somewhat odd headline

[Joel S. Berson]

Contemplating, one can put some logic into the
headline.  If one tries hard enough.

If Huffington had written "Gaddafi Captured,
Killed", it might have been seen as an atrocity
-- a prisoner of war killed in custody.  On the
other hand, "Gaddafi Killed, Captured" neatly
gives the suggestion that he was killed
(accidentally, it has been claimed)* and then (his body was) captured.

* I have heard conflicting reports about whether
he was unintentionally shot during a fire-fight,
or captured first and then accidentally shot.

Joel

At 10/20/2011 10:46 AM, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>Content-Disposition: inline
>
>On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:44:47AM -0400, Laurence Horn wrote:
> > Muammar Gaddafi Killed, Captured In Sirte: Reports
> >
> >
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/muammar-gaddafi-killed_n_1021462.html
> >
> > Well, it does make the capture easier

>
>We should celebrate this. It's not very often one gets to use the term
>"hysteron-proteron", after all.
>
>Jesse Sheidlower
>OED
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org