If you are like me, you can waste a whole day trying to find the 'right' word for a sentence. You see, I've done it there. 'Right' doesn't say it all. Perfect wouldn't be correct either. Nor would correct. I am looking for the word that means 'to convey the exact meaning' I could scour the thesaurus but then you have to check that it doesn't change the interpretation of a sentence.
The thesaurus can be the most deadly dinosaur for a writer. In a writers group, I once read, "My mother was so kind; in fact most people called her a spanking woman." I read to the end of the piece expecting conflict but there were none. I checked thesaurus.com and found spanking listed as a synonym for good.
Journalists have to be extra careful. There are some words they can only use in certain circumstances or they are in danger of breaking the law. The rules are so complicated that journalists are urged to keep a copy of McNae in their knapsack.
There seems, to me, to be an important word missing from the Jo Cox coverage.
Assassination.
Not one newspaper has called her death an assassination and I'm confused by that. This word is all I have been able to think about for days. I keep asking people. Mostly, they just shrug and mumble a disinterested, "I dunno." Occasionally, they they agree that it's odd for the word not to have been used. The Long Suffering Husband has tried to silence me on the subject by telling me that only a head of state can be assassinated.
I checked several dictionaries and he is wrong (I know, there's a first time for everything!) The Oxford English Dictionary (the big one on my bookshelf) says, "Assassinate: murder an important person for political or religious reasons."
Maybe Jo Cox wasn't important but as the MP for the constituency she was killed in I doubt that. Maybe she wasn't murdered. At trial they might decide that it was all some horrible accident and the gun coincidentally fired three times and the man, who just happened to be carrying a knife fell on her six times. Maybe it wasn't done for political reasons. Maybe shouting, "Put Britain First," as he plunged a knife into an MP who cared deeply about refugees was a version of Tourette's. Maybe he was just mad and she was only a woman so it doesn't matter what we call it.
I think it does matter. The reason that we were all so revolted and being terribly un-British about the whole thing, with flowers and vigils, is that an assassination is a shocking event. Everyone remembers where they were when JFK was shot. Even if we weren't yet born, we know about the grassy knoll and Jackie Kennedy's pink pillbox hat. Assassinations mark the beginning of coups and political uprisings.
It is tempting to pretend that this sort of thing doesn't happen in Britain; that this is a nice country, where the fields are green, the streets of London are paved with gold and children are going on adventures with their dog, Timmy, while drinking ginger beer, but can we really kid ourselves by not using the word?
We know, really, don't we? We know that Jo Cox, a brilliant, important person; an MP who fought for the rights of Syrian refugees and her Muslim constituents and who was urging people to vote to remain in the EU was murdered by a man who had a political agenda. She was assassinated.
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