Saturday, August 18, 2007

The Morning News

--I looked up the daily newspaper in Jamaica to see how the approaching hurricane was being covered from the scene. At first I thought I was reading an Onion parody, but no, it was real. Maybe there's some sort of movement for phonetic authenticity going on there that I don't know about. Who knew dialect was still being rendered this way in 2007?

--The only TV news we can stand to watch regularly in our house is the BBC World News, despite that ridiculous shiny red set that looks like a South Jersey diner, that thumping techno music that would be more at home in a Bulgarian nightclub, and those male news-readers who affect weird British speech patterns that make them sound like Elmer Fudds who have passed their A-levels. (I keep hoping there'll be riots in Kuala Lumpur just to listen to these guys try to say the words).

But I digress. This is about the coal-mine disaster in Utah. Why do the American media keep parroting the term used by the coal-mine owners, who insist that disaster is the result of "seismic shifts." The BBC, to its credit, calls it what it is: A cave-in.

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1 comment:

Joshua Katt said...

Love it, why not. Better than santized press. Gives you some real flavor of the Island. Hope to visit some day.