Exsanguating? Well, don't try it at home
I return from my “hostile environment” course with the word exsanguate ringing in my ears. It’s not a word I knew. But you cannot deal with battlefield scenarios without coming across the appalling prospect of an arterial bleed.
Pumping red, the stuff exsanguates from the body, and the only response, if it is in the leg, is to cut off the flow either by applying massive pressure on the critical blood flow point in the groin or, if it is in the arm, under the bicep. Alternatively a tourniquet is the last-ditch chance to save life.
There were 12 of us on the refresher course: five from ITN, four from Sky and three others. Inevitably the most recent terror attack was uppermost in our deliberations – the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan.
You can emerge from a course like this convinced the world is in a bloodier state than at any time in history. Certainly the cascade of political violence in Pakistan is some of the worst outside the Indo-Pak war since partition from India.
And yet I think I’m right in saying that this is only the second attack on an international sporting event since the Munich Olympics in 1972 – not that that makes it any better.
My friend from Sky challenged me to find a use for exsanguate in yesterday’s news. Could I have got the word into last night’s headlines. I wondered whether Harriet Harman’s leadership chances were exsanguating as a result of wounds inflicted by Fred Goodwin’s knighthood controversy (he got it for banking and not, as Ms Harman had suggested in the Commons, for charitable works) and the government’s evident difficulty in putting him on trial over his pension.
In truth, the use of words is a pivotal element of the television news trade. Some of us fear it is being eroded by the sheer multiplicity of tasks a television journalist now performs – shooting, editing, graphic design, super-captions.
Is it any wonder that no-one is experimenting with exsanguate. I guess I should issue a health warning: don’t try it at home.