Good morning campers! I start every day with all the puzzles in the Globe. As you know I am trudging through writing a book on the history of Athletics at Lowell Textile/Tech. Now the sections on the sports teams are pretty boring to write...lots of names, results and statistics and all. But I do get to wax poetical in other parts of each chapter where I describe life in the city, school and athletics in general for each decade. (And if I dont get release there, I always have FB posts!) It is there where I get to really think about the words I choose and their nuances. In the mornings crossword there was a clue which got me thinking. The clue was Threw things at...the answer was pelted. Now, to me, that is not a good clue. Pelted has always implied to me that something was actually hit, not just thrown at. Better clue: Threw and hit Such is the nature of our marvelous language. I have serious concern for how much todays society is missing with its random tweets, texts and glib captioning of daily events, both in our hands and on our televisions, all screens, actually. Or, since thoughts are to be expressed in sometimes as few as 132 characters, will we get better at using just the right word? I also saw and heard, several times this morning a misuse of a word, which I attributed to carelessness, on the Weather Channel. I know it must be tough to go over the same material while on live broadcast, and to think of ways to vary the delivery slightly (for ones own sanity). The error this morning was semantic, I suppose, but technically misleading. The were warning about an increased rip current threat later this week on Long Island, and several people kept referring to the danger zone as the southern end of Long Island. Well, Im sorry, but Long Island lies basically east/west with a general tilt to the south when one heads west on the island. The southern END of Long Island is Breezy Point Tip beach, off of Brooklyn, which may have some rip current action this week. What they MEANT or SHOULD have said was the Southern SIDE of Long Island as the threat stretches nearly a hundred miles east along the WHOLE island to Montauk point. Semantics? For most of us, yes, but should someone drown at Montauk, you KNOW their lawyer would be the first to show that the broadcast only stated the southern END not the whole southern SIDE...blah, blah, blah. When all is well, theyre just little things, but when something goes wrong, the slightest word change makes ALL the difference, no?
Posted on: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 15:51:19 +0000
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