From or For or In Bed: He's Still Indicted

Last week, in reporting the same tired story over and over and over again, television reporters on every single English-language news channel repeated the phrase “he was indicted from his hospital bed” at least a thousand times within the space of an hour.

The phrase bothered me for three reasons.

First, its very repetition was a cruel aural punishment. Do television reporters meet on a weekly basis at their teeth-polishing salons and decide on a catchphrase of the week?

Second, the person who was “indicted” from his hospital bed was in a mental institution. Why would he have been in bed?

Third, I’m not so sure one can be indicted from anywhere. After all, one is never from court.

So I went on a little etymological hunt.

When one is indicted, one is arraigned, or accused. So, if one is, in fact, lying in a hospital bed when the judge and lawyers enter the room, they will proceed to indict him in his hospital bed.

But, that sounds a little strange, because it might suggest that everyone got into bed with him for the indictment. So, to safeguard against such misinterpretation, television writers changed the active indict to a passive to be indicted: “Mr. Alleged Perpetrator was indicted in his hospital bed.”

What we never find out is what Mr. A.P. was indicted for. But, I guess there’s definite ambiguity in “Mr. Alleged Perpetrator was indicted for murder in his hospital bed.”

Did he murder someone in his hospital bed?

So some bright copywriter or copyeditor came up with the idea of using a different preposition—from—to act as a clarifier, or dis-ambiguizer. However, because we never would say, “Mr. Alleged Perpetrator was indicted for murder from court,” it doesn’t work.

It’s a lexical mess, and had the newscasters not repeated the phrase so many times on one day, I probably wouldn’t have considered the matter, well, indictable. They might have agreed on something like: “Mr. Alleged Perpetrator was in his hospital bed when prosecutors indicted him for murder.”

But, they didn’t.

I still don’t understand, though, why he was in bed in the first place. Was it the middle of the night?