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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mph who wrote (18225)	5/10/2006 3:25:02 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 542946

Many terrible things are referred to as incidents. “This is the 56th anniversary of the tragic incident in Hiroshima and people are starting to forget about it. That is not right,” said Wasko Matsui, the ambassador’s wife. “We have to pass the sadness to the younger generation.” She expressed hope that the incident would never happen again anywhere. “The bombing made Japanese people unite and act as a team to create something from scratch,” she added. I do not think incident is an odd choice. It's meant to imply a separate unit of occurrence - as opposed to an ongoing situation. I don't think incident sanitizes anything, and from what I've seen of the way it is used it's often used in the company of horrible occurrences- like the above quote referring to the event that led to the death of 230k people. Is event better than incident? Is occurrence better? It's the modifier that's important. And horrendous was a good one for 9/11 or for Hiroshima, for that matter. (googling "incident" with atrocities- you'll find all sorts of horrible incidents many of them having to do with ethnic cleansing, and genocide interestingly enough- My Lai, the rape of Nanking, atrocities in Iraq- it's amazing what comes up with incident.)

To: mph who wrote (18225)	5/10/2006 3:28:25 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542946

What struck me about the comment was more the use of the term "incident" I noticed that, too. And I might have given Mr. Lucky points for that but for the fact that the statement immediately characterized the incident as the "deplorable" "killing" of "innocents."

To: mph who wrote (18225)	5/10/2006 3:30:29 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542946

From the 9/11 commission report: 821) Effective decisionmaking in New York was hampered by problems in com-mand and control and in internal communications. Within the Fire Department of New York, this was true for several reasons: the magnitude of the incident was unforeseen; commanders had difficulty communicating with their units; more units were actually dispatched than were ordered by the chiefs; some units self-dispatched; and once units arrived at the World Trade Center, they were neither comprehensively accounted for nor coordinated. .... it's such a good word, I figured it would show up in official US documents, and it does... kottke.org

To: mph who wrote (18225)	5/10/2006 6:47:11 PM
From: MrLucky	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542946

Some people seem to believe that incident is a good word for describing a situation where people are leaping from a skyscraper to avoid the heat and flame of jet fuel. I don't. Some people seem to believe that because the 9/11 commission, or some politician(s) used the word, it must be the gospel for describing a catastrophic event. I don't. If incident is the operative word, then each time a bunch Iraqis are car bombed to death, it is merely an incident. A suicide bomber in Palestine that kills a couple dozen people enjoying a pizza in Israel is just another incident. Thousands starving or dying of AIDs in Africa is one or more incidents. I wonder if Bono would agree. A couple weeks back the WAPO could not bring itself to use the word terrorist(s) in describing the senseless murder of a teacher in front of his students in a Bagdhad classsroom. If I recall, they beheaded him. Some posters on this thread took exception to my view of the WAPO description. Maybe they are subscribers. ;-) No matter. We all have an opinion. Some of us are better nit pickers than others. <g> Thanks for the input.