plural). Thirty-nine right-wing French MPs arrived yesterday from Paris to join the 'human shield' around Gen Aoun, who also received the unexpected 11th-hour support of 6,000 'Lebanese forces', or Phalange militiamen. Financial Times 30 Nov. 1989, section 1, p.
4 Forty-one Britons and a number of other Europeans in Kuwait have been rounded up by the Iraqis, apparently as the first of the thousands of foreigners who were waiting last night to be made a human shield for military and other installations. Daily Telegraph 20 Aug. 1990, p.
1 Americans...reportedly were taken from the Mansour-Melia Hotel in Baghdad on the night of Oct.
29 and are now presumed to be 'human shields' at an undisclosed strategic site in Iraq. Washington Post 1 Nov. 1990, section A, p.
1 See also guestage

humanness.html - (Lifestyle and Leisure) see Mexican wave

humanness.html - adj. & n.
--adj.

1 of or belonging to the genus Homo.
2 consisting of human beings (the human race).
3 of or characteristic of mankind as opposed to God or animals or machines, esp. susceptible to the weaknesses of mankind (is only human).
4 showing (esp. the better) qualities of man (proved to be very human).

--n.

a human being.

human being any man or woman or child of the species Homo sapiens. human chain a line of people formed for passing things along, e.g. buckets of water to the site of a fire. human engineering 1 the management of industrial labour, esp. as regards man-machine relationships.
2 the study of this. human equation a bias or prejudice. human interest (in a newspaper story etc.) reference to personal experience and emotions etc. human nature the general characteristics and feelings of mankind. human relations relations with or between people or individuals. human rights rights held to be justifiably belonging to any person.

humanness n. [ME humain(e) f. OF f. L humanus f. homo human being]

humanness.html - adj.
1 benevolent, compassionate.
2 inflicting the minimum of pain.
3 (of a branch of learning) tending to civilize or confer refinement.

humane killer an instrument for the painless slaughter of animals.

humanely adv. humaneness n. [var. of HUMAN, differentiated in sense in the 18th c.]

humanness.html - n.
1 an outlook or system of thought concerned with human rather than divine or supernatural matters.
2 a belief or outlook emphasizing common human needs and seeking solely rational ways of solving human problems, and concerned with mankind as responsible and progressive intellectual beings.
3 (often Humanism) literary culture, esp. that of the Renaissance humanists.

humanness.html - n.
1 an adherent of humanism.
2 a humanitarian.
3 a student (esp. in the 14th-16th c.) of Roman and Greek literature and antiquities.

humanistic adj. humanistically adv. [F humaniste f. It. umanista (as HUMAN)]