I guess maybe if the people of Akron had spent all their time & money building an ark, it could be ironic.
Dontcha know that “ironic” means “on the other hand”? :rolleyes: Kinda like “alas” in the OP. Newsrooms apparently don’t have access to dictionaries.
I have the Akron newspaper close to hand and I’m pretty sure they’d have covered an Ark-building.
Plus, I just stuck my head out the door and it’s pretty damn sunny. Ironic, isn’t it?
From the language of the Shawnee Indians who used to live in the region, “Akron” means “mostly cloudy with an 80% chance of afternoon thundershowers.” Hence the irony.
Or not.
We were watching an American weather report one day, and were kinda surprised to hear that the hurricane would be missing all of the United States coast but making landfall in the Canadian maritimes, so there would be no danger to any people. Uh, guys, I know your weather maps have Canada labelled as “Here there be dragons,” but we do actually have people living on our east coast, too.
Sports news guy in a postgame interview with a football lineman who’d picked up a fumble and run it in for a touchdown: “Were you aware that this was your first NFL touchdown ever?”
“… the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which defies the laws of physics…”
Oh really? :dubious:
Virtually every time one of them uses the word ‘virtually’.
I have yet to hear a newscaster use the phrase ‘begs the question’ in the proper context.
I once heard a new morning drivetime traffic lady have a hard time with our Detroit street names. Schoenherr (shayner) was Schooner, she got Lahser alright (lah-sir) but couldn’t get Cadieux (kad-ju) for anything and called it Catteeux. Then another DJ helpfully interjected, “Cadieux” quickly and she said, “Bless you.”
In Duluth they run an annual marathon called “Grandma’s Marathon”.
I thought I misheard it when the local guy called it Grannas Marathon.
Then at the end of the story that he was reading off a teleprompter he said it again, Grannas Marathon.
This guy probably grew up calling his grandmother “Granna”, eventually saw the word “Grandma”, and thought it was pronounced “Granna” since that’s how he said it since he was 2 and has been doing it ever since.
Maybe he thought that two towns being less than 40 miles apart having different weather (one sunny, one partly sunny) was ironic as in “Shouldn’t they be pretty much having the same weather?”
Wasn’t there some newscaster who got confused by the term “cardboard knives” with respect to the 9/11 hijackers, and rather than thinking “box-cutters” she started rambling about “knives made of cardboard to get past security”?
Or is that some kind of urban legend?
Quite possibly. But (a) he should move to NorCal, where towns *4 *miles apart have radically different weather (a slight exaggeration); and (b) “ironic” does not mean the same thing as “surprisingly”.
I once heard a news anchor solemnly say “The victim of the murder, who has yet to be identified, did not survive.”
Hey, here in northern New Mexico, four miles often does mean you’re getting totally different weather. (Example: I was about five miles from home, at a store, then waiting for the bus. Home got 3 inches of rain in less than two hours. The end of town where I was got nothing at all.)
Up by Duluth, they also have held the 3-day John Beargrease Sled Dog Race for the past 25 years or so, which is widely covered by Twin Cities TV stations.
One year, I saw the news anchors on a TV station ad libing talk about this, filling up the last minute of a newscast that ran short. The male anchor mentioned offhand that men had a slight advantage in this (timed) race. The woman anchor questioned him on this, saying that many women were just as strong as men, and, being lighter, would be less tiring for their dogs to pull. He responded that the men could get by with fewer stops along the trail. She challenged that, saying that women mushers could have just as much endurance as men. He (rather embarrassed at the whole subject) said that men could just turn around while standing on the runners, and didn’t have to stop like women drivers. She (rather angrily) started to say that women drivers were certainly capable of standing backwards on the runners, too, and why would that matter, when she suddenly realized what he was talking about (that men could stand backwards on the sled and urinate while it was still going).
You could see the sudden change in her expression, the blush that came over her face, and sudden trailing off of her comments. And you could hear in the background the weather guy and some of the studio techs starting to laugh, as the director faded to the station logo & started to roll the credits.
Heard on TV, from a local airport. Reserve soldiers have just arrived home from Desert Storm. One young man and his wife are in a double jointed clinch, and the chirpy reporter sticks a microphone at them and asks, “So, do you have any plans for this evening?”
Just last night on the KARE11 the final story they ran started out like this:
“First it was a piece of toast, then a potato chip, then a plexiglass window. Now these folks say they can see the image of Jesus Christ in their cats fur…” followed by pictures.
After the story Belinda Jensen comments: “I don’t get it. So they also saw images of toast and a potato chip in the cats fur?”
The others had to quickly explain it to her as they faded to credits.
I’m in your camp on this but have been in a couple of discussions in GQ where people take the position that it’s been used incorrectly by so many for so long that it is now accepted usage to mean “invites the question” rather than the traditional “assumes what you are trying to prove” logical fallacy meaning.
“That’d be in the butt, Bob.”
Yeah, I’ve followed the discussions. It is my opinion that news writers should have sufficient command of the english language to know better.
When I lived in Austin, there was a novice meteorologist who, when going over the weather map, would sometimes confuse her personal perspective of up, down, left, and right with north, south, east, and west. So, she would occasionally tell us that a cold front would be moving in from the left.