Pet peeve

[cactuswatcher]

My latest gripe with the news culture copying mistakes from every other news outlet is the misuse of the word "after."

From my local TV station's website, Pedestrian suffers life-threatening injuries after being struck by vehicle.

How horrible! First the person was hit by a vehicle, then afterward suffered life-threatening injuries? ...Of course not... For God's sake stop using 'after' plus a progressive tense as a synonym for 'when' plus a simple past tense. The injuries didn't happen after. They happened when!

Note the difference between this and a similarly constructed sentence, "Pedestrian dies after being struck by vehicle..." It's a very possible sequence of events, where the sentence quoted above is very unlikely.

Comments

[conuly]

I'm not sure that "when" conveys the same meaning, though. The injuries are presumably caused by the accident, not just more or less concurrent with it.

[cactuswatcher]

See ATPo-ONM's comment below and my reply.

[atpo_onm]

Good point. Although...

... if one truly longed to be nit-picky, depending on the time interval chosen, "after" could be accurately used. For example, it was probably at least a fair number of microseconds after the pedestrian was initially physically contacted by some portion of the vehicle before the injuries occurred. Who knows, perhaps even milliseconds?

Right? Yes?

( Sneaks away now, or after a few picoseconds...)

;-)

[cactuswatcher]

I think a better argument along that line would be: "The pedestrian was hit in the side, flew 30 feet through the air then suffered serious head injuries when they struck the pavement," which surely makes the exact wording with "after being struck by vehicle" technically correct. But short of dissecting the accident, which the TV news people are very rarely going to do, I see the whole accident as one event. The wording with 'after' in use these days is in fact a cliche just adding unnecessary verbiage. That's something my high school journalism teacher would have frowned on, and she was the one who taught me to get most of the useless crap out of my own writing.

[atpo_onm]

Well, you may be pleased to know that your editing assistance back during my work on the Angel fanfic is still having an effect. One of the honchos for this big local record swap meet has been after me to do some technical articles for their monthly newsletter, and I was working on that project earlier this week.

I wrote up articles for the first two months, and then as I always do, went over them several times for basic proofreading, and... then for how I could trim them to make them cleaner. Several words/sentences were indeed rearranged or deleted.

So there ya go!

[jesuswasbatman]

It's another way of reducing the apparent responsibility of the person who hit them.

[shadowkat]

I feel an overwhelming urge to send you Newsday articles. Their copy-edit department is apparently non-existent.