Spree trails ruin

Language Log 2020-09-24

From BobW:

"Saw this and immediately thought of Language Log. Whatever are they doing with all those spree trails?":

"With Deutsche Bank’s help, an oligarch’s buying spree trails ruin across the US heartland

Secret transactions, lost jobs, worker injuries, gutted buildings, unpaid bills: Ihor Kolomoisky’s untold American legacy"

By Michael Sallah and Tanya Kozyreva, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (9/22/20).

I think that most people encountering this string of oddly concatenated words would stop and do a double take as they try to make sense of it:  "oligarch’s buying spree trails ruin".  With my eyeballs whirling around in my head, I thought:  whatever are they trying to say?  But then I calmed down and recollected that the hardest word, "spree", is one that I had myself used in a Yuletide greeting in 2013.  With "spree" (a sudden outburst of activity) nailed down in the center, the other words fell into place.

Aside from the unusual, refractory wording, the thing that pained me the most about this article is that the culprit responsible for the death and destruction, Ihor Kolomoisky, seems to have focused on northeastern Ohio (Warren, Cleveland), where I grew up.  The opening scene is at a hospital in Akron, only 25 miles from my old home in Canton.  The site of the big factory explosion described in Warren is 60 miles from Canton.

Rust belt predator on a spree!