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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I hate that phrase "hit by a train". It's usually because it's fodder for NIMBYs. It implies the train did something, like it jumped the tracks or something, whereas the train was just traveling the path it always does. A woman drowns, she's not "asphyxiated by the river", a man burns himself on a stove, he's not "Burnt by the stove." In the train's case the conscious action was the "putting something in front of it". Yet somehow it's the train's fault? Suicide? It's the train's fault. Drunk idiot? It's the train's fault.
I mention this because this is yet another case in which transit is getting blamed for a human action, an action that human knew could leave to the death of someone else, but that the human did anyway. It detracts from the fact the blame is with the officer.
Anyway, I know you all don't care, but it's another way in which language serves an establishment, in this case two - the car centric, anti-transit establishment that it usually does, and the officer who all but murdered a suspect. It's another phrase like "Officer involved shooting", except maybe even that phrase doesn't place blame on an inanimate object.
You know, I agree with your point after reading it but sure don't read statements about trains hitting things that way.
A train is a huge and heavy thing that takes forever to slow down, so putting someone in front of a train or being hit by a train is read as the person who created the situation causing the harm, not the train. Almost like a force of nature, trains don't hit things by choice so it is the fault of whoever put the thing in front of it that always take the blame.
Obviously other people must read it the way you pointed out. Just noting that some people see it in a way that cannot possibly blame the train due to the properties of trains.
Read the above comment again, towards the end of the first paragraph..
"Yet somehow it's the train's fault?"
I do believe that is implied sarcasm, they're well aware it's not the train's fault.
You know on a conscious level that the train couldn't have done anything. But on a subconscious level the author is telling you the train, not the "person that caused something to be in the way of the train" was the cause of the accident. Had there been no pesky train just existing, there'd have been no accident regardless of how avoidable the accident was.
That's my problem with the language. Just as you know an officer-involved-shooting actually involved the officer shooting someone, but the language is so weak that on some level your subconscious assumes it can't be a big deal if that kind of vague, woolly, wording is appropriate.
And as I mentioned, it appears to be an intentional word choice. People don't talk about rivers (non-sentient object) asphyxiating people, they talk about people drowning in rivers. A threshing machine (non-sentient) doesn't thresh a minion (!), the minion falls into a threshing machine. But a train (non-sentient) hits people, rather than vice-versa. To be fair you occasionally see this language with cars, but cars are driven by people, it's usually the case the car driver is actually the decision maker that caused a death.
Does that make sense?
"Flooding kill X people" is a regular headline though, as the default is to be based on the person/thing that is acting. So flooding kills people, but people who fall into the river while boating put themselves into the situation and therefore drowned.
Things like trains that are controlled by people fall into the thing you are talking about, where there is a possibility that either person's actions could have led to the outcome. In that case they tend to default the action based on avoiding blame in headlines. An "officer involved shooting" tries to avoid blaming either person, but as you note tends to be read as excusing the officer by default which is more of a blame the victim thing. It also avoids the possibility that the officer was present but never shot their weapon as a CYA default.
For trains though, it is treated like someone who stepped in front if a car in a way that couldn't be avoided. They were struck by the car even though the impact was not caused by the car or the driver. That is because the car is the larger object that impacted a smaller object.
So I am agreeing with you that the language can imply something, but explaining that it is not always malicious intent that results in the wording we see every day. In fact, I would prefer if shootings involving police were worded as "police shot X" instead of officer involved shooting, and that vehicles/people were described as not getting out of the way of trains. But that just isn't how attempts at neutral language work.
Soft, passive language where the events are technically communicated but the impact of them is lessened to the point of outright denial and absolutely no one is in any way responsible for their actions.
I see your point. It's the same sort of thing for various violence around the world. Headlines like "3 die in West Bank Violence" should actually be "Israeli Soldiers Kill 3 Palestinians."
This misuse of language has irritated me for years in both media and personal life. "It" didn't do a damn thing!
I think this also speaks to an issue around suicide. I used to work in behavioral healthcare and “suicide” is a similar issue. There’s a lot of debate around “commit suicide,” since it sort of blames the person and not the illness.
It’s hard to frame these conversations around cause of death in certain situations.
This is just the way our natural grammatical structure works.
We're not having a discussion about grammar, we're having a discussion about how phrases can be misleading even if technically correct, and how those phrases can end up serving inhuman agendas.
While "Hit by car" the driver is usually at fault. Note news articles will generally go out of their way to avoid "hit by car" on the rare occasion someone jumps in front of one.
Hit by a pitch? Not sure what this means.
Hit by stray bullet is modified to describe an unusual set of circumstances so inappropriate here. That's the equivalent of "Man hit by derailed train". We're not talking about that kind of situation. The nearest equivalent of "Man hit by train" where the direct cause of death is an aimed bullet is "Man shot", or "Man shot by ", it's never "Man hit by bullet"
Struck by new knowledge doesn't really apply here too.
The underlying message of "Hit by train" is that transit was at fault (the train "hit"). Rather than the drunk driver. Rather than the reckless idiot who decided to go around the barrier. Rather than the suicidal cyclist who stepped in front of it. Rather than, in this case, the cop that parked on the tracks and locked a prisoner inside the car.
Words are about communication. And all phrases have subtexts and good writing recognizes those subtexts and avoids misleading ones and uses accurate ones that convey as much information as possible.
"Train hits " is an intentional choice by journalists to focus the blame on transit rather than the person whose actions lead to death. Whether it's technically correct ignores the fact that there are better phrases that could be used that also focus the blame on the person who caused the situation. "Colorado officer who trapped prisoner in path of train sentenced to " doesn't have the misleading nuances that the headline does. It's more accurate and more informative as a result.
We're having a discussion about the way a person wrote a headline, and I explained that, rather than believe an elaborate conspiracy theory, you could acknowledge that this is just the way English grammatical structures work.
The alternative to "hit by a train" is going to be multiple sentences long to convey the same information. Your conspiracy theory about it being a deflection falls apart because the entire article is about how the officer is legally and ethically at fault, accepts that, and that the family understands that.
"Trapped prisoner in path of train" oddly enough, is slanted language with misleading nuances.
I mean, the correct phrase here is "murdered by a cop" but you can see where the people that pay cops to murder us might object to that phrasing. They like soft language where of course everyone wishes that things had gone differently but it's also no one's fault and nothing is going to change.
The wording is deliberate. "Hero cop was not assaulted by dangerous detainee"
Bravo. Well said!