4 Dec 2014

And Then A BBC Headline….

A headline on the BBC news site caught my eye this morning;

Fire under train in south London captured by commuters

Jolly well done all those commuters  I say. The headline, sadly, doesn’t give any clues as to what fire was doing skulking under the train but one can assume it was there with the intention of setting fire to the train. Nor are there any hints in the headline as to how this citizens arrest of fire was carried out and I wasn’t inclined to read any further than the headline to find out.

Did these brave commuters surround the train and drag  fire out from under by  its smoke? Did one group of commuters shout and flap their coats thus scaring fire out the other side whereupon another group of commuters pounced on it? No idea, but in these times of ‘drastically reduced’ police force budgets, we really do need much more of this type of public spirited action to keep crime down.

Or did I just read the headline wrongly; is it just that headline writers are now so young they have no concept of other usages for  the word ‘captured’ other than describing  something folk do, ad-nauseam, with a smartphone?

Quote;  John Malkovich.

“People get up, they go to work, they have their lives, but you'll never see the headlines say, 'Six billion people got along rather well today.' You'll have the headline about the 30 people who shot each other.”

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