Prosecutors have charged a Metropolitan Police officer with murder after he shot rapper Chris Kaba in London last year.

  • kartonrealista@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ha ha very funny. Except this is grammatically correct and not ambiguous. It would work with your joke interpretation if it said “who shot dead, unarmed, black man”

    • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I disagree that this is unambiguous, I was also confused reading this headline. It’s odd wording. It may be technically correct but that doesn’t mean it’s unambiguous.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Or “shot dead an unarmed black man”. Three additional characters would have fixed this. I’ve long been frustrated by the journalistic style of removing every possible word from headlines. We’re no longer reading these things printed on dead trees, there’s no extra ink being spent or space wasted.

          • Polar@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Many apps or websites cut titles off, though. It’s important to keep them short.

            I wish more people followed proper journalistic formats. Frustrates me when the first sentence is supposed to have everything you need to know - who, what, where, when, why, how - but instead these gen Z journalists think they should bury the details 5 paragraphs deep.

            The proper way to write an article is to give the reader everything they need to know from the first sentence, and then expand in detail with each following paragraph, from most important to least.

      • naught@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        “Dead” and “unarmed” are adjectives and if they were being used like you thought, they should have a comma between them. I agree that it’s potentially vague, but if you read it in your BBC broadcaster voice it should help

        • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s ambiguous. Adjectives don’t need a comma like that, especially when there are two. You don’t say “look at that small, red, fire hydrant”, you just say “look at that small red fire hydrant” (and technically, you could call “fire” an adjective there too).

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      This is absolutely ambiguous diction.

      “…who shot and killed unarmed black man…” would have been substantially more specific and readable without potential confusion.

      • Strykker@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Except “shot and killed” it self can be ambiguous. What did he kill them with? Did he shoot him then kill him with a knife?

        Shot dead, means the shooting is what killed the man.

      • Polar@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        In school you learn to keep titles short. You added a lot of filler words that can ruin the headline on apps that cut them off, or printed media.

        Shot dead is correct.

        • nudny ekscentryk@szmer.info
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          1 year ago

          “shot dead” is a phrasel verb, therefore it can (I would argue in this particular context it should) be split:

          shot (whom?) dead.

          I shot him dead

          He shot his wife dead

          Cop shot unarmed black man dead (including press-specific omitting of articles because English is stupid)

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          And yet, we wouldn’t be having this discussion if the wording was actually unambiguous.

          I removed one word and added two. That’s not “a lot of filler words”.

    • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Quick tip - if the majority of people who read something find it ambiguous, it is. Plain and simple - especially for languages like English that don’t have a central authority for setting language rules.

      • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Quick tip - People with a poor grasp of un-simplified English are not the majority

      • Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s written by a British person in OG English. This phrase isn’t unambiguous here and it took me a sec to figure out why people were confused. It’s just a syntax difference but surely you can figure it out with context clues, just like I did with your interpretation.