Kudos
The Sherman T. Potter Memorial Moose Muffin goes to WAFF Channel 48 News in Huntsville, Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill for saying (at least in caption [1]) while reporting a house conflagration
“fire and smoke ripped through the house.”
This cannot be blamed simply on the news readers who will read anything put in front of them while smiling fetchingly. Rather it is likely the fault of the news writers who now demonstrate themselves to not only be unattractive (else they would be news readers,) overworked (else they would not likely of said something so outrageous,) and underpaid (else they would be more competent,) but also apparently either undereducated or intimidated by management.
Simple physics is that smoke will not compromise the integrity of an edifice as fire, the byproduct of exothermal chemical reactions will. It will pollute the edifice and it may interfere with respiration but the latter does not destroy the corpus, merely interfere with its functioning.
But the phrase does read well, being almost an Agnewism, and hence the uncertainty that this may be nothing more that pure alliterative endocrine appeal to acognitive consumers imposed on otherwise exacting news writers by venal management.
[1] Admittedly a source of uncertainty of source, however, given the information entropy of the phrase, a very small one.
