Anyone else annoyed by the growing use of the word "impact" to speak increasingly passively?
People are so afraid to make a claim nowadays, even if it's obviously true. They speak of "impacts" or that something will be "impacted". But they seem to want to avoid saying who or what will be impacted.
"I was impacted by today's layoffs."
"We expect there to be impacts to website traffic."
These meaningless words do nothing except to say "something has happened" which puts the reader in the mindset of having to unravel a mystery.
Anytime you write it's your job to make yourself understood. I don't want to have to be Encyclopedia Brown to figure out what you're trying to tell me.
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" really should be required reading for all high school students. Personally, I re-read it every few years - chronic exposure to terrible English makes the bad habits grow back, so you need to pull the weeds regularly.
Exactly. They're giving the least information possible to formulate a coherent headline which is technically accurate. If they told the truth in the headline, it would get WAY more clicks. These are clicks they don't want.
People are so afraid to make a claim nowadays, even if it's obviously true. They speak of "impacts" or that something will be "impacted". But they seem to want to avoid saying who or what will be impacted.
"I was impacted by today's layoffs." "We expect there to be impacts to website traffic."
These meaningless words do nothing except to say "something has happened" which puts the reader in the mindset of having to unravel a mystery.
Anytime you write it's your job to make yourself understood. I don't want to have to be Encyclopedia Brown to figure out what you're trying to tell me.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=impacting&year...
Edit: A better headline for OP would have been "Private phone numbers + email addresses leaked for 5M Twitter accounts"