Remember those scary but effective TV commercials from the 80s ("This is your brain on drugs")?
Well, I need to vent.
This is a leak -
This is a spill -
A volcano of oil a mile under the ocean is nothing like either of these, and should not be referred to as such.
I can fully understand why corporate whores like Faux News would mislead its audience by using such verbiage. We in the reality-based community should know better, however.
The most recent front page story at DKos uses the term "leak" five times. (A better term "oil flooding" is used once.)
Here is a video, in case you have yet to subject your eyes to the horror:
(it gets more colorful around 2:20)
Here is a list of terms that might be apt to describe that video:
A Blowout
A Wild Well
A volcano of oil
Oil Volcano
A Gush or Gusher
A River of Oil
Oilpocalypse
Feel free to mention your favorite name for this clusterfuck in the gulf in the comments.
On a tangentially related note, these terms should also be avoided-
Gay Marriage
Illegal Aliens
Partial-birth Abortion
Global Warming
instead, please use these terms-
Marriage Equality
Undocumented Immigrants
Late-term Abortion
Climate Change
The controversial terms we discuss in our debates often make or break their political survival.
Recently we saw the success of the USA Patriot Act and the No Child Left Behind Act, both of which have proven to be problematic at best. But their catchy names helped them secure broad bipartisan support.
During the health care debate, we saw the White House try to alter its messaging sometime around August when the astroturf town hall screamers were at their most fevered pitch. It was a bit too late to re-brand the effort completely, and since then we have seen them all but abandon talk of "Health Insurance Reform" over the standard Health Care Reform. The latter term seems to make people more uneasy, which is why we saw its opponents twist it into Obamacare .
I am not about to launch into a long diatribe about Frank Luntz and how we need our own Democratic Luntz ...er....well, you know what I mean.
Palinese and Luntzese are not welcome on Daily Kos.
Neither is BP's-ese.
Let's try to be more careful with the words we choose, m'kay?
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Update by LaughingPlanet on Fri May 21, 2010 at 12:51 PM PDT:
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MB had a poll a few weeks back.
Here are the results:
oilmageddon
17% 1189 votes
oil volcano
15% 1013 votes
Gulf gusher
13% 880 votes
And the troll choice-
business as usual
21% 1464 votes
is FReeped as usual
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