Ignorance, sloppiness, autocorrect (a bane if I ever saw one) … there are many reasons for poor grammar and usage. But there are few excuses.
No one writes the way they talk—see what I did there?—and few of us even write the way we’re “supposed to” in everyday writing. That is, in emails to friends and sticky notes to coworkers, who much cares how U write as long as yr understood? Emails to your boss or the board, on the other hand, call for a higher standard.
Companies, government agencies, and nonprofits are also held to a higher standard. Any entity in business with or service to the public should respect itself and its audience enough to use proper English. If you don’t know enough to make a noun and a verb agree—and know that it matters that they do—find someone who does.
As always, I’m not going to pound on regular folks who mess with the language. Those “entities” that know better or should, though, deserve what they get. Some examples:
In direct mail from a nondenominational Maryland church, “The decisions we make can transform our lives, the lives of our families and impact our future.” As Sesame Street says, “Which one of these things does not belong?” Parallel usage, please. Though fighting “impact” as a verb may require the Almighty.
From a Washington Gas marketing flier: “Cross bores can lay dormant for months or even years, their exact locations unknown.” Cross bores may lie low—that’s an example of an idiom—but they lie dormant. And that’s no lie.
A radio ad for a timeshare-rescue company says, “How’d you like to be the person that dumped that timeshare?” Another says, “You deserve a dentist that can restore a full arch of teeth in a single visit.” If this dentist is a person and not a robot, he or she is a “who,” not a “that.”
There’s a lot of this going around: Referring to veterans, the New Mexico Department of Health website says, “We are proud to serve those that have served us.” And “Tonight we’ve learned more about the prison employee that investigators think helped the men escape ….”—With two previous mentions here, CBS’s Scott Pelley is going for the ungrammatical hall of fame.
From a Yahoo Music article: “The song lyrics warn about a wrath from God prompted by ‘the lack of raw humanity.’ ” I’ve heard of the wrath of God. Maybe this should say “a wreath”?
In an opinion column in the Washington Post: “the text of the Constitution, the legislative history, the legislative history of the civil rights statue that preceded it ….” Ooh, let’s see the civil-rights statue that preceded it. Pretty sure the Constitution came first, though.
The Hollywood Reporter, quoting Law & Order: SVU showrunner Warren Leight about an actor: “We’ve put his character through the ringer ….” No, you put his character through the wringer. My grandmother used a wringer. Being put through one would be very unpleasant. (See photo.)
From a Liberty Mutual magazine ad: “As an alumni of UVa, you could receive exclusive savings ….” Staff at the alumni association, whose logo is on the ad, should know that any graduate, alum, or former student is singular, not plural.
In the Washington Post Express, in a section on odd crimes: “After giving officers there a detailed description of the hat, police found it in a flowerbed and arrested him.” Police gave officers a description?
And in the Washington Post, those pesky vowels: “The decision does not effect the Ivanka Trump collection, which Macy’s also sells.” No. It doesn’t affect it, either, which is more to the point.
From a business coach’s newsletter on the subject of communication (irony alert): “If people don’t seem to be listening to you and reacting the way you desire, it is you, not them, that are the issue.” Oy! (Says Bill Walsh, Washington Post copyeditor: “ ‘They’ would be the quick fix, but I’d do more heavy lifting.”)
Another communicator who should know better is the writer/editor of FishbowlNY, which ran this sentence this summer: “The New York Daily News has received bids from John Catsimatidis and Jimmy Finkelstein, but neither appear to be the frontrunner.”
On a poster in Washington, DC’s, transit system: “A smart kid like you knows that eating and drinking in the system is against the law, right?” And a smart Metro knows that two subjects take a plural verb, right? (It didn’t mean only people who do these things in combination. Folks have been arrested for just the French-fries part.)
Okay, this is not strictly a grammatical error and seemed to be an off-the-cuff remark, nothing official. But it made me giggle while listening to WTOP radio: “Watch out for deer on the road in all this fog. I saw two of them driving in this morning.”
Copyright 2015 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.
Where there’s smoke, there’s ire
January 22, 2012The Post’s real-estate editor surprised me by putting my condos/smoking article online late Tuesday afternoon, ahead of Saturday’s print publication date. (See mini-rant three posts ago about this self-destructive practice.) The next day, other editors surprised me more. Just after lunch, I wrote a friend, “My next story (in print Saturday) was buried deep on the real-estate page … suddenly it’s on the front page online, with my name! Being of a private inclination, I’m not sure this is necessarily good, but it’s getting a lot of comments ….”
A lot of comments indeed. Within hours, the number had climbed to more than 200. Then it was 340. Then it plummeted to 280 or 290. Comments police at the Post removed some, and all of the many by one person have disappeared. In any case, by late Wednesday, the story (and my name) were off the front page, and the pace slowed to nearly nothing until the story appeared in print yesterday. Right now there are 365.
Thursday night I mentioned all this to another friend, who said something about the attention. “They’re not talking about the story,” I said with a wry smile. “They’re bashing each other.”
Commenters at the Washington Post are a bit more civilized than at the New York Post, but these are too often ad hominem attacks. One commenter on my story wrote of another, “You are stupid.” Another put up a tirade against every major racial and ethnic group. (Eventually that one got removed. “Gotta love the diversity in that post,” someone wrote, which made me snort.) A few dozen comments attacked “libs” or Obama even though the article has nothing to do with politics. People on one side called people on the other side “whiny,” “selfish,” “idiotic,” “crazy,” “disgusting,” “neurotic,” “brainless,” and “bigots,” among other things, and one wrote, ” … if you did die, I am sure the rest of us would appreciate the peace and quiet.” Whew!
Should newspapers and other media police their comments sections? It’s an ongoing debate in newsrooms. The Washington Post’s ombudsman has weighed in, and I think there was an online chat about the issue. The New York Post seems to be a free-for-all. The New York Times is either well regulated or has more thoughtful and polite readers – probably both. Our Post surely feels like it’s dealing with a moving target.
Consider, for example, not this story, which quoted several people but focused on an issue, but the one two weeks ago in the Post Magazine about Page Melton Ivie – a story that focused on a person and secondarily on other people and issues. Big issues: After a notable reporting career, Page’s first husband is permanently in a childlike state due to medical calamity, and Page was resigned to caring for their children at home and him at an assisted-living facility. Years later she reconnected with an old friend, and they eventually married, which necessitated divorcing Robert, though he now lives close to the new family in the Midwest, where all of them visit frequently, and Allan has his own real friendship with his new wife’s first husband. (I was stunned to realize, when the article mentioned Page’s birth name, that I’d known her, and even Allan slightly, in college, though we were a few years apart.) A lot of readers, including me, found the article moving, a testament to open hearts and open minds and the tremendous power of love.
It was disheartening to learn that other readers – many – were horrified. They called Page terrible names, accusing her of not taking her wedding vows seriously and tearing apart her family for selfish, carnal whims. They said she was an example of a throw-away society and deserved to go to hell for bailing on Robert when the going got tough. Never mind that she didn’t do anything of the sort and in fact spent years finding ways to keep her family together and even expand it through a painful and draining ordeal.
Poor Page – or anyone – to be on the receiving end of so many hateful, ad feminam comments. A column a week later blasted those commenters, noting how easy it is to lob firebombs from behind the shield of anonymity and wondering how many people would say the same things if they had to attach their real names. Those of us who naturally shy away from public fora (a sexist old saying was that a woman’s name should appear in print only upon birth, marriage, and death; I amended that for myself to add three-point bylines) will hesitate even more to toss a personal opinion into the lions’ den, leaving it inevitably to the lions and the blowhards. Or, wait … is that too insulting? Leave a comment. Good thing this blog is purely an academic exercise for which no one has the address.
Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.
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Tags: ad feminam, ad hominem, anonymity, bylines, comments, editor, editors, front page, New York Post, newspapers, ombudsman, online chat, Page Melton Ivie, Post Magazine, real-estate editor, smoking, Washington Post
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