The lead news article in today's Times is a profile of the Dallas Ebola victim. It carries the byline of two-time Pulitzer-prize winner Kevin Sack, and it also carries some pretty compelling and fascinating reporting. Alas, it also carries a real clunker of a sentence that some editor should have caught and fixed: "Tragedy befell Ms. Troh in February when a daughter in Liberia died during childbirth."
Yikes. Can't Times readers be counted on to react with the appropriate emotion to the news of a death during childbirth without being clobbered over the head with notification that it is a "tragedy"? And who communicates in this passive-voice, non-idiomatic language — "Tragedy befell" — other than journalists?