Safe havens and pulled people

I've heard some egregious errors made by local TV reporters during the last few days of hurricane coverage.

But the prize for Most Obscure Statement Made During Coverage of the Irene Aftermath goes to ... Rachel DePompa.

In a story on last night's 6 p.m. WWBT TV newscast, she stood in front of a fallen tree reporting from a neighborhood where people are saying they're fed up with the lack of electric power.

"The rolling hills and tall trees of Stratford made this area a haven for Irene's destruction," she declared.

Huh?

Let's leave aside the fact that the neighborhood is Stratford Hills, not Stratford.

More important, does Rachel know what a haven is?

My Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged, says a haven is a safe place. You know, like a harbor where you'd moor a boat to keep it from harm during a storm.

So what exactly is a "haven for Irene's destruction?" Is it a safe place for a hurricane to do its damage? The good residents of Stratford Hills might disagree.

I don't have a clue about what Rachel was trying to tell us.

Or was she just stringing cool-sounding words together without fully grasping the meaning of what she was saying.

I suspect that was it.

Rachel is not alone. In many ways, her goof is emblematic of local TV news.

A few months back, her colleague Gene Petriello reported live from the scene of a fire: "Nine people, all from the same family, without a place to live, and they have their 78-year-old aunt to thank."

What on earth does that mean? Come to find out, the aunt hadn't set the fire and made her family homeless. No, she had awakened them and saved their lives.

Gene covers a lot of fires, staples of the contemporary local newscast. Who can forget the time he proclaimed, "We're told here a woman actually woke herself up to the fire."

And he reported on another blaze: "Six people were pulled and rescued after being trapped in an apartment fire." If it weren't so tasteless, I might make some comparison between pulled pork and pulled people. Sorry. I guess it's too late for me to be tasteful.

Words, words, words. Does it matter how you use them? I guess it doesn't -- not if you're on TV.

So, here's a tip from a veteran of the word wars for Rachel, Gene, and all the other local TV news newbies: Words are tricky. The biggest problem for many amateurs who try to use them is that they have meanings. And I'm going to be picky, picky, picky here -- good sentences have logical structures.

So, if you're not sure what words mean or what order they should go in, it's probably a good idea to stop and think.

If you're in the news business, words are ... well ... your stock in trade.