Ratko Mladić died on Thursday, at 84, in a UN prison hospital in the Netherlands, where he was serving a life sentence. In 2017 an international tribunal convicted him of genocide for the murder of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica — Europe's worst atrocity since World War II — and for the years-long shelling of Sarajevo. Those are court findings, not opinions. Keep them in mind while we read the headlines. * An obituary headline has one job: pick the noun that goes next to the name, one last time. We've written before that every obituary headline is an epitaph. So here's what the industry carved today. * BBC: "Convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Mladić dies aged 84." Al Jazeera: "Convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic dies." That's the strong version, and notice how boring it is — no adjectives, no nickname, just the legal record doing all the lifting. 'Convicted war criminal' can't be argued with. A court already had the argument. * AP's wire, carried by NBC and NPR: "ex-Bosnian Serb warlord who oversaw atrocities in Bosnia, dies in prison at 84." Softer than it sounds. 'Warlord' is a vibe, not a verdict — video games have warlords. And 'oversaw atrocities' is middle-management grammar, the language of a regional director with an unfortunate quarter. The tribunal didn't find that he oversaw something; it found him guilty of genocide. AP's own first sentence says exactly that — "convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre" — which means the wire knew the right words and spent them one floor below the headline. * And then CNN: "Ratko Mladić, Bosnian-Serb general dubbed, the 'Butcher of Bosnia,' dies aged 84." Read the nouns CNN chose. 'General' — the rank he'd want on his tombstone. 'Dubbed' — meaning even the nickname isn't CNN's claim, just something people used to call him. There is no crime anywhere in that headline. No conviction, no genocide, no prison. A general with a colorful nickname died at a respectable age. You could run the same syntax for a beloved retired astronaut. * Here's the thing about 'Butcher of Bosnia': it sounds brutal, but it's actually the evasive option. It's a tabloid epithet — vivid, deniable, legally weightless. 'Genocide' is a finding of fact that took a five-year trial, hundreds of witnesses and years of judicial review to establish. It is the single most expensive, most verified word available for this man's obituary, it was sitting right there in the public record, free to use — and CNN's headline reached past it for a nickname, then held the nickname with tongs. * Why it matters, in one quote: Munira Subašić of the Mothers of Srebrenica said Thursday that "a major war criminal died" — while noting that among many of his admirers, his crimes are still denied and he's still called a hero. That denial project has one great ally: vague language. Every headline that buries the conviction under a rank or a nickname is a small donation to it. The court did the naming years ago. All the obituary had to do was quote it.