Quote:
Originally Posted by Windswept
I feel especially sorry for those people when they say "I seen" or "I had went" on national television, when being interviewed with regard to some once-in-a-lifetime incident that they happened to witness. (Recent bridge tragedy, for example.)
There, on tape for all time and for their posterity, are recorded their appalling grammatical atrocities.
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Yeah, that's what I call the Tornado Witness Interview Syndrome (TWIS)...everytime a tornado strikes around here (we don't get them in Chattanooga proper, thank goodness, but in a lot of the outlying counties they can be a real danger).
Anyway, the local news crew travels there to get some footage and interviews. And it
never fails (in fact, I think they seek it out...I really do, for their own twisted kicks) that they always -
always - choose the one person who is the least capable of putting together a coherent sentence,
and who looks like something from another dimension.
I call it The Interview Uniform®: muscle shirt (with one of three NASCAR drivers: Dale Jr., Dale, Sr. or Mark Martin), some sort of ball crap - camouflage pattern - with disgusting graphic/phrase of a sexual or racial nature (which has to be pixelated in editing), mullet, homemade tattoo of the Chevy logo and, of course, smoking (or, if you get lucky, they'll actually have a can of beer at 9:45am).
"I done seen that big dang ol' wall of clouds, and I told them there kids to get on inside. Then I heared what sounded like a freight train*. It like to scared me plum half-to-death. I ain't never saw nothing like it nowhere. We're just glad it only carried off two of the kids...the other nine, they's safe over yonder."
If you're
really lucky, you'll get a few bleeped passages.
"Sir, we're from Eyewitness Action First News 10, and can you tel..."
"Buddy, I don't give a sweet flyin' [beeeeep]...look at my [beeeeep] yard!"
*
Always the go-to audio description of a tornado. I'm really hoping they'll come across someone someday who goes for a bit of originality/honesty and says "Freight train, my ass...it sounded like a whole lotta strong fuckin' wind, tearin' all my shit up!"
Fingers crossed...