Saw one of those police chases that television news stations out west like to pass off as news the other day. It ended when the drive crashed the car and ran from the tops.
But that isn’t what the talking heads on the tube said.
There wasn’t a car chase. No. The cops were ivolved in a “police activity.:
And the car didn’t crash. It was “involved in an incident.” The drive didn’t run from the cops. He “exited the vehicle? and – one caught — he was not caught or captured. Nope. The police “apprehended” him where they are not “investigating the possibility of multiple violatons of the municipal code.”
Good grief. Whatever happened to English?
7 thoughts on “Chasing good English”
My favorite is when police are “working an accident”? How does one “work” an accident?? Unrelated to police activity is the increasingly common usage of single letters in lieu of words in written messages. No doubt, this is courtesy of Twitter. As in r u busy? Indeed, what has happened to written English? I understand that language (and its written form) is constantly changing, but when I see examples like these, my opinion of the “writer” declines considerably!
Likewise, what has happened to the past tense of verbs? Newscasters often use the present tense when describing events that have happened in the past — even in the distant past.
‘Good’ English: my friend, Beverly Shute, London.
Those TV people were using cop-speak. I oughta know — I do some police reporting on a newspaper/website and that’s typical language used by any police agency.
The TV station should know better.
Much of the stilted speach we hear today is a result of political correctness. One is visually impaired, not blind as a bat. Sarah Palin is mentally challenged, not an effing retard. As a society, we have become so afraid of offending any single individual that we now offend practically everyone. I say it’s time for plain speaking. In that regard, Ken Cuccinelli is not the southern end of a north bound equine, he’s just a horse’s ass.
The TV news stations hire people to transcribe news stories from video, which they tend to do verbatim. Ever notice how many of the local news stories begin with “It happened…” And these are journalism GRADUATES, no less, whose use of language seems to be disintegrating by the day. They must have their vocabularies down to about 800 words by now.
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