Fatals (noun)

[Laurence Horn]

>Barbara wrote:
>
>"Today's Chicago Tribune has a headline that reads "White [Sec of
>State] says teen fatals a priority". The article is about teen
>driving fatalities. I have done a quick Google search (for English
>results only) and, leaving aside references to The Fatals (a band?)
>and to Femme Fatals (another band? the same band), the hits all seem
>to be related to traffic fatalities--and the word appears in
>headlines--not in the body of the text (or, in one case, a link at
>the top of the page--the actual headline has fatalities)."
>
>We then had a discussion about other adjectives made into nouns (*creative*,
>etc).  But has anyone ever heard this use of *fatal(s)* pronounced?  (I
>haven't.)  The first mental pronunciation of it that I came up with was
>
>/f@'taelz/
>
>with the stress on the same syllable as in *fatality/-ies*, because I imagined
>it as a headlinese abbreviation of the noun, not as a nominalisation of the
>adjective, which would I suppose be pronounced /'fejt at lz/.
>
>In what is about the same semantic field (headline and TV-show crime?), we
>already have *perpetrator* > *perp* > *perps*.  Any thoughts?
>
In the latter case, though, the stress issue doesn't arise.  I'm not
sure about the pronunciation of "fatals" as a noun; I'd probably read
it as /'fejt at lz/ myself.  Of course, /f@'taelz/ already exists, as in
"femmes fatales" noted above (for the borrowed collocation, not
necessarily the eponymous band).  I've never heard "fatals" (on a TV
crime show or elsewhere, unlike the ubiquitous "perps".

LH

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