Filed under: News, Writing | Tags: annoying, bad reporting, bad writing, pet-peeve, petty
I have no comments on the Austrian mother who locked up her daughters for years in their basement; that perversity speaks for itself. What I have a (petty) comment on, is the perverse wording of the UK Times Online article covering the Austrian incident.
The first sentence/paragraph of the article is:
Three girls who were imprisoned by their mother in a house of indescribable filth for seven years may never recover from the ordeal, experts said last night.
Hmm, was it really “indescribable” filth? I’ve seen some pretty vile filth described in articles and books before. Isn’t it a writer’s job to describe things like that? Of course, in the third paragraph, the writer goes ahead and describes the filth:
When they were discovered, their home in a smart, upper middle-class suburb had no running water and was filled with waste and excrement a metre high. The floor was corroded by mice urine.
So I guess the filth was quite describable after all, and the author used the word “indescribable” because he wasn’t all that careful in putting together his opening sentence. I’ve seen this done quite a few times, and it really annoys me. When someone makes a living off stringing words together, I’d hope they take the time to use words correctly.
I did a quick Google search (very quick) to see if I could find others also peeved by the misuse of the word “indescribable” and all I found was a comment to a blog post about a new blog that tracks misuse of the word “literally.” Commenter number 9, Satan, is on the ball.
As an aside, it also seems strange to me that the writer used the term “mice urine.” Is that technically correct? Shouldn’t it be “mouse urine”?
Filed under: Agriculture, Animal Law | Tags: Blogs, Chicago, Commenters, Foie Gras, Lack of Nuanced Debate
The city of Chicago overturned a ban it had previously imposed on foie gras. Nick Fox of the NYT’s “Diner’s Journal” blog had a post on it, where he mentions that:
Similarly, many of the comments to the blog post make the same argument, and are cheering Chicago’s overturning of the ban as a victory against so-called “Nanny-State” regulation of behaviors that pose health problems, such as the ever-growing bans on smoking in public places, or New York City’s recent ban on trans-fats in restaurants (the “food police” is mentioned more than once). Some typical comment excerpts:
But this is the wrong debate, and is conflating two separate issues. The foie gras ban was not pushed for and passed for the reasons that people support smoking and trans-fat bans, which are regulated for the effect they have on the health of the general population. Supporters of the ban wish to eliminate what some people believe to be a food production process that by its very nature (necessarily requiring force-feeding ducks until they get diseased livers ten times their natural size) is inhumane.
There are plenty of sound libertarian arguments against government trying to stop us from hurting ourselves through our choices, but it’s an entirely different issue when the harm is being imposed on others by our choices, which is what the animal activists believe is wrong in this case. Whether or not one believes the harm caused on these ducks and geese is acceptable for our high-end culinary pleasures is, it seems to me, the debate that should be had.