Appearance on Fox NY News, “Those Annoying Things Local TV News Reporters Say” (Apr. 25, 2014)
“Another dramatic car chase,” linguist Ben Zimmer said. “Do all car chases have to be dramatic? They do in the rhetoric of local news.”
Zimmer, the executive producer of vocabulary.com, can find “tragic,” “tragedy,” “horrible” or “heart-breaking” abused at least once in any nightly news show. Hearts on his TV now seem to go out to a lot of different things.
“A dangerous chase,” Zimmer said, “a dramatic car crash, a terrifying ordeal.”