Hacker News Reader

Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

> It makes it sound like there's some toxic debris Boeing is still racing to clean-up, when it fact the story is just about financial/reputational after-effects.

It doesn't make it sound like that at all. I don't think anyone except maybe you reads it that way. "Fallout" well-understood to mean "effects" or "results".

View on HN

Clearly others (commenting & upvoting) read it that way as well. Good headline writing avoids murky euphemisms, especially if the originating source of the metaphor – in this case, bombs & debris from the sky – overlaps confusingly with the actual facts.

Boeing Cleans Up Burning Debris And Aircraft Parts from Recent Crash (in a Publicity Sense)

Or, just spitballing here, "fall(ing) out of the sky" perhaps.

I read it that way as well—-words do have secondary and tertiary connotations, and any competent journalist knows how to use composition and careful word choice to more effectively convey a particular narrative.

Here are some other recent NY Times headlines that use the word fallout

Trauma May Have Fallout Over Generations

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far

As Trump Struggles With Helsinki’s Fallout, Congress Faces a New Charge: Complicity

Inside Uber’s $100,000 Payment to a Hacker, and the Fallout

Nissan and Renault Wrestle With the Fallout From Carlos Ghosn’s Arrest

Fallout is widely used to mean "affect-effects" with no secondary or tertiary connotations.

I mean....you really thought there was some kind of nuclear disaster in Helsinki after reading that headline?

All your examples use 'fallout' about abstract occurrences – not situations where an actual plane-and-jet-fuel crashed-and-exploded from the sky, throwing some actual 'fallout' across a debris field.

As far as I can tell, clean-up crews are having no notable problems with the fallout from the crash. Boeing is scrambling to contain the damage to its business.

Nobody with a full command of the language uses "fallout" to refer to a debris field. It is most commonly used in the abstract sense, to refer to negative after-effects, or else in the technical sense, for radioactive pollution.

The 'fallout' isn't the field itself, but toxic stuff that falls from the sky after an explosion.

No competent headline writer would use that figurative language around an explosive incident where there might be literal 'fallout'.

(The NYT uses 'fallout' to refer to the literal toxic materials thrown off from a non-nuclear explosion, as in stories like https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/world/asia/cyanide-levels.... And also to refer to toxic off-gassing from other processes, as in the headline at https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/us/home-drug-making-labor...)

> toxic stuff that falls from the sky

I know... "radioactive pollution."

The public would not expect a civilian airliner to be nuke-powered.

As noted in my examples, the NYT regularly uses 'fallout' to refer to non-radioactive toxics emerging from explosions and other activities as well. This usage is also confirmed by many dictionaries.

The Times in the first (and only working) link uses fallout in the "problematic aftereffects" sense, although I can see how this might be confusing.

The use of "toxic fallout" in the 1st link is pretty clearly referring to literal toxic chemicals released. And if you remove the '.' from the 2nd link, you'll see the same in the "toxic fallout" headline there.

I can't believe you stole 30 seconds of my life on this "topic."

As a common consumer of news on sites like HN, headline practices are very interesting to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com