After I check my email I usually look at HuffPost first thing just to see their top story and this is what I saw today:
This was the lead story in both The NY Times and The Washington Post.
With Richard Engle reporting from an Israeli bomb-safe hospital….
… I looked at RawStory, the next website I go to, which summarizes breaking news in American politics being reported on in other media:
The English langauge is replete with words to describe horrible things. One of the definitions of replete, by chance, is “filled or well-supplied with something: sensational popular fiction, replete with adultery and sudden death.”
I recall President Biden using the phrase “that’s not hyperbole when I say…” In fact, as this and other articles has said, this has been one of his most used sayings:
Hyperbole is another way to say sensationalization. How do we describe something real that is so beyond the pale ordinary words don’t suffice to descibe it? There are prefaces like calling something “mega-” which means “extremely” but there is no single word. There is no word to describe a unique in history event like the Holocaust.
There are times when images rather than words convey the awfulness of a situation. Here’s another example this clip from Apocalypse Now”
If someone is equally horrified both by what may happen in the United States and what may happen in Israel there are no English words to describe what a doubled horror is or what it feels like.
Sometimes we may need images like Guernica by Picasso and the most reproduced part of Jan van Eyck‘s Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych.
Hal Brown's Stressline 
Leave a comment