Horizon

See also 'miracle': "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

"It is a sad and beautiful world. Buzz off."

- Roberto Benigni, in "Down By law."

The dreary pedantry rolls on... I know one thing, if my kid drowned, I wouldn't stroke my beard for two long worrying about whether it was correct to call it a tragedy.

But if, on the night your kid drowned, you flicked on the news and saw an announcer referring to "...this tragic death..." with smarmy showbiz sentimentality, wouldn't you feel used?

But let's say you're not the parent. Let's say you're the newscaster whose job it is to communicate the event to the public, or the minister consoling mourners at the funeral. Is calling it a tragedy the best you can do? It's a word that's used so often and so carelessly that's it's lost all meaning. It's usage represents a lack of sincerity and a loss of decency.

I would also like to place a moratorium on "sifting through the rubble."

Robbie has a beard? Never imagined it.

If a newsreader said 'A child drowned today when she fell through the ice at so and so. The tragedy occurred whilst...' I would think that quite appropriate. I'm quite sure that in the crass and insane media culture of the USA, they overcook events like that. But the word tragedy shouldn't be outlawed, because a child's accidental death is a tragic event; to merely, tight-lippedly, say 'accident' is underwriting it IMO. What would you consider worthy of being called a tragedy by a newsreader then?

I didn't suggest outlawing anything. I thought I was saying the words were used far too frequently for my taste. It is true I was lamenting that here are some words that have lost their original meanings, that they seem weaker to me now that they have come to mean something else. I can't get around the fact, though, that "tragic" is a legitimate word to use to describe the calamitous.

If I were a newsreader I would say "accident" instead of "tragedy" because my job (as I would see it)would be to report the news and not attempt to assauge anyone's grief by inserting some Greek drama into it. But that's me and I'm sure I wouldn't last long in the newsreader business.

I think Bobby is trying to rescue the word "tragedy" from becoming devalued and therefore meaningless. Its use as a conventional piety tends to dilute its effect as a descriptive term, and "when the salt hath lost its saltness, wherewith shall it be salted"?

I understand what you're both saying and I can imagine that US news is probably very glutinous, but the real enemy in this is TV itself, it's the ultimate cheapener.

I tell you what I really hate though: the *music* that news programmes have: that bleeping, psuedo-martial, usually electronic blare, day in, day out. Totally unnecessary, it's just another way news reporters--vain, self-aggrandizing and a wee bit parasitical as you've noticed--and tv have made themselves seem important. News should come on with a few pips, like on Radio 4. That's all you need.

What really gets me is that people make careers out of composing that music. Why? As Dr. Strangelove once said, "It could easily be accomplished with a computer."

...or as Hendrik Hertzberg wonderfully phoneticized it, "A chikentic gomplex of gumbyuders."