Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Et tu, New Yorker?

I hate seeing a booboo in this magazine, because it's usually so well copy-edited. But today I was reading a Talk of the Town piece about Zimbabwe, and they mentioned how an opposition leader had been injured, and had received a severe laceration to his skull. Is this some everyday usage I'm not aware of? Did my early inclinations toward medicine as a career forever make me unable to deal with this kind of inexactitude? Wouldn't it have been better and more colloquial to say he'd received a laceration to his head? And better and more exact to say he's received a laceration to his scalp? Is it just me?

3 comments:

MWR said...

Not for nothing did we win the 1985 HOSA "Brain Bowl".

Anonymous said...

Under pressure from my mom several years ago to get rid of all my crap I was then storing at her house (this was before I had my own crap storage unit, aka my house), I think I threw away my HOSA Brain Bowl plaque. I feel kind of bad, but still, what was I going to do with it? It's not like we have a "den" where we could hang it next to Mavis's golf trophies or anything.

MWR said...

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! (with apologies to the young Darth Vader)