The Times’ “After Deadline” column, which features the highs and lows of newspaper writing, often points out words and phrases that are being sorely overused. The term “aging dictator” — as in, “the Arab Spring is holding aging dictators accountable to their people” — comes to mind, but the biggest offense in the past few weeks has to be the word “trove.” First we had the trove of documents recovered from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. It was almost always a trove, and almost always likened in size to “a small college library.”
From the Los Angeles Times, less than a week after Bin Laden’s death:
“U.S. intelligence agencies are racing to exploit a trove of documents and computer files that U.S. Navy SEALs collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan before other Al Qaeda groups or leaders can change their communication methods or move their safe houses.”
A few days and several hundred references later, the Washington Post chimes in:
“Osama bin Laden was preoccupied with attacking the United States over all other targets, a fixation that led to friction with followers, according to U.S. intelligence officials involved in analyzing the trove of materials recovered from the al-Qaeda leader’s compound.”
Proving that it’s never too late to call a trove a trove, the word pops up again in an AP article from a few days ago:
“In an attempt to rebuild the relationship, the Washington and Islamabad have agreed to form a joint intelligence team to track down militant targets inside Pakistan, drawing in part from the trove of records taken from bin Laden’s personal office during the raid. “
The joys of “trove” extend beyond bin Laden to Sarah Palin, whose e-mails from her time as governor of Alaska were released last Friday. The Times wrote:
“Released in hard copy and covering most of Ms. Palin’s months in office, the vast trove will take days to read and decipher. “
This vast trove turned out to be vastly boring, and the crowdsourcing methods of the Times and the Post ended up garnering almost as much media attention as the e-mails themselves. (Bristol Palin’s tanning bed, anyone?) The AP at least didn’t mince words, calling the dollies of paper boxes, which set each media outlet back a cool $726, a “dump“:
“Drawing on methods used by both Wikileaks and social networks, traditional news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post used the Palin email dump as an experiment in new media techniques.”
FYI, the thesaurus also suggests the following: hoard, collection, aggregation, cache, stash. Try one of ’em. It won’t hurt, I promise.
. . . So Well Read. . . 