The two people credited in a byline for an article that included the following should be whipped with a dangling participle, along with any editor who passed on their work:
“…the recently re-ignited 40-year-old cold case that has haunted the FBI for years.”
?!? OK, I don’t get paid to write anything, but even I know that is unnecessarily awkward. How about, “…the recently re-ignited cold case that has haunted the FBI for 40 years” instead? It’s even easier to write than the other, too. Clarity, simplicity, brevity: watchwords for reporters to observe carefully, IMO.
Of course, now that I think of it, where would the “journalists” of today find such writing to emulate? (And I’ll admit they’d not find it here, but then I don’t take anyone’s money for this gig.)
Just another small piece of the “literacy means more than just being able to painfully puzzle out those weird chicken scratches on paper” puzzle, along with idiot Hiveminders who don’t know such things as the difference between “affect” and “effect” or “than” and “then” (and don’t pretend you haven’t seen such abortions of literacy in print or heard them from Podpeople Pie Holes).
Such people don’t even qualify as subliterates in my book. That would be giving them too much credit.
OK, OK, these sorts of things have been around forever, I suppose. I just notice them more and more often nowadays. But… re-reading (and taking very little time to do so *heh*) a book from the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction” authored by one of its pillars, I ran across,
“…according to their desserts.”
Where the author meant, “according to their deserts.”
Yes, the first instance is incorrect and the second is correct. Check me, if you wish. I’ll wait. 🙂
OK, back now?
Now, that incorrect word usage may have been a slip of the typewriter 61 years ago, though since I’m conversant with this author’s work in print, and he was more literate than 99% of fair-to-middlin’-to-pretty darned good contemporary authors, even given the space opera-ish tone of his work, I suspect an error in transcription crept in along the way to the eBook edition.
And naturally, it went flying right past any proofreader or editor with nary a pause.
Chaps my gizzard, it does… *heh*
