If you'll stick to the subject and stop sniping at members of the discussion it will move forward more smoothly.

This from the start of that New Republic article gillymor posted:

In the course of reporting "A Liberator, But Never Free," about the recent discovery of the late Dr. David Wilsey’s letters home from the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, one intriguing semantic anomaly transfixed every expert consulted: the Spokane anesthesiologist’s persistent use of the word “holocaust” to describe the horrors all around him.

There has long been a rigorous debate among etymologists and historians as to when the lowercased “holocaust,” generically defined as a large-scale calamity usually involving fire, became the proper noun used specifically to name the period of Nazi genocide against European Jews. Yet there is little debate that that formalization occurred years after the war’s end.

“I immediately wrote it down the first time I saw him using this word,” said historian Patricia Heberer-Rice of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “There’s a bit of a conundrum about when this word was first used.” Harold Marcuse, a Holocaust historian at University of California San Diego and author of Legacies of Dachau, said, “The fact that he’s using it right then, in that context, makes it a very interesting historical fact that will contribute to scholarship.”

Read the rest of it at the link above.