Noun choice, sex, lies, and video by Geoffrey K. Pullum.
From the post:
Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.
Deeply amusing post on language use in the UK.
While reading it I thought of how topic maps could be used to map the language used in either national or local news reporting.
But, then I thought such a topic map would simply be adding to the debasing of the English language. I don’t think there has been an automobile accident reported within my hearing that wasn’t “tragic” if there was a fatality. There are any number of terms that can be applied to automobile accidents but “tragic” isn’t one of them.
Any more than the “on location” reporters who say with straight faces that SUV’s have “knifejacked” due to ice, snow, rain, whatever. (The link has a great animation to show reporters in those cases are simply mouthing noises that resemble meaningful speech.)
Not to say you should not create a topic map of language usage in the news, just keep it a secret so it doesn’t act as a bad influence on others.