Most Confusing Fight of All Time: Man Struck By Hatchet: An Exploration of the Word “Laceration”
LEBANON, Pa. — Police say a man was struck on the back by a hatchet and another struck on the head with a bottle, during a dispute with a third man in Lebanon.
On Saturday afternoon, police say they were dispatched to the hospital to investigate after a man was brought in with a laceration on the right side of his back.
Before we hop into this, you can read the full story here. Right off the bat I just want to congratulate the brilliant writers at Fox 43 for what is, without a doubt, the most confusing description of a fight I’ve ever seen.
During their investigation police learned there had been a fight between three men on the 900 block of Cumberland Street just before 4:00 p.m. that day.
Alright, three guys. One fight. Got it.
According to officials, the three men fought because two of them attempted to remove a bottle of alcohol from a business on Cumberland Street. The bottle belonged to the third man.
Okay, so the first two guys stole a bottle of alcohol from a store… and the bottle also belonged to the third guy? The third guy had a separate bottle? If we’re dealing with more than one bottle here we can’t just be throwing around terms like “the bottle” when there are two “the bottles”.
That's when the third man confronted the other two and a fight broke out, police say. Then one of the two men was struck on the head with a bottle.
Oh dear, okay, not getting any less confusing. So we’ve got a classic one vs. two, and one of the two gets hit with a bottle. Not the bottle. A bottle. So we, as the reader, are in the dark as to whether this was the bottle they stole, or THE bottle that the third guy just brought with him to the fight. Third option is there’s only one bottl.e 4th option is there’s three bottles but the writers at Fox43 didn’t find that information pertinent. To be fair, all of these details are only important if you want to have any clue as to what the fuck is going on. Shame on us, really.
The second man who police say appeared to be have been holding a tire iron, and the third man who was holding a hatchet became entangled in a physical fight that resulted in the second man getting struck on his back with the hatchet.
We’re just labeling these dudes without a care in the world aren’t we. Are the second and third guy friends or are they enemies? Was this a collateral hatchet strike or a hostile one? It has to be friendly right? If it was hostile than they would have mentioned that when they were listing all the bottles these guys were carrying. Strange the hatchet and tire iron didn’t come up then. The dude with the hatchet and the dude with the tire iron is remarkably easier to picture than two guys with a bottle and one guy with the bottle.
According to police, both the two men who were injured required medical attention. The second man is currently still in the hospital recovering from the lacerations to his back caused by the hatchet.
There’s something about the word laceration that just really doesn’t seem to cover any sort of severity, certainly not the kind one would experience with a bladed weapon. Maybe it’s just been my personal experience with the word, but it makes me think of a scratch. For the record, I think a scratch is technically a laceration. Well regardless we’ve got to have a different word for hatchet wound than laceration. You can’t use the same word to describe what happens when I scrape my knee and when some random dude survives a hatchet attack. If you’re using the word laceration in regards to a hatched attack, motherfucker you got lucky. You got missed by the hatchet. Laceration? What did I do, walk into a branch? This dude almost got chopped up! I’m curious if any medical professionals out there share my outrage at lumping a ridiculous variety of words under one term. We’ve got the english language and all of it’s adjectives and nouns at our fingertips, we can do better.
