I sounds wrong to my ear, too. Headlines are rarely written by the journalist herself. Some harried guy, on a tight deadline, smites out all the paper’s headlines to fit the available space in a short time. I’m willing to give the headline a little slack for that reason.
“Slain” was not used in the text of the story, just the headline.
You know, just because you had an incorrect understanding of the use of the word doesn’t mean your understanding was correct, right? :dubious:
Now, to give another example, my New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language (Encyclopedic edition), 1989 edition, defines slay as: to kill violently. Again, notice that there is no indication of intent involved, nor is it necessary that a human be doing it.
So, you can’t be “slain” by, say, an injection of drugs, but you can be slain by someone smashing a car into you (regardless of intent).
It seems to me that (as a matter of style) in contemporary work-a-day English the word “slay” should be reserved for deliberate killing. Applying it to disaster or accident is really only appropriate in a literary/figurative mode. (Apart from as an archaism.)
From wordnet:
From rhymezone:
Slain is clearly moving away from the old meaning that is given in the dictionaries, if most people treat it as a synonym for “murdered”. I don’t really think citing dictionary definitions proves anything at all.
That move isn’t exactly recent. Webster’s 1828
Already we see an established literal sense of “slaying” being carried out by an actor. Of course it can be used in a figurative sense - (eg; “slain by cancer”) - but this is out of place in a newspaper headline, where (without the context provided in the body of the article) people are naturally going to receive the impression that the woman died as the result of a personal attack.
Crap, missed the edit window.
…This is why style guides are so useful in publication - in a condensed form of communication like headline-writing, you need to be mindful of the dominant sense of the words you’re using, and make substitutions where it improves clarity. You wouldn’t want a headline like, “Chief Justice’ ejaculation raises eyebrows” where the story is actually about an extemporaneous remark. Well, not unless you’re one of those papers.
Yes, it is important to understand that, to the extent that dictionaries are referenced in situations like this, it’s not for the purpose of saying, “the Dictionary establishes the meaning,” but rather to say, “the Dictionary says this because it is how it is used by most people.” Since meaning is mutable, it may be that at some point in the future, “slay” may come to have a more narrow meaning. However, I certainly do not consider myself unusual in thinking it to still have the more broad meaning referenced by my citations above.
The funny thing is that the newspaper use has become so ingrained that it’s sort of in your head as a part of some people’s name - slain-civil-rights-leader-Martin-Luther-King comes to mind.
In regular speech, one slays dragons, or is “slain” ironically by a bad joke.
I think it is country specific. For example, [Eliza Doolittle] “The slain in Spain die mainly from the train” [/Eliza]
Not necessarily. Perhaps he made a split-second choice to switch to this branching track because the one he was originally on had ten astronaut grannies on it, and he thought it better to kill one than ten.
I grew up knowing a very strange old hermit who was a retired train engineer. His name was Skeeter. He lived next door to Terry Bradshaw’s farm and had a large pet alligator named Baby that would come out of the water when called and follow Skeeter around including into his house. My father used to take me and my brother to see them and I would feed Baby whole chickens by hand.
Skeeter would sometimes just start talking about his days as a train engineer. He referred to the people that he hit as “deadoned”. I think that is a good term to use here.
"Astronaut, Family Plan Service for Deadoned Mom"
I feel terrible for laughing out loud at that. Over the holidays, too. Unconscionable mirth.
I am deeply, profoundly ashamed of myself. I hope you are too, you wretch.
Ha!
I think Random’s on the right track (so to speak) here. Slain does not imply murder. We use verbs like slain and killed in the context of sudden, violent deaths because they have connotations of causation but not necessarily of intent.
The problem we have with headlines like “Astronaut, family plan memorial service for slain mom” is that we infer intent or an intentional causal agent from the causative construction of the verb phrase “slain mom [a mom was slain]” but when we read the article we realize that there can be no intent construable when an elderly woman is struck by a train while committing the extremely idiotic act of passing a school bus at a railroad crossing.
Headline writers are constrained by the telegraphic nature of headlines, which often results in clumsy constructions as they attempt to impart maximum information in a minimum of words. In this case, whoever wrote the headline probably used the best possible verb for the structure of that particular headline: “killed mom” might cause even more readers to infer intent, plus it sounds even more clumsy than “slain mom”; “dead mom” is too vague (and too cold); “deceased mom” doesn’t have the connotation of sudden and violent and so doesn’t fit the facts. Etc.
i always pictured “slain” as a rather bloody death or murder; with parts hither and yon. a death brought on by sharp objects. stabbing, slashing, biting, clawing, etc.
i guess a train could fit in… trains crashing into cars seem a bit blunt. just doesn’t seem sharp enough for me to have used “slain.” the wheels may be sharp enough for slain if they run over a physical being. but she was hit by the train while in a vehicle. the wheels may not have touched her body.
i would have gone with killed in an accident or killed in a wreck with a train. not slain.
to go with a more current news item: i could see using slain in connection with a tiger attack.
Mumdaver?
Ouch, Cervaise. That’s so bad I almost like it. By the way, I did get a chuckle out your earlier allusion to the train moral dilemma.
Oh, and I just realized DSYoungEsq had already covered my points about intent and cause earlier in the thread, and that AskNott had already made my point about headline space. Sorry, folks.
I hope you punished it as it deserved, Fatwater Fewl. :eek:
I wanted to, but I thought that might be inviting really bad comma. 
I agree that “slain” carries a connotation of intent.
However, headline writers get a lot of leeway.
But it doesn’t, that’s the whole point.