. . . even when a hyphen is brought in to help.

I received early this morning a push notifiation on my phone from The Washington Post, the BBC, and The New York Times respectively, all to the effect that a dose of a COVID vaccination was proving a certain percentage effective. The first alert to arrive, from the Washington Post started with the unfortunate lead words “Single-shot” followed by “Johnson & Johnson vaccine . . ..”

As a society, we are presently in the midst of a gun epidemic piled atop a virus pandemic. Certain elected officials in Congress are claiming their right to carry guns where none rightly dared, while on the other side of the political divide, constituents are demanding the ouster of those lawmakers who cite, among other things, the extension of their 2nd amendment rights.

No sooner had I written a menatal email to the editors of The Washington Post, pleading with them to replace the word “shot” with “dose,” then, right on cue, the notifications arrived from the BBC and The New York Times, leading with the words “one-dose” and “single-dose” in lieu of “one-shot.”

In the context of the present moment, an early-morning news headline that leads with the hyphenated word, “single-shot,” is simply asking too much of the word, shot. Just because the word can do double, triple, or even quadruple duty–as an injection, or even a jigger of tequilla or a wild guess, in addition to a bullet discharged from a gun–doesn’t mean it is fair to ask it to do so. Not in the current environment. Not when context is everything.