The intersection between pornography and language, the intersection between the inflation of news and the idea of celebrity as distinct from news, the intersection between silence and noise for the sake of noise; filling the void where conversation stalls with a repetition of an already-known piece of information.
For most of the past week, the main news story in England has been about a man with a gun who managed to evade capture by police. As well as allegedly shooting dead his ex-girlfriend's new partner, Raoul Moat is also alleged to have shot the aforementioned ex-girlfriend, as well as injuring a policeman and robbing a fish-and-chip shop.
On Friday night, armed police found Moat's hiding place, and surrounded him. The details of exactly what happened next are unclear, but ultimately, after six hours or more, Moat was shot - it's not yet been established whether he committed suicide, or whether the police were responsible - and pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.
The language of war, reduced to the language of sports journalism.
Football's World Cup is the 21st century's world war, at least if you read the newspapers.
It takes no great observational power to realise the leak of warlike language into the arena of sport - the team with the greatest firepower or heaviest artillery are installed as pre-tournament favourites. Footballers rifle shots into the goal, or blast them wide, and the players who do so are sharpshooters or hitmen, or even assassins, but always deadly.
Of course we know by now that being eliminated from the competition is a tragedy and a disaster for a nation - the war is lost, and this particularly applies whenever England play Germany.
The German national football team are the remnants of the Second World War, according to some members of the British Press - references to the Hun, and to Fritz, are not uncommon in the tabloids, and the Daily Mirror took this to its natural conclusion before the Euro '96 semi-final between the two countries.
It hardly needs mentioning that this trend not only gives football an importance which it arguably does not deserve, but it also trivialises war.
The language of sports journalism, confused with the language of news.
Sports journalists uses the language they do because it insufflates otherwise dull cricket and football matches with a sense of occasion.
In some ways, sportswriters are failed news reporters - they don't get to write about general elections or murder cases or the death of royalty, and so they feel obliged to compensate by making their subject seem more connected to other, more important events, hence in part the dramatic language employed.
So much for sportswriters, who ham up their disconnect world like actors. What excuse do news reporters have for over-dramatising their subject, for taking the events which (genuinely) affect people's lives, and turning them into theatre?
Some examples of the terminology used on BBC Radio on Friday night, as the presenter waited for developments between the police and Moat. They'd not be out of place on the back page of a tabloid before an England v Germany football match, such is their appeal to the emotions - the following are almost verbatim, but I'm not sure I got down every word as I sat at the computer. A series of 'experts' comprising former firearms officers and high-ranking ex-police, as well as eyewitnesses:
- the lethal range of a shotgun against someone with full body armour is very, very short.
- people are trying to get as good a view of the scene as they can to see how it ends. this could end at any moment.
- for the first time the police are in control of this manhunt. they had been chasing shadows, scanning the land, but now they've got him surrounded. there are only two ways this can end.
- he must be getting tired, fatigued - the same applies to the police officers, by the way. this should be resolved one way or the other pretty soon.
The language of war and sport and news superimposed over one another with no single one holding sway, and thus no way of discerning the trivial from the threatening, and the outcome of a tennis match from the decision to take another's man life, or permit him to live.
