Friday, May 15, 2015

Where's Bernard Goetz when you need him? Confused reporter and editor are diffused. Or were they defused? Can they be excused? Let's just settle for confused, shall we?

Defuse vs. diffuse: To defuse (something) is to make a threatening or dangerous situation safer. For example, you might defuse a violent argument by calming the people involved, or you might literally defuse a bomb by deactivating its fuse. Diffuse works as both a verb and an adjective. To diffuse something is to disperse it or spread it out. When something is dispersed or spread out, it is diffuse. -- Grammarist.com
Mob of teens attack bystander who tries to break up brawl inside Brooklyn McDonald’s
Two young girls begin trading blows, and people try to tear them apart. An older gentleman in a hat tries to diffuse the situation, but is turned on by the teen boys crowding around, who seemed to have been enjoying the fight. The narrator, Don Balmain, can be heard gleefully yelling, “Kill him!” interspersed with laughs.
Fresh from exploding laws in South Carolina we now have a reporter (with usage checked by an editor) who would have us believe that a good Samaritan intervened in a fight to spread it around rather than deescalate it. Just what sort of illiterate products are the journalism schools turning out these days? No, wait, don't answer that.

6 comments:

Dave said...

Well, since the subject has been raised, here's a grammar problem that bugs me and is becoming universal: Using the plural pronoun "they" to refer to a single person. For example, "Someone (singular) said they (plural) forgot their umbrella." The proper pronoun should be "he," as in "Someone said he forgot his umbrella."

I'm guessing this comes from a subconscious fear of committing a political correctness violation: What if the individual in question is a woman? What if he's a male trans-gendered into a female but also homosexual? (Double-triple PC violation!!!)

Anonymous said...

Nice to know some things in Brooklyn haven't changed. Let's see that happen in the so-called "gentrified" areas the yuppies that can't afford Manhattan have moved to.

Anonymous said...

I'm willing to bet the farm that this was intentional and that it will continue. Unable to defend the incoming ordnance from his first folly and unwilling to just admit a simple mistake, that writer turns to this now, probably singing the autocorrect song along the way somewhere, while loving all the clicks. More articles coming will contain these types of things to get people on the hunt for them. In order to keep it going he will have to sprinkle them in here and there.

What "journalism" schools are turning out is the indoctrinated fools taught only how to spout one line in any way to generate page views. This is this fools way to do so.

Jimmy the Saint said...

What you complaining for? He use English much goodly!

rexxhead said...

PIX11 is the news arm of WPIX-TV which is owned by the NY Daily News. They have long since been captured by barbarians.

Bad Cyborg said...

How about the reporter also implied that the good samaritan was a pedo. Notice how the writer put it, "but is turned on by the teen boys crowding around" (emphasis mine, BC). I think the writer intended to convey that some of the guys watching the fight attacked the old man. The way he wrote it sounds to me like the presence of the teenaged boys watching the fight aroused the old man sexually.

Of course that begs the issue since the writer told the story in that aggravating eternal present tense people have fallen into using these days. I'm not sure why they do that. I just know it grates on my nerves.