Tuesday, June 28, 2005
This New York Times article has this sentence in it in the third graf:
"And even their extinction - once proof of thuggish inadequacy - is now a sign of mere victimhood: they were apparently wiped out in a mass extinction caused by a comet hitting the earth." (Emphasis mine.)
Except a comet is this:
: a celestial body that consists of a fuzzy head usually surrounding a bright nucleus, that has a usually highly eccentric orbit, and that often when in the part of its orbit near the sun develops a long tail which points away from the sun (Merriam-Webster) The word the Times should have used is meteor:
1 : an atmospheric phenomenon (as lightning or a snowfall) (Merriam-Webster) In outer space, it's a comet. Once it punctures Earth's atmosphere, if you will, it becomes a meteor. Once it crashes into the ground, however, it's a meteorite.
9:57:00 AM
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