Some journalists still know they are writing the first draft of history, as with the magisterial lede from Adam Nagourney's story in the New York Times:
Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.
The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.
I understand the rhetoric, but “unthinkable”?
This is in the same class of ignorance as 9/11 (presaged by Towering Inferno and actual bombing attempts on buildings) and Katrina (Which was predicted pretty exactly two years before in a TV show).
The people who say it was ‘unthinkable’ don’t really know how to think at all.
Having said that, it was not guaranteed that this would be the day it happened, so it is still remarkable.
I just think that professional writers should be able to use the language. Better choices would have been ‘unrealistic’ or ‘doomed to fail’.
Oh, well. I might as well wish that sports writers and commentators not label every successful play as ‘great’.