{"id":1911,"date":"2005-01-30T23:02:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-30T23:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=1911"},"modified":"2018-07-20T09:45:58","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T14:45:58","slug":"1911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/01\/30\/1911\/","title":{"rendered":"Verb Abuse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CNN Headline: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2005\/WORLD\/europe\/01\/30\/spain.blast\/index.html\" target=\"_new\">Explosion targets Spanish hotel<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a physicist, so take what I am about to say with a grain of sodium chloride, but<\/p>\n<p><center><\/p>\n<h3>Explosions don&#8217;t target things; people do<\/h3>\n<p><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Headline writers use this cheap personification when they want to hide appropriate subject of the sentence, the actor who made the typically bad thing happen.  To say &#8220;Basque Terrorists Target Hotel&#8221; makes the Spanish separatists sound just a little mean, doesn&#8217;t it?  Better the explosion itself &#8211;an act of nature that just happens under just the right circumstances, such a combination of Semtex and detonator&#8211; take the rap than to single out the people who actually performed the deed.<\/p>\n<p>Headline writers also use this when they want to emphasize an inanimate object&#8217;s role in the event, especially when the prevailing windsom indicates that the object itself is bad.  That&#8217;s why you get SUVs running down grandmothers and guns killing innocent bystanders.<\/p>\n<p>Personification is a nice device in fiction or creative non-fiction.  Journalists should probably avoid it, except when their journalism is fiction or creative non-fiction.  Come to think of it, perhaps journalists are already adhering to this maxim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CNN Headline: Explosion targets Spanish hotel. I&#8217;m not a physicist, so take what I am about to say with a grain of sodium chloride, but Explosions don&#8217;t target things; people do Headline writers use this cheap personification when they want to hide appropriate subject of the sentence, the actor who made the typically bad thing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1911"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20613,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions\/20613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}