Hurried literary flavour

News writing has customarily been (don't know if it has been any longer) considered to be 'literature in a hurry.' And the very proposition, known to all journalism students and their hangabouts, inspires the reporters and even the editors to show a bit of their literary flares, that too, often, with a touch of the easy-to-reach Shift + F7, which invokes a bare thesaurus within Microsoft Word.

There are a number of words that drafts are larded with, by reporters and editers alike, to make them read a bit literary. One such word is 'tiny.' Reporters write 'tiny traders,' very much of a private coin, in place of small traders or retailers and not to mean the people who are called midgets, and the clichéd 'tiny tots' for children. Another wrote that 'bilateral trade between the two countries amounts tiny.' One with high innovative faculty once wrote 'rotund aubergine' to distinguish, in a literary manner, as he explained, the kind of aubergine that is almost round from the kind that is taller, but also with round circumference. Another wrote 'molest' as a synonym for 'harass' in a report on a political arrest, of course with the help of the ubiquitous MS Word thesaurus. They are synonymous, in a sense, maybe; but when the police molest a political party leader aged above 60, the connotation only hints at the hardly-imagined permissiveness of society.