Reader question:

Please explain this sentence, particularly “road kill”: Yahoo has become road kill on the information superhighway.

My comments:

Road kill is literally an animal killed on the road by vehicles in traffic. For example, if someone’s pet dog strays onto the road Beijing and gets run over by a car or truck, that poor dog is roadkill.

In the countryside, animals in the wild often stray onto highways or superhighways and get hit by cars and trucks. These are all road kills.

Road kill, or roadkill, is American in origin and a relatively new expression – obviously the byproduct of motor vehicles and highways.

In fact, according to Online Etymology Dictionary, “road kill” became accepted in the English language as late as in 1972. Presumably prior to that road kills had not been a general topic because they weren’t as prevalent then as they were to become later. For example, Merritt Clifton, Editor Animal People Newspaper, used the 1993 roadkill statistics and estimated that the following animals were being killed by motor vehicles (http://roadkill.edutel.com) in a year:

41 million squirrels

26 million cats

22 million rats

19 million opossums

15 million raccoons

6 million dogs

350,000 deer

Horrific numbers, aren’t they?

Metaphorically, “road kill” in the figurative sense came into being in 1992, again according to the same Online Etymology Dictionary.

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