A newspaper headline caught my eye: Search ends in tragedy. What, did the search somehow cause the death of the missing child, or of one of the searchers? No, it’s simply that the child was found dead.

Classically, a tragedy is a drama in which the hero dies (or fails) because of a flaw in his own character. A tragedy ought to carry a moral lesson. What do we learn from a random murder? Did little Alex die because of his hubris? Of course not. Same goes for the victims of a natural disaster.

I mean no disrespect, of course, to the sorrow of the victim’s family. (Search ends in sorrow would be a more accurate headline.) My contempt is for writers careless of their tools.

Next time: theatre vs amphitheatre.

Charlie Stross describes the FBI Carnivore email-snooper as “an indiscriminate Hoover”. That’s twice this month he’s made a pun such that I can’t tell whether he was aware of it. (The other was “Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta”.)

The phrase “Iron Curtain” was coined by Churchill in a speech in Missouri, if memory serves. Is there a known source for “Cold War”?

Update: Dan Kohn did the legwork and got the goods:

Cold War
This term for a conflict between nations that falls short of all-out war was coined, appropriately enough, by George Orwell in October 1945. Many, including Safire, credit Bayard Swope, a speech writer for Bernard Baruch[,] for coining the term in a draft speech in 1946. Baruch didn’t use the phrase, though, until 1947. But Orwell beat him to the punch in an article in the Tribune.

Dan adds, “BTW, Churchill’s speech is here“.

I see that a “former Bolivian president” (BBC) / “ex-Bolivian dictator” (CNN) / “former Bolivian leader” (Nando) has died. What kind of dictator did he become when he retired from being Bolivian? Why do you never see “Bolivian ex-dictator” (or “British former prime minister”) in the news? Hm, maybe Ex-Bolivia and Former Britain are different countries . . . .

LATER: I was delighted when it was briefly bandied about in 2004 that India might get a former Italian prime minister: Sonia Gandhi, Italian-born widow of Rajiv.

Review of a German book which “tries to show that many of the obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic.”

Thousands of Inca Mummies Raised From Their Graves

About 40 of the large mummy bundles are topped with false heads, known to archaeologists as falsas cabezas.

Can’t quarrel with that! (Cabeza is Spanish for ‘head’.)

Anybody in France: Is Le Pen pronounced like pin, pan or penne?

Update: François Velde writes, “The last; it rimes with haine . . .” [‘hate’]