Twice in one night.

[cattj]

Standards are dropping. Twice on the telly tonight...

Odd one in:

"Meet the man who was electrocuted while cooking a barbecue."

Casualty:

"Most high voltage electrocutions are fatal."

I've been watching this thread, waiting for someone to reply, I'm a bit thick so you'll have to explain.
ps. did you watch the magic show or national lottery inbetween?

Can you show me the error in the second one? It irritates me when I can't work them out. (I need to go back to Lynne Truss' book.)

doesn't electrocution mean death....

well I think these are pretty minor errors! Arguably a barbecue can be correctly used to refer to the meal, not just the grill itself. It's been common in the US to talk about "eating barbecue" for years. (Unless the error is something else?)

And the second one I can't see the error at all.

Ah! Thanks.

no - electrocution doesn't necessarily mean death.

The OED definition is "death or injury caused by electric shock" (my boldening).

"injure or kill with electric shock" in my dictionary (look up in microsoft word)

Hehe, I thought the error in the first one was while instead of whilst. Missed the electrocuted part!

oh ok, I dont know sorry

really shouldn't be in this topic

oh I see - the first one is electrocution too!

Sorry OP - you are wrong, electrocution can mean death but can equally correctly mean injury. So the examples you give are perfectly correct usage.

I thought the second one was the tautology? You don't get electrocuted by low voltage, so the use of high voltage is unnecessary.

Just thinking about the first one, how can you be electrocuted using a barbecue? Surely they are charcoal or gas? Or am I missing something?

no, it's not tautology, because to make the sentence correct, you need to specify that you are talking solely about high voltage electrocutions.

It wouldn't make sense to say "most electrocutions are fatal" because you can also have low(er) voltage electrocutions, they are just less likely to be fatal.

It's like saying "most high speed car crashes are fatal" - that's not a tautology either.

You can have barbecues with electric elements (like a rotisserie spit for eg). Or the barbecue itself could have been incidental - he could have been struck by lightning.

This is immaterial though - the sentence is grammatically and logically correct which is all that matters from a pedantic POV

The fella was struck by lightening whilst barbequeing.

So, I wasn't being thick, there isn't anything wrong with the sentences?

No. There's nothing wrong with either sentence.

(Before anyone asks - yes you can get electrocuted - even fatally - by low voltage. It depends on the current and lots of other factors).

Volts jolt, amps kill. That's what I remember anyway.