Suppose your football coach exhorts the team with all the great coach clichés: “We win or lose together”, “There’s no I in ‘Team'”, maybe “We can still win if we pull together and give 110 percent in the second half”. Would anyone say this was a “warning”? But when Angela Merkel says Europe needs to work together to deal with the current influx of migrants, we get this headline in the Guardian:
It reminds me of the peculiar set of mandatory texts that were introduced for cigarette packets in the US in 1981: Among the warnings of carbon monoxide and foetal injury was this one:
SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.
“Greatly reduces serious risks to your health” doesn’t sound like a warning to me.
Common Infirmities 