the vocabulary problem strikes again
Found this funny article about a police officer who was called in to shoo off a “big cat” only to find out that it was actually a male mountain lion weighing 80 – 90 pounds. In the article itself, the mountain lion was called 3 names: “kitty cat”, “big cat” and “house cat” — none of which I would probably use to describe a lion. The title comes closer with “cougar”. I find it amazing that a 200-word article can call something 5 different names!
Complete article here.
Annette Greiner Said,
October 3, 2008 @ 10:24 am
It’s interesting how loosely the reporter treated the terms in an article highlighting the vocabulary problem. The result is that, at first glance, the article makes the concerned citizen look like a dope, when the real dope was the police dispatcher. The title and first line of the article suggest that the woman who called in to report the cougar called it a ‘kitty cat’, but later it’s clarified that she in fact called it a ‘big cat’ (which in my book is actually a pretty common term for a feline big enough to harm a human), and that it was the police dispatcher who demoted it to ‘house cat’. This looks to me like an instance of a sexist reporter much more interested in getting a laugh at the woman’s expense than in reporting a flaw (possibly an understandable one, possibly the result of a dismissive attitude) in the actions of the local police.