I just read a headline in a US paper, “Donald Trump Takes Lead Over Kamala Harris in Shock New Hampshire Poll.” Similarly, I’ve read British papers that say “blah blah blah according to shock claim,” instead of “… shocking claim.” And in another example, with a different word, I read, in a US publication, about someone witnessing a “horror auto accident” instead of a “horrible auto accident.”
Have the rules surrounding participles in English changed fundamentally since I was in 8th grade? These usages certain grate my ears.
For the last few years I’ve been noticing that, particularly on stories that news outlets are trying to publish ASAP, I’m seeing more and more of these types of grammatical errors. Or more specifically, problems that spell check won’t catch, but the word is still ‘spelled’ wrong.
Have you heard people speaking like this or are you just seeing it in print/online?
Just a theory: perhaps it started with “shock jock”? That’s too good a rhyme to pass up, and once it caught on as a phrase, perhaps “shock” got transferred to other uses as well.
Apparently “shock poll”, “shock decision” and similar phrases are more common in British English than in American English. See this page for discussion.
Then why did LHOD link to a blog post about that word? Both of your posts focus just on that word.
Has anyone found an older example of “Horror car accident” instead of “horrible car accident”?
Nope. I can’t believe you even read the blog post; it is not just about the word ‘shock’, it is about using the word ‘shock’ as an adjective. As were the examples I linked, as is the phenomenon raised by the OP.
The post discusses the linguistic phenomenon, answering the OP’s question:
It happens to use the same example word ‘shock’ that the OP mentions. What is wrong with answering a question using the same example as the person who asked it? I think it’s actually preferable to do that, as we don’t have to deal with ‘but… but that’s different’
People have been griping about newspaper headlines using “incorrect” English for more than a hundred years. Shortening words was especially condemned. But so was using short nicknames for presidents.
No language body exists to determine what “correct” language is. Peoples’ eight-grade teachers could enforce rules in their classrooms, and therefore many people stalled there. Nevertheless the common language changes yearly. “Good” writers, the ones that are normally found in newspapers, magazines, and books, write as they see good English, no matter what they were taught. If those usages are widely picked up, that is what becomes “correct” English.
And yet the newer correcter English is not considered to apply in all cases. Advertising lingo is one of them. Headlines are another. The internet is continually readjusting to the onslaught of casual users ignoring rules when fewer keystrokes can be used.
English is like science in a way. Neither was fixed in stone 50 or 60 years ago. English changes and modernizes just as science changes and modernizes. People who look for correctness just have to change and modernize at the same pace.