#johnstone

he is In Your House

"What are you doing in my house?"

An expert pickpocket - yes please

Associates with all classes of pickpocket.

Comp: fresh

Trade: Labourer

Build: prop

Eyes: blue

Ht: 5'6

Hair: Brown

Marks: Tatt

“Israel Rescues 4 Hostages in Military Operation; Gazan Officials Say Scores Are Killed,” reads a New York Times headline from Saturday.

It’s a very odd-looking headline even if you don’t know anything about the propagandistic tactics being employed in it. The first half is very clear, while the second half is unintelligible and reads like some weird kind of riddle or word puzzle.

The New York Times is performing these bizarre, cryptic linguistic gymnastics to discuss the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza which as of this writing has a reported death toll of 236.

Right off the bat we can see something weird in this headline with the use of the word “scores” to describe the number of people reported killed in the massacre. The New York Times article itself says it was reported that “more than 200 people were killed in central Gaza,” so the correct quantifier for the headline would be “hundreds”, not “scores”. This would be like a headline saying “dozens” of people were killed on 9/11 instead of “thousands”; it would technically be correct since the number of people killed were mathematically speaking many many dozens, but it would give readers the wrong impression of the lethality of the incident.