The scale of death and destruction in the Nepalese earthquake arouses sympathy and inspires solidarity throughout the world.
As often happens in such cruel circumstances, the international response has been admirable, volunteers and emergency provisions arriving at a steady pace to alleviate the suffering even if distribution on the ground has been patchy.
The media plays an important role. Most of us have seen, heard or read utterly compelling accounts of the consequences of the violent tremor.
But the earthquake offers a worthwhile reminder that those who communicate information should always think carefully about their use of language.
In this case, it is entirely correct to talk of a catastrophe since heavy loss of life has been caused in and near Kathmandu and on the slopes of the Himalayas. But how often are we tempted to reach for similar words for rather less serious incidents?
The media, ever in search of drama, is frequently guilty of lapsing into hyperbole.
Train crashes involving relatively low numbers of fatalities, by which I mean in single or low double figures, are erroneously described as disasters.
Western broadcasters and newspapers settled too quickly on the term “massacre” when Saad Al Hilli, an Iraqi-born Briton, was murdered in the French Alps along with two members of his family and a French cyclist in 2012.
There is some self-criticism here. I initially used the word in a report of my own but instantly accepted a colleague’s point: the killing of four people, though appalling, paled into numerical insignificance when compared with what was happening weekly in, for example, the Syrian civil war.
On a more mundane level, I recall standing in a square in the Belgian town of Charleroi 15 years ago as idiotic English and German football supporters fought a mini-battle, tossing bar chairs and tables in the process. It was briefly unpleasant; it was not, as television coverage implied, akin to a Third World War and it was not even a riot.
None of this may matter a great deal. We know the tabloid newspaper instinct, to sensationalise the commonplace, has spread to other media. But if the glossary of misfortune and wrongdoing is cheapened, we will struggle for appropriate terminology to describe truly grave occurrences.
The media is not alone. In ordinary conversation, there is a tendency to overstate the importance of aspects of everyday life. Many young people believe that whatever gives pleasure, from an enjoyable new film to a tasty pizza, cries out for the adjective “awesome”. When I see that word, I think of the power of the sea or a great army’s might.
But perhaps I should just nod benignly at imaginative expression. There is, after all, another side to this coin.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s nationalist Front National (FN), has been summoned to internal disciplinary proceedings on Monday.
Anxiously pursuing its strategy of de-demonisation (many still consider the party racist, even fascist), the FN may decide to punish him.
But far from indulging in exaggeration for the sake of effect, the 86-year-old career controversialist is in trouble for underplaying exceptional brutality.
Interviewed by the far right magazine Rivarol, he repeated a previous utterance, enough to have him hauled before the courts and fined, that Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers were just a “detail of the Second World War”. For good measure, he added a sympathetic reference to Marshal Phillippe Pétain, the collaborationist wartime leader of Vichy France judged – wrongly, says Le Pen – a traitor.
It is a source of mischievous delight that while journalists may sometimes be accused of extravagance with language, the shoot-from-the-hip Le Pen faces sanction for his habit of being economical with the truth.
Colin Randall is a former executive editor of The National
