Miracles

The wild and reckless use of the word “miracles” in modern journalism raises my hackles.

I hear it all the time. The operation was successful. A miracle! One of the miners survived the mine collapse. A miracle! A beautiful sunny day after a lot of rain. A miracle!

Modern journalistic usage (and popular parlance) seem to have redefined miracle as “Anything that happened that we had previously convinced ourselves was unlikely to happen.”