Some day I'll compile a list of idioms gone wrong because no one recognizes their root meanings anymore. You know, like "waiting with baited breath" or "give free reign".

This is from George Will's column as published at Real Clear Politics:

The same column appears in the Washington Post, but with the more traditional vale of tears instead of the malaprop veil.

What to make of this? Which publication gets the column first? Does Mr Will send the same copy to both? The most obvious explanation is that the Post has a decent editor who fixed it while RCP doesn't. But that would require us to believe that Will wrote it incorrectly in the first place. Can it really be that as erudite a writer as Will — who in the same column meaningfully uses the word "meretriciousness" — thinks that we children of Eve were banished to a veil of tears? Perhaps I lose some innocence today, because I always imagined that of all columnists, surely George Will would never make such a mistake. (Or maybe he did get it right, and some misguided editor at RCP incorrected it.)

Anyway, good for the staff at the Post for doing their job. Writers aren't perfect; it's up to editors to make them look that way. It's nice to know some press organs still care.

ABC News doesn't. A lead story on their website begins with this sentence:

I don't blame the writer, who is probably some poor beat reporter rushing to meet an impossible deadline; I blame the editors. ABC professes to be a leading news source. They ought to have someone literate reading the stories on their web page. The story has been up for more than a week now; even if they missed it the first time, can't they go back and fix it later after someone notices?

I suppose it's possible that Obama really might take a new tact, but the usual idiom is "took a new tack. A tack is a direction. It's a sailing term, having to do with how the sails are trimmed.

I wrote the preceding part of this post a week ago but never got around to uploading. Here's a new one I saw today. This is from the Harvard Crimson's editorial endorsing Obama for president. The byline attributes it to "the Crimson staff".

Yikes. I can't even count how many things are wrong with that sentence.

No, I take that back. I can:

1. Too many commas. I know I myself incline toward too many commas, so it is with motes in my eyes that I behold this. Of the six in the quoted sentence, only the last is really necessary. The first three are grammatically wrong. They might be excused if they helped make a unwieldy sentence more readable, but they don't.

All together they almost tempt one to remove as well the pair around "finally", which otherwise are unnecessary but inoffensive. Come to think of it, the word "finally" is itself unnecessary. How is Obama's service in the U.S. Senate final? The adverb is describing the sentence's narrative voice, not its content.

2. Articles. This one's not hard. If the next sound is a consonant, use "a"; if it's a vowel, use "an". An Illinois. A United.

3. Abbreviation. Why on earth would you abbreviate "Illinois" here? Even if your style book likes abbreviating state names (which it shouldn't), this would warrant an exception. It looks like you're starting an outline in the middle of the sentence, with Roman numeral III. I'm not sure why Illinois is even mentioned. The relevant information in context is that he was a state senator. The fact that it happened in Illinois, as opposed to Arizona or Pennsylvania, is incidental.

4. Capitalization. I'm not sure what the Crimson's style guide says about this one either, but if you put an indefinite article in front of "senator" that suggests to me it isn't a proper noun. I would lowercase "state" and both "senator"s.

5. Even if it were properly spelled and punctuated, it's still a stupid sentence. It's a lazy and flabby stringing together of ideas without any thought to how they're related.

"From [example] to [another example], [statement]" is a standard formula for presenting information, but it's only fresh if the items you plug into it are consistent with the idea of the formula. The prepositions hint at geography (at least metaphorical) and suggest that much ground is covered between the two. The formula calls for two examples and no more. If you need to stretch it out in order to go "to" more places, that should be a hint that the structure you're looking for isn't "from ... to" at all but rather something with "and" in it. (Indeed, those three erroneous commas are an indication that at some level the writers knew they really wanted to be listing items in a series.)

Why not this?

Or if you want to connect the thoughts even more, change the period to a colon. (That's what colons are for.)

I was so appalled by the second sentence that it was quite a while before I was able to read the rest of the piece. Besides being a dull and routine endorsement, hardly worth the effort to read, it's riddled with further minor errors. (One of them amused me: Discussing immigration policy, the Crimson staff recommends "reducing shoring up boarders". That almost makes sense.)

What an embarrassment for Harvard College. Isn't it supposed to be one America's elite universities? I thought being editor of the Harvard Crismon was supposed to be a great credential. Whatever the other qualifications may be, aptitude for editing doesn't seem to be among them.

5:04:00 PM  [permalink]  comment []