I’m no stranger to ego-surfing, if I may deploy that crusty neologism-that-wasn’t — a word from those halcyon days in which the Everyperson lived out their brief, faddish first romance with search engines. People did it, Wired talked about it: sometimes you just have to Google yourself to see how you stand, webospherically.

I bring this up not to introduce some new wrinkle in the ongoing saga of Josh Millard vs. The Search Engines, but rather to express a certain weird pleasure in having discovered something Millardological despite not making any effort to find myself.

Presenting Rosie Millard Central.

Who is Rosie Millard? I had no idea, until ten minutes ago. The site covers, as you might expect, a great deal on the subject, but Rosie is, briefly, a (former?) BBC television correspondent. And somebody is so bloody fond of her that they set up a web-site on geocities. Bravo for Rosie, and all that. I personally take some weird pleasure in seeing the name Millard plastered all over a site, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with me; and, back to the original point, I didn’t go looking for a Millard, and in fact have no idea how I even got there, now. Oh how I love you, my wonderful random The Web.

I haven’t been this homonymically* tickled since I found about good old Number Thirteen.

* Though, in the case of Pres. Fillmore, the pronunciation “MILL-erd” clashes with my surname’s rendering: “Mih-LARD”. So I suppose the tickling in that case would be more correctly classified as merely homographical. Oh well.

From the Bay Area’s mercurynews.com, in an article on the recent post-office shootup/suicide in Santa Barbara:

“Later Monday, Sanmarco shot six postal employees at a mail processing plant in Goleta, killing five before committing suicide, authorities said. The sole survivor remained hospitalized in critical condition. It was the deadliest shooting at any workplace since 2003.”

Emphasis mine.

What strikes me as odd, this morning, is the use of deadliest. I can’t pin it down, exactly, however; why does that bother me? I don’t think it’s just the Statistics of the Macabre angle (like the AP is playing color commentator for a game of Murderball: “next up to the plate, Sanmarco.” “No smalltime hitter there, Bob; she holds the record for deadliest workplace shooting since oh three.” “Aaaand, here’s the windup…”)

It may just be some misguided instinct to treat “deadly” as a sort of abstract, binary modifier — something is deadly or it isn’t, and that is that. My argument would hinge on the notion that for things that might get a person killed but aren’t really defined by that possibility, a better word would be “dangerous” or “perilous” or some such thing. Only those things that are likely to (or, after the fact, did indeed) cause death should be deadly, and at that point, if people will die or have died, you can’t get much deadlier.

So, for example, if it hasn’t happened yet, rock climbing is dangerous, whereas Russian Roulette is deadly. If it has happened already, a car accident that everyone survived was dangerous, injurious, but not deadly. Whereas a fatal (hey, there’s a handy word) shootout was unquestionably deadly.

So there’s the thing. If a shootout in which someone dies is deadly, is a shootout in which two people die also simply deadly? Or is it deadlier?

I don’t think I’m in accord with general usage — certainly, the AP doesn’t agree with me, here — so it’s probably just a quirk in my own preferences. Still, the idea of those variations on “deadly” as a superlative make me blink. “Fatal” certainly doesn’t behave the same way: one shootout is certainly not more fatal (let alone fataler) than another, and none is going to be crowned most fatal any time soon. But maybe the lesson is that “deadly” occupies a more euphamistic and less technical role in general usage than I’m trying to project onto it.