abstract nouns

From a CNN story about Terry Jones promoting his new books, Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror, and Who Murdered Chaucer:

In the book, Jones criticizes the use of language to describe the conflict in Iraq, the coverage by the news media and the influence neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz have exercised in U.S. policy.

"First the [initial] bombing was called a war, but I thought a war had to have two sides," he says. "Then it became a war because people fought back, but now it's an 'insurgency.' "

For that matter, in the book he takes on the phrase "war on terrorism" with a Python's sense of the absurd: "But how is 'terrorism' going to surrender?" he writes. "It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to do anything at all of their own volition."

(Nitpick: in the first paragraph, CNN's, it should be "the language used", not "the use of language". It's hardly likely that Jones would decry the use of language, period, in trying to convey information.)