In an article entitled "Once-beautiful Baghdad descends to eyesore" published today, brought to me by my MSNBC news feed, there is a picture of the desolation of Baghdad. Very sad. The caption reads:
An Iraqi boy walks past stagnant water on Wednesday in the Sadr City section of Baghdad. ...Baghdad's landscape has been marred by concrete blast walls and barbed wire, its crumbling buildings pockmarked by bullet holes or ransacked by explosions.
Excuse me? Ransacked by explosions? I wasn't aware that explosions could ransack anything, seeing as ransack means something along the lines of "search" or perhaps "pillage." An explosion, ahem, can't do either of those things.
Reading the second sentence in the article, however, we see how this came about:
Known for centuries as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, its landscape has been marred by concrete blast walls, barbed wire, steel barricades, sandbags and crumbling buildings pockmarked by bullet holes or gutted by explosions.
Clearly the caption writer simply lifted that second sentence from the body of the article, removed some words, and decided he didn't like the word "gutted," so busted out his trusty thesauraus and came up with "ransacked." Which sounds completely ridiculous. It's bad enough that the bulk of the caption was lifted straight from the article, but far, far worse that it was then edited ever so slightly so that it just made no sense at all. Ugh.
I hope I'm wrong, and that it was a machine that did it. But the sheer randomness of it--why replace just that word with an inappropriate synonym?--leads me to believe that it is, in fact, a very stupid human who has committed this crime against journalism.
And yet another example of why one mustn't just use any old word listed as a synonym in a thesaurus. Because you may just end up sounding like an idiot.