Local-ish Trivia: Quite a disturbing sentence.

"Police suspect a serial killer but so far have no suspects."

Ooh. Creepy.

Pretty disturbing content. But what also disturbs me about this sentence is the double-use of the word "suspect," even though in one case it's a verb and in the other it's a noun.

I am then meta-disturbed that word choice disturbs me here, since obviously there are more important things going on than the use of words that have legitimate meaning, if not the poetic sensibility I appear to expect from aggregated crime reporting.

And on further reflection I also feel disturbed that this whole scenario -- four women (one from CT) found dead on the side of the road, more or less, and four more bodies recovered in addition to those -- refers me automatically to TV rather than any real-life events. Murders are almost entirely mediated in my mind, not visceral or impactful at all.

But maybe that last one's for the best.

(Note: In writing this post, I had originally copied the characterization of the women found in the article -- "four prostitutes" -- but when I actually wrote it out, I found myself resisting that label. Why specify that they were prostitutes, as though that's a different kind of human than "women"? Nobody finds four dudes dead on the side of the road and says "the four investment bankers [blah blah blah]." And if they did, despite the fact that investment bankers have screwed us all, while prostitutes have only screwed a small fraction of us -- and then at our request, and for our apparent benefit, and to their own peril -- we'd probably think something like "oh, they were investment bankers -- upstanding citizens who probably had families." These women had families, too. Probably. If this kind of sensationalist reportorial nonsensical characterization continues, I'll be forced to take a defensive position in favor of legalized prostitution, rather than continuing to believe that investment bankers should probably be made illegal.)