Here is the news
Whatever
the medium, the style is the same.
Here's why – as they say, in that overly chummy tone.
Two
suffer indigestion after eating breakfast
The
pair complained of stomach cramps after tucking into a fry-up in one
West Country village. They had always visited the Carthouse Cafe in
Clombury, Cornwall, but admitted to downing their first meal of the
day more quickly than usual. The villagers are reported to have
suffered only short term effects. The cafe have declined to comment.
It comes amid reports that wallabies had been spotted on the village
green. A non-sequitur was reported by our local correspondent.
Elsewhere
in the news:
Popular
family pet dies following kick by wallaby.
Royston
Rabbit sadly died at the scene after passers-by failed to resuscitate
them after the incident. Royston's family paid tribute, saying "he
was really a viscious little beast with those nasty sharp teeth he
had". They have asked for privacy at this time, but probably
won't get it.
In
the first example, the location of the incident is, as usual,
nebulous. Commonly there is a semi-fictitious county name that,
following boundary reorganisation, means little to the local reader.
Conwy County and Caerphilly County are two such. You
have to read on to find the actual place (click-bait?). I often see
an incident described "on a North Wales island", yet we
know they are usually referring to Ynys Mon (Anglesey). It's a big enough place, and sufficiently well-known, to be named in
the headline. I once read an Isle of Wight 'local' newspaper
item that described an incident "on an island off the coast of
Hampshire" that just happened to be 22.5 miles wide. Is there
another? Local news has been centralised to
somewhere in Surrey, or even to an another universe. That may be the problem. Whoever (or whatever) writes the news has little knowledge of local geography.
The
number of people involved is always clumsily written, as in "two
suffer" or even "the Clombury Two". "The first
meal of the day" avoids having to write 'breakfast' twice.
Recent items about Mars irritatingly refer to it as "the
Red Planet" by the time we reach the second paragraph, in
whatever news medium you happen to read. So good they named it twice?
But not in the news apparently.
A
little further in, we invariably read "It comes as ...", or
"It comes amid...". What is 'it'? This vague 'thing' is
often grammatically disconnected from the later context. But I am no
expert in grammar. It comes amid my fading memory of O level English.
And
who are "villagers"? Supposedly they are not those part
time inhabitants, those Entitled Grabbers who fancy a sanitised rural
life in their own image, who complain about church bells and the
mud from the farmer's tractor. No, in the news they come
straight out of the cliché
file
labelled "rustics", and are imagined wearing smocks and
chewing on a piece of straw. Quaint folksy folk. When asked what he thought of Folk Music, Louis Armstrong famously said "All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing...".
As for "The
cafe have
declined to comment": surely, "the cafe has",
as cafe is a singular noun. But the media are a law unto themselves,
especially in sports reporting, "Portsmouth FC have
spent £5 million on a new bloke to kick a ball". Sorry. "The
club" [insert your favourite] is a singular noun [It has
spent £5m, surely].
A
sombre item, but in the second example, someone always dies in
the present tense ("Rabbit dies"). I understand this is to
give a story immediacy, but instead it implies they are continually dying, in
some Purgatory, stuck in suspended animation at the point of
death. Rarely does the news say X has died. Finally. In the
perfect tense. Celebrities rush in to "pay tribute", but
never to say how much they hated the old goat, Surely there are other ways of reporting how others have responded to the loss
without having to "pay tribute" every time. It's as if the
whole lot has been written in advance, with just a few gaps to be
filled. Insert name of deceased. Insert names of those paying
tribute. Insert name of newspaper.
There
is no news, just standardised information. The "informatics"
empire has the upper hand. In a similar vein, I read today that the
world's oldest person "dies" [has died]. That never happens of
course, as, curiously, there's always another coming along behind.
LINKS
I can comment on one of your betes noires, if not rule on the grammatical correctness. With The Cafe and The Club, i think the writers are using metonym, in this case substituting the place for the institution or specifically, the people of the institution, but using the plural, nevertheless. I'm not sure if this is correct or optional.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Thanks. The practice still grates.
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