Anybody else?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:27 PM -0500 11/3/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Has anybody else noticed the TV voice-over guy who speaks of "rare but
>serious fatalities" that have or may occur as a consequence of using
>the patent medicine that he's shilling for?
>--
>-Wilson Gray

903 google hits for "serious fatalities", only a minority of which
refer (plausibly) to something like a serious number/rate of
fatalities.  (To be sure, the number includes a lot of irrelevant
cites in which a sentence boundary intervenes.)

Presumably this is a blend of "serious accident" (or whatever) and
"fatalities".  Note the possibly related use of "casualties" to refer
sometimes to those (at least) injured as the result of military
action, act of nature, accidents, whatever, and sometimes
specifically to those killed (as in "There were 155 casualties and
over 500 more victims who were seriously injured").

Larry