3 posts tagged “rant”

I really hate it when you e-mail people on Thursday to ask when they want to meet on the weekend to work on a project that's due Tuesday and they don't respond.  Ever.  And then you meet with one of them Friday to work on a different project and you discuss meeting on the weekend for the first project but they still don't tell you when they want to meet this weekend.  I know my e-mail is still working because I got e-mails from other people yesterday.  I'd call them to ask what the hell is going on but I seem to have lost their phone numbers.  I guess I'll try sending them another e-mail but I think I'll mark it as "urgent" this time.  Maybe that'll get their attention.

Tonight's episode of "Chuck" is (I believe) the last episode until the strike is over.  So what is the local NBC station showing?  "Chuck", you say?  Wrong, I say.  They're showing "Celebrating the Life of Ruth Bell Graham" instead.  WTF?  They couldn't wait until next week to show it?  Was it really so important to show "Celebrating the Life of Ruth Bell Graham" tonight?  Thankfully, hopefully, it only lasts an hour so I can still watch the new episodes of "Heroes" and "Life".  It also lets me watch "The Year Without Santa Claus" but still.  You don't bump "Chuck" to show some thing (it's seriously almost infomercial-like) about Billy Graham's wife instead.

I'm glad I started um, "collecting" episodes of "Chuck" when I did.

On my homepage, there is the following headline and blurb: "al-Qaida group says it captured 3 U.S. troops: Thousands of U.S. troops searched insurgent areas south of Baghdad for their three missing comrades."  What bugs me about this is not the fact that 3 U.S. soldiers have been captured (although that is horrible), it's the fact that a "troop" is a group of people.  Webster's online dictionary says a troop is "a group of soldiers" (Source).  A troop is not a person.  When will the media realize this?  When will the public in general realize this?  Now, I have no idea how many people are actually in a troop but let's just say there's 50 people in a troop.  Then, according to this headline, 150 people have been captured.  But that's not the case!  Only 3 people have been captured.  I know the blurb says, "three missing comrades" so why couldn't the headline?  Why couldn't the headline say "3 U.S. soldiers" instead of "3 U.S. troops"?  Why does the media insist on using the word "troop(s)" in place of "soldier(s)"?  Is it to make us think more people have really been captured?  (If so that's a pretty mean reason.)  This really shouldn't bug me this much (I'm not even an English major) but it does.  People need to learn the correct usage for certain words before writing headlines, making news reports, etc.