Monday, November 30, 2009

Ambush? Why Not 'Conflagration'? Or 'Gefiltefish'?


Clearly, the horrible attack on police officers in Washington state was not an ambush. No accounts have the gunman hiding in the coffee bar waiting to spring out and shoot the officers.

But a police spokesman used the word "ambush," and it's a more interesting word than "attack" or "assault," and so, by the standards of many news organizations, OK, fine, it was an ambush.

(It wasn't a "murder" either, at least not yet.)

3 comments:

Mummy Addled said...

What the hell is an ambushment? The dictionary just made that up. Even my spellchecker doesn't believe it.

Josephine said...

No "ambushment" in my dictionary. That is weird. Now if it were a word like "arraign," it could become "arraignment," but "ambushment" is like choking on a chicken bone.
Jo-Anne

Lou Krieger said...

"Gefiltefish" is only one written as word when the "oy vey" that invariably precedes it is also expressed as a single word, as is the "oh no, not again" that almost always follows it.