Nicholas Smallwood

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”?