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Prosecutors have charged a Metropolitan Police officer with murder after he shot rapper Chris Kaba in London last year.
Prosecutors have charged a Metropolitan Police officer with murder after he shot rapper Chris Kaba in London last year.
What a confusing headline. The cop did not, in fact, shoot a dead man. He shot a live man, killing him.
Same headline with fixed grammar:
London Cop Who Shot Unarmed Black Man Dead Charged With Murder
The headline is grammatically correct and only confusing if you’re not super familiar with the phrase “shot dead”.
It would be clearer just by saying “shot and killed”.
He shot them dead. It’s a figure of speech, meaning the shot was fatal. So the headline is fine. He shot dead a cat. He shot dead an old lady. He shot dead a black kid.
The headline is technically grammatically correct but ambiguous. “…shot and killed unarmed black man” would have been better. If you absolutely need to stick to word/character count, “shot unarmed black man dead” would be less ambiguous and more in keeping with how people actually use “shot dead”. I’ve watched a lot of westerns and I can think of quite a few where someone says “I shot him dead” but not one where someone says “I shot dead him”.
The US and the UK have different figures of speech and idioms. People in the UK don’t usually sound like cowboys.
I’d love to see an example of “I shot dead him”. I’m not trying to be defensive, I’d really enjoy seeing it. Dialects fascinate me.
Well, it’s an expression that only comes up in the third person, not the first person. You’d see “Tim shot dead Eric”. I think if they’d say anything like that in the UK, it would just be “I shot him”.
I still only have ever heard “Tim shot Eric dead.” I’ve never seen it any other way except in this headlines.
Yeah it’s the wrong way round but I think most people can also infer some context from the part where it mentions the murder charge.
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Comma would be weird; there’s no pause, for example: “he shot dead a heard of cattle”. It all flows as one line.
If you want to fix it, just ad an “an”:
But I’m not a literary professor or anything.
About 10 seconds after I submitted the comment I realized my error and deleted it lol
Figures of speech don’t really belong on a headline about murder though
Figures of speech turn up in all writing, and especially in headlines. They’re useful to convey more meaning than is normally possible in few words because they rely on assumed context. Because major goals of headlines include information packing and brevity, idioms, turns of phrase, and figures of speech are common.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Or just leave out “dead” entirely—it’s already implied by the murder charge.
Yes and no, technically without “dead” and leaving the rest of the sentence unchanged, it could imply the cop has a separate murder charge. A better headline is “London Cop Charged With Murder After Shooting And Killing Unarmed Black Man.”
That doesn’t rule out the logical possibility of the murder charge being for a different incident. But you could eliminate it with “London Cop Charged With Murder For Shooting Unarmed Black Man”.
Where were you when the editor didn’t do their job?
For a secon thrre I thigh he shot a walking dead man and was wondering why he was going to jail
This whole article has a few confusing points, and the article never clarifies them. So the vehicle is confirmed to be involved with a shooting the day before. The vehicle does not belong to the rapper, but was driving it. How did the rapper acquire the vehicle? Was he actually involved in the shooting the day before or not? Did someone he knows give it to him? Lots of questions, bad article.
No, it would need a comma to convey that meaning:
“London Cop Who Shot Dead, Unarmed Black Man Charged With Murder”
“Shot dead” is a common phrase in original English.