From today's NYT newsletter:
Two powerful car bombs ripped through a market in central Baghdad on Monday in one of the worst scenes of carnage since the war began.
I have read "one of the worst scenes of carnage since the war began" so many times in the past couple years that I'm now convinced reporters have this phrase defined as a keyboard macro.
Which is hardly to blame them.
3 comments:
I blame the reporter.
A less lazy reporter might have written "killing 53 Iraqis (2.3 times the daily average), bringing the total dead this year to 1148, and since the war began to approx. 185,246". Readers might find the running total a little less inuring.
And the word carnage is pure tabloid. How is it that a person killed by a stray bullet is less dead than a body shredded into dog food. It is the loss of human life, not the state of the dead corpse, that is hopefully being mourned here. Perhaps we should give the murderers a cleaner bomb so they don't make such a mess. I am surprised and disappointed that even the NYT would stoop to such tabloidia.
I think they have just run out of descriptions for this occupation-turned-war.
Dan --
The innumeracy of the typical NYT reader, and staffer, is well-known. Your proposed lede would have as much chance of making it past a MEGO-fearing editor as a steak past a Rottweiler. In defense of this particular story, there are specific data farther down.
I don't have a problem with "carnage" in this case. True, it can be overused, especially for shock value, and true, someone is just as dead from a bullet as a bomb. I accept it here because it highlights the multiple simultaneous killings, not to mention the increased amount of mess to be picked up afterwards.
Brian's point is probably true. How many ways words can there be in the thesaurus for this situation?
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