So, I'm reading a book at the moment, Fred and Rose by Howard Sounes. No prices for guessing who it's about. It's OK, not a stellar read, but interesting enough, I guess. I'm pretty prejudiced though, since I've already read Brian Masters' much more well written work 'She Must Have Known', which, unsurprisingly perhaps, has biased me in Rose's favor. Sounes is constantly taking it as an absolute given that she participated fully in the murders, but Masters gave me a lot to think about and so far Sounes has definitely not been able to sway me to his view. But that's not the point.
This book is OK language-wise but suffers somewhat from the traditional journalist's ailment of using words that sound fancy without considering what they actually fundamentally mean. You know ... no one was killed in the fatal accident. That type of thing. And here's my question. At one point, talking about one of the victims ... I think maybe Caz Cooper, but that's not important ... he says that Fred threw her decapitated head into the grave with her. But you can't say that, can you? That's my question. Input wanted from native English speakers. A body can be decapitated, but a head can't be, right? A head can only be severed ... because to decapitate means to behead, ie, to remove the head. So a decapitated head, that makes no sense, right? It's an oxymoron?
Hey, I said it was creepy.
To keep this post vaguely Keanu-related, here's a boring event from my life. I ordered some movies online yesterday. One of them I will definitely be getting back to. The other one though I'm less excited about ... I've seen it several times before, so, meh. But I don't have it on DVD, which of course is a shocking oversight. And the connection is serial murder. Relevance, I has it ...
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4 comments:
I think you might be right to me its the severed head off a decapitated body, gruesome stuff BTW.
On the whether people know, people often see only what they want to see sometimes and delude themselves.
Yeah, doesn't that sound more right? o_O
Yes, people do see what they want to see, and also it's important to consider that some people are much more easily dominated and led than others. And if you yourself are a person who is not easily led, it may be hard to imagine that others can be very different from yourself. If that makes sense.
Well, to "decapicate" means to chop someone's head off, right? And you can't chop a head off a head, you can only chop a head off a body.
Exactly!! And when you've done that, the body is decapitated, but the head is just severed.
Oh, what a pleasant conversation we're having ... !! :-D
Word verification: cappere, which to my ears sounds like Italian for chopping something off ... even though I know that it isn't, but still. :-D
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