Writing Tools

I heard it this morning while driving to work, as I knew I would. The radio reporter described the efforts of rescue workers to pull dead bodies out of crushed cars and out of the muck at the bottom of the Mississippi River. The failure of the bridge in Minneapolis at rush hour made this "grim task" necessary.

There it was — the phrase "grim task."  Let's kill it along with its first cousin "grisly task." I've heard it and read it for more than 30 years now, and it is more tired than ever. I's appearance is so predictable that it has become, to borrow a phrase from George Orwell, a substitute for thinking. I would argue that at a time of death and destruction, the failure of writers to craft something original is a sign of disrespect.

I first heard the phrase used by a TV reporter in Montgomery, Ala., to describe the exhumation of a corpse. "As the coroner performs the grim task blah, blah, blah." 

I was teaching English literature at the time, and I must have been reading "Hamlet" because I immediately thought of Shakespeare's singing gravedigger.

He appears in Act V and is digging a grave for the dead Ophelia. He sends his partner to get some liquor and begins singing a love song to accompany his digging. Hamlet and his pal Horatio come upon him:

Hamlet: Has this fellow no feeling of his business that he sings at grave-making?
Horatio: Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.
Hamlet: 'Tis e'en so, the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.

In other words, the gravedigger can sing because it's his job to dig graves. A person who has never done this work would naturally have a more delicate sensibility about it. To cast it in modern terms, think of all those TV cops visiting all those medical examiners, all of them cracking wise with impunity right there in the presence of the autopsied corpse.

We can now test the overuse of certain phrases by doing a Google search. When I plugged in "grim task," I found 55,400 links, including a headline in a video game and a diatribe against the phrase by my old Poynter pal, Dr. Ink. But the most common use came from journalists reporting on crime, accidents and natural disasters. 

Please do not misunderstand me. I admire rescue workers for the difficult work they do, but I think it inaccurate to imagine that all of them think of handling a dead body as a grim or grisly task. If I were a reporter covering such a person or such a scene, I'd avoid the words "grim task" like the plague.  No, strike that — like the swine flu.