A Charming Little Trope
One of my favorite crime show clichés is when the narrator or detective claims that the financial motivation for a murder, say, has as many reasons as the number of dollars the perpetrator stands to gain from his crime.
“Yeah, he shot her —and he had fifty thousand reasons to do it.”
Logically, of course, it’s a silly thing to say: either the murderer’s rationale for taking someone’s life is such that any one reason is implicitly worth a single dollar —or the rationale is so incredibly complex that its individual criteria aggegrate in the thousands, making the murderer Col. Kurtz.
In which case, the narrator is beneath the ken of judgement and should learn his place.
