I Just Hate It When This Happens

In a blogpost critiquing the easily mocked Eric Alterman’s assertion that conservatives are largely unsuccessful in penetrating the domains of academia and journalism because they “lack professionalism” the author sums up with this statement:

Just a reminder, when you tax socialists : you’ll get less of them.

In one short sentence two glaring punctuation errors, one orthography error and one misused word leap off the page to assault my eyes. The comma should be a colon; the space after “socialists” is a glaring orthography error; the colon should be a comma and “less” should be “fewer”.

But then, “professional” journalists, who supposedly have editors checking their work, often write prose as bad as that, so it doesn’t affect the post’s argument as badly as it otherwise might.