An item posted on the WDH Web site last night:
Electrocution reported
Wausau Daily Herald
Emergency personnel are responding to a report of an 11-year-old girl who was electrocuted, according to a Marathon County Sheriff’s Department emergency dispatch.
A call came in at about 7:30 p.m. from a residence on Chicago Avenue in Wausau. The girl was breathing and trying but unable to speak, according to the dispatch.
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If you're electrocuted, you are not breathing and you are not trying to talk. Sorry, but you are dead.
Same thing if you drown or are hanged.
We meant to write that the girl received an electrical shock.
(I am aware that this Web post did not go through the copy desk before publication. Hoping that reporters and front-line editors read this, too.)
— Mark T.
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5 comments:
Well, anyway we are not alone. From the Guardian last week:
"We said that in the American TV drama 24, Jack Bauer, the counter-terrorism agent, resorted to electrocution to extract information. You cannot extract information from someone who has been electrocuted because they are dead."
Amen - Webster defines electrocution as death by electrical shock
The correct way to state this would have been the girl was shocked. Ditto for someone who _nearly drowned_ or strangled for the other two actions that did not result in death.
Don't forget strangled, which means choked to death. So if a victim survives, use the word choked.
If the Boston Strangler hadn't been so successful, he'd have been the Boston Choker, a name the Red Sox could have used up until recent years.
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