QUANTIFYING DESTRUCTION: MONEY FIRST OR MONEY LAST?

Loss of lives or property often get well-accommodated in the media. Such coverage does not seek to celebrate calamity or someone's misfortune. The unfortunate bit could be that the press seeks to capitalize on this sense of loss to get the attention of the audience. Quantifying the value of destruction appears to be quite a challenge though. Should money come first or last?

In the newspaper headline above, the reader is first being asked to process the amount of money 'destroyed' before relating it to a particular product, in this case wheat.

From the way this information is packaged, the headline writer is stressing the amount of money lost... but in terms of wheat.

To a reader like me, this is rather confusing.

'Floods destroy wheat worth Sh 150m' would sound more natural and easier to process than 'Floods destroy Sh 150m worth of wheat'.

In other words, the loss should first be established to be of wheat, before the value of the wheat lost is given.

And if you are not fully convinced, try listening to a similar sentence construction in a radio or TV news broadcast!