Yes, Mr Dog, but the question remains, what were you laying? Or have you been lying this whole time?
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That’s why I’m glad that they’ve started reporting “car crashes” instead of “car accidents”. Cars don’t have accidents because they don’t drive. Even if a car was wrecked because mud slid over it while it was parked in a valley during a rainstorm, the car didn’t choose to park there. A person did.
Whenever there’s a shooting, someone was behind a trigger. And if you’re a real journalist, you don’t hide that shit from anyone.
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Good point. But even then it’s pushing it. It’s a kind of black humor, I think, more than a serious term to describe the language. “Exonerative” is just a flavor of implication, of tone. “Exonerative tense” was apparently derived from “past exonerative tense”, a more obvious term. There it refers to language such as “mistakes were made”— more corporate than cop.
The police flavor of exonerative language derives from the language of police reports, which are the result of decades of selective pressure to hold up in court. So there’s maybe an interesting analysis yet to be made there, regarding the triangulation between what works in front of judges and juries and what ends up in wild headlines.
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Just so long as it’s not called “passive voice”, because it’s just as often not that. (There’s always a minimisation of agency, but the passive is only one way of doing that.)
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Fatty pork products?
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It’s in the revised tweet
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