Morbid Statistics

I’m a sucker for statistics, especially morbid statistics, so I was particularly pleased to find these causes of death for 2001 (USA figures):

Terrorist attacks	2,978
Other murders	17,330
Suicide	30,622
Accidents	101,537
Cancer	553,768
Heart disease	700,142

(Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quoted in Scientific American)

Note that this is 2001, the year of 9/11, and your heart was still 235 times more likely to kill you than a terrorist. We can assume that in a more typical year, your chances of succumbing to a heart attack rather than a terrorist attack are so great as to be, for all practical purposes, inevitable. To get the ratio down to something worth calculating, you would have to take a plane to Baghdad and walk around draped in an American flag. To get your chances of being murdered in some more mundane way up to the risk of heart disease or cancer, there are more practical alternatives, like making friends with Colombian cocaine dealers.

Linguistic Distractions

Having a background in linguistics can sometimes be a pain in the neck. As Lynne Truss, in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, points out, an obsession with linguistic correctness can make you an irritable nitpicker who finds it hard to control their urges to paint out superfluous apostrophes on signs. I'm more inclined to react to semantics than punctuation, though. For example, I was in a shoe shop (which was bad enough in itself) and they were playing Darkness’ “One Way Ticket to Hell and Back”. I wanted to scream “YOU CAN’T HAVE A ONE WAY TICKET TO HELL AND BACK! IF YOU COME BACK IT’S A RETURN TICKET!

But even when such attention to detail does not result in word rage, it can still be very distracting. One of my favourite songs is Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down”, but I am distracted from the soothing lullaby-like effect by wondering whether “That you will hold me dear” is actually “That you will hold me, dear.” Before long, I won t be able to listen to a song unless it comes with tree diagrams to help me parse it.