The Horror

That’s right, Christmas is coming. Be afraid.

Anything that has this much hype for this long is bound to be a disappointment at best, at worst the Apocalypse itself (Obama’s not in power yet…).

I’ve noticed that the word horror seems to be cropping up in headlines with alarming regularity. No sooner had Worcester folk got over the shock of ‘CYCLIST DIES IN HORROR CRASH’ than we were hit with ‘HORROR RAPE CASE VERDICT’.

Stephen Fry has shown me the error of my ways, so I’m trying to curb my innate pedantry. In fact, I do think ‘horror’ has more impact (or maybe even ‘is more impactful’) than ‘horrific’- it’s as if these incidents encapsulate the very concept of horror.

But that’s the problem- if we keep sticking horror in front of any and every nasty event, we run the risk of devaluing it. Then what will we do the next time someone like Sarah Palin is in with a chance of becoming leader of the free world, or Linda Barker makes another DFS ad?

No, we must make a friend of horror, but that means respecting it and only using it when we really need it… that and chopping the freshy-innoculated arms off Vietnamese children, of course.