Battles with Cancer

easychair

Why is it the News Media always refers to someone with cancer as "battling" cancer? Today's Irish Independent has this today with "
Shock for listeners as Aine reveals her battle with cancer"


http://www.independent.ie/national-news/shock-for-listeners-as-aine-reveals-her-battle-with-cancer-2907068.html

No one is ever "battling" after a heart attack, or "battling 'flu" and so on.

This implies that someone who succumbs to cancer wasn't battling hard enough, which is silly. How does someone "battle" cancer in a way that they can't "battle" the 'flu?

Why has this idea that we have to "battle" cancer become so ubiquitous , when it's unclear what one does to battle the disease which is not applicable to other diseases?

coylemj

They 'battle' cancer so that they can be labelled a hero for beating it. It's all part of the emotive language used by the media today.

If a trainee journo produced a story which said that so and so was diagnosed with cancer, went to a specialist, got treated by our excellent health service and is now cured, they would be fired.

easychair

"In the book, 'At Five In The Afternoon', published two years ago, the 64-year-old gave a searingly honest account of his fight against prostate cancer."

Another article from the Irish Independent talking about someone "fighting " cancer. No details are given of what he did to fight it, or how he fought it, and I am bemused why these terms seem to be exclusively used for cancer patients and not for patients with other diseases.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/book-revelations-led-to-split-in-murphys-family-2920553.html

brian_t

Mary Kenny on Cancer is not a ‘Battle’

http://www.mary-kenny.com/published_articles/cancer-battle.html

Wildlife Actor

OP you've got to read Myles na gCopaleen's Catechism of Cliche...

A taste (paraphrased less funnily from memory):

Question: Is there any proper use of that dreadful cliche "such-and-such will fall to be dealt with by so-and-so"?
Answer: Yes "The incendiary bombs will fall to be dealt with by the Fire Brigade"

easychair

I myself love the way the news talks of one person being "murdered" (Implication he was done away with by someone undesirable) whereas when someone undesirable is murdered, the news programmes usually talk of him being "killed" .

Ditto when someone drunk or drugged up drives his car into a tree, it is said the car crashed into a tree, rather than what in fact happened was it was driven into the tree.

I wonder is this all part and parcel of trying to avoid responsibility for anything, a culture which has caused so much harm to Ireland over far too many years, and where no one ever seems to take or to be responsible for anything.

goose2005

easychair wrote: »

I myself love the way the news talks of one person being "murdered" (Implication he was done away with by someone undesirable) whereas when someone undesirable is murdered, the news programmes usually talk of him being "killed" .

Also, it's odd that any premeditated 'gangland' murder is called "execution-style" - I didn't realise that shooting a kneeling man in the head in a warehouse was such a common method. Maybe if they had locked him up for several years, allowed a series of appeals against the sentence, gave him a last meal and a visit from a priest, invited his victims to view the execution, and then hanged him, that would be "execution-style".