Because nothing says “accident” like leaving a prisoner in the middle of a railroad crossing!

    • dan1101@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I see your point. It’s the same sort of thing for various violence around the world. Headlines like “3 die in West Bank Violence” should actually be “Israeli Soldiers Kill 3 Palestinians.”

    • JoJoGAH@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This misuse of language has irritated me for years in both media and personal life. “It” didn’t do a damn thing!

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
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      1 year ago

      I think this also speaks to an issue around suicide. I used to work in behavioral healthcare and “suicide” is a similar issue. There’s a lot of debate around “commit suicide,” since it sort of blames the person and not the illness.

      It’s hard to frame these conversations around cause of death in certain situations.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      hit by train

      hit by car

      hit by a pitch

      hit by stray bullet

      struck by new knowledge

      This is just the way our natural grammatical structure works.

        • SCB@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          We’re not having a discussion about grammar, we’re having a discussion about how phrases can be misleading even if technically correct, and how those phrases can end up serving inhuman agendas.

          We’re having a discussion about the way a person wrote a headline, and I explained that, rather than believe an elaborate conspiracy theory, you could acknowledge that this is just the way English grammatical structures work.

          The alternative to “hit by a train” is going to be multiple sentences long to convey the same information. Your conspiracy theory about it being a deflection falls apart because the entire article is about how the officer is legally and ethically at fault, accepts that, and that the family understands that.

          “Trapped prisoner in path of train” oddly enough, is slanted language with misleading nuances.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I mean, the correct phrase here is “murdered by a cop” but you can see where the people that pay cops to murder us might object to that phrasing. They like soft language where of course everyone wishes that things had gone differently but it’s also no one’s fault and nothing is going to change.