graphically slaughtered

[Joel S. Berson]

At 3/24/2012 09:29 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>I posted the following last August 3:
>
>"Another CNN analyst explained that the UN is reluctant to get involved in
>countries like Syria 'no matter how gruesome or graphic the government is
>treating its own people.'"

Especially strange since the Syrian government would not be much
interested in graphicizing (documenting visually) its gruesome
treatment of its own people.

Joel


>JL
>
>On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:07 AM, Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net>wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> > Subject:      graphically slaughtered
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > From _Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch_'s movie review of _The Hunger Games_, by
> > Frank Gabrenya:
> >
> > "Although much of the book's violence has been sanitized for a PG-13
> > rating,
> > the combat scenes are too fast and blurry to tell who is slaughtering whom,
> > much less how graphically."
> >
> > At first, I inferred from the wording that "graphic(ally)" simply means
> > "really violent(ly)" in Gabrenya's idiolect, given that he uses it to
> > modify
> > a verb that doesn't have "show" or "describe" as part of its semantics
> > (i.e.
> > "slaughter"), and in fact separates graphicness from how visible it is.
> > With
> > Gabrenya's meaning, the fact that you can't tell much about the
> > slaughtering
> > does not mean that the slaughter is not very graphic.
> >
> > However, I Googled "graphically slaughtered" and got hits such as "Extended
> > sequences show Americans being graphically slaughtered in the natives'
> > counterattack." This is more interesting now. To graphically slaughter
> > someone means to do it in such a way that viewers of a recording of the
> > event get a really detailed look. Even though "graphically" syntactically
> > modifies "slaughtered", it has as much to do with how a camera crew
> > captures
> > the event as how the slaughterer does the deed.
> >
> > Neal Whitman
> > Email: nwhitman at ameritech.net
> > Blog: http://literalminded.wordpress.com
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
>--
>"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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