#1012 Gaping Error

Perhaps the downfall of journalism can be traced to its astonishing ignorance when it comes to things astronomical. I’m not saying every news service writer needs to be a scientist. I just wish that when they employed metaphors and similes from the world of science, they were a little more accurate about what it is they are metaphoring or similizing.
I’ve ranted before about the bad use of the term meteoric. As in “The famous person abruptly ended his meteoric rise to fame.” Or “his meteoric career just keeps on rising with a new hit in the top 40!”
As any schoolchild will tell you, meteors don’t rise. An end to a meteoric career would be a career that was plunging in a catastrophic ball of flame.
Some writers and pundits also say things like “he went ballistic” when they mean the he in question is exploding in every direction. Ballistic simply means to move according to ambient conditions, as in projectiles zooming through the sky and reacting to air friction and wind. Said projectiles may be missiles, which may have warheads, which then explode. But the nature of the explosion has nothing to do with the ballistics of the missile in question.
I read a new astro-misnomer the other day. A writer was bemoaning the fact that there was a “gaping black hole” in British finances.
Now perhaps he meant a real hole, that was deep and dark and without light, so it could be characterized as black. But I don’t think so. I think he meant the astronomical black hole. Or why not just say gaping hole?
So once again, let me call for accuracy. Astrophysical black holes do not gape. They are infinite points of infinite mass. With gravity so intense nothing, not even light, can escape.
That’s where the black in black hole comes from. No light.
The hole part comes from the fact that you can’t get out of it. But it doesn’t gape.
Its gravity sucks really hard.
If one happened to fly over a ballistic chunk of rock falling through our atmosphere it would be so strong enough to make that meteor rise.
America, ya gotta love it.