Stunning style bomb

Earthshaking events are usually dramatic enough that they don’t need hyperbolic adjectives or nouns to underscore the drama.

Deputy ME Matt Murray issued a staff reminder to watch out for such hyping:

We have had too many moments lately of slipping into "unprecedented," "record-breaking" events, and we've also been "stunned" a lot, as well as "jolted." Companies aren't just holding talks but "secret" talks, and by the way sometimes they aren't companies but "behemoths" and "titans." Every disagreement is "increasingly tense" and "increasingly fraught."

We want to encourage bright, taut, colorful writing, he concluded, but we also want to remain a steady presence for readers in a jittery world.

Amen to that. A magnitude 7 earthquake in a capital city doesn’t need to be called catastrophic or devastating repeatedly. And a major car company’s halting sales temporarily may be earthshaking as well, but we needn’t call it stunning and unprecedented to underscore the point.