Cliche of the Week 7 – Fled the Scene
July 12, 2010 at 12:41 am 5 comments
Armed men rarely calmly walk away from a robbery. They flee.
“The suspects fled the scene in a dark blue Chevrolet Impala with silver trim on the trunk.” (June 4, The Herald, South Carolina)
Fled the scene is used about 4,000 times a month in crime reporting round the world.
Read the full Cliche of the week report, Villains flee the scene often and everywhere, in the Australian newspaper.
Police reporting is a rich field for cliches. I was in India last week where newspapers referred to detectives as ‘sleuths’.
Steady usage of ‘fled the scene’ in the global media (Dow Jones Factiva search)
Entry filed under: Cliche of The Week. Tags: chris pash, cliches, crime, getaway car, journalism, reporting, robbery, The Australian, writing.
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Chris Pash 
1.
Maryanne Khan | July 12, 2010 at 12:50 am
You were in India? Then you’re now familiar with ‘miscreants’ who do the fleeing.
South Asian English is full of words fallen into disuse over here but that appear everywhere over there. I had a ball writing a novel in which several characters speak in South Asian English.
maryanne
2.
chrispash | July 12, 2010 at 1:01 am
Yes, India is rich in words. There are so many newspapers and sometimes the stories are hard to follow.
Was in Delhi and Mumbai.
3.
Maryanne Khan | July 12, 2010 at 1:07 am
What I particularly find boggling is the (lack of) use of ‘The’. It gets selectively missed more often than not. I subscribe to several underground internet newspapers out of Pakistan and read the national papers when I was in Pak last September, some articles were unintentionally hilarious. Imagine my surprise when I was asked to help my high-school aged nephew with homework and it was parsing sentences! A kid his age over here would not know what it was, let alone how to do it!
4.
Cliche of the Week 23 – Broad Daylight « Chris Pash | October 31, 2010 at 10:44 pm
[…] daylight” sits high on the crime reporter’s must-have cliche sheet, along with “fled the scene“, “getaway car” and “shallow […]
5.
Cliche of the Week 25 – Rushed to the scene « Chris Pash | November 15, 2010 at 12:19 am
[…] the scene” appears 300 times a week in mainstream reporting. It’s the reverse of “fled the scene“, something armed robbers do as a matter of […]