Showing posts with label Journalese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalese. Show all posts

Cliches and Cliched Comments

Some cliches and my even more cliched comments :)

This is a "landmark'' XYZ. What is? Is it really?Is there a "watermark"also?

My "blood boils''. Then how come you have not evaporated?

"Stock sinks" on Supreme Court judgement. Was it swimming till now?

Australia " hammer India" (this happened yesterday on the cricket field).  What else could they have used? A chain-saw?

XYZ gets a 'clean chit'. What happened to all the dirty ones? Were they washed or not?

"9/11, 7/11" and all other branded dates. Are we glorifying things that happened on those by branding them?

"Black Tuesday" to commemorate the stock market fall. If you invested in stocks, you can afford to lose the money.

You are "looking fabulous" . Hmm..






Allaying Fears

I am always intrigued by the jargon used by our journalist fraternity. 25 feared killed in landslide. Disaster strikes Maryland. Town heaves sigh of relief as tornado passes it by. Government allays fears about the H1N1 epidemic.

These are a small sample of headlines going about the 'newsy' rooms and on to the printed pages. What if they got really daring, and started to become bold (if not beautiful) and report what they truly felt, minus the jargon? We might see something like these reports-

He claimed a lot of things, but the audience knew it was hocus-pocus.

The news reporters in the press conference were clueless, and ill-prepared to ask intelligent questions, including this reporter.

The speech did not make any sense, but the audience clapped anyway.

There was no news to report on our beat, so we made up some.

The same old parade- looked more like a charade.

The roads had the same number of potholes as yesterday. So we did not bother to go out today.

It rained incessantly, so we let the TV channels go out there to report the 'reality' while writing our stories by watching them, sipping some hot tea with samosas in the office.





Places I Have Visited - A to Z

 I will mix up countries and Cities/Towns. A- Amsterdam B- Belgium C- Cambodia D- Detroit E- El Paso, texas F-France G- Germany H- Holland I...

These Were Liked a Lot