Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Guzzling Is Good.

The Guardian's most frequently sensible columnist is Simon Jenkins, this is damning with faint praise I admit, in an otherwise mundane column on urban planning he writes:
Tony Blair's will be remembered not just for Iraq, but for giant warehouses and hypermarkets on urban fringes and for pepper-potting the capital with carbon-guzzling glass towers.
Surely if they were 'carbon-guzzling' this would be a good thing, trees for example do 'guzzle' CO2. Obviously he means carbon emitting, but the use of the word 'guzzling' does demonstrate how much of what passes for comment journalism is simply spouting off buzz words without comprehendng what they mean. Guzzling is most frequently used in the context of 'gas guzzling', as it is an emotive way of describing consumption of petrol, Jenkins is trying to transfer the same emotive terminology to buildings even when it makes no sense whatsoever.

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