Can't read it wrong

[david_h]

It is . . . not surprising that writers from Shakespeare onward should often have interchanged who and whom. And though the distinction shows no signs of disappearing in formal style, strict adherence to the rules in informal discourse might be taken as evidence that the speaker or writer is paying undue attention to the form of what is said, possibly at the expense of its substance... (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

"...possibly at the expense of its substance"

I guess we should be able to work it out from context but maybe not so a software 'proof-reader'

Whom is dead.

A tricky sentence without the context. MSWord suggests "whom is dead?" but Google search "who is dead." Google does not know that it is a sentence but it does know most frequent usage.

[kkrell]

Memes. So much wrong. Quite.

[Nanohedron]

Papers do hire competent proofers, but they don't have the same standards as middle-aged fogies of the likes of us. Proof readers and copy editors are young and poorly paid, and always have been. You're now a generation older and quite rightly feeling left behind. Every educated person gets here eventually. What you - and I - need to do now is to find the grace to give up resisting [some of*] the new norms, because those are the future. Sometimes it hurts.

I don't see inattention to the difference between "lets" and "let's" or "quiet" and "quite" as an acceptable norm in professional publication, nor should any of us. Proofreaders who let that slide cannot be called competent, ever. They are simply collecting pay for doing nothing, and I'm surprised you'd go so far as to justify that with the tired old trope of generational differences. It is true that you get what you pay for, but that is on the publisher who may rightly be called out for his miserliness. Are we to accept that the important distinction between "lets" and "let's" no longer applies in modern journalism? That's a standard that is no standard at all. It is chaos, and worse, it promotes illiteracy. If you have it in you to be okay with that, be my guest. There seems to be an argument these days enshrining business, granting it an entitled status almost as a law unto itself; we must shrug when vulgar penny-kissing is called "economy", for it is done in the Name of Business, supposedly making destructive outcomes like the Idiocracy okay. I say that a fair wage for literate output is part of the cost of doing business. If you can't afford that, get out of the profession.

And don't lecture me on getting old, whippersnapper.

Saw this t-shirt last evening:



I commented that at least they put in the apostrophe, but the other critic wasn't so satisfied.

[s1m0n]

Whom is dead.

A tricky sentence without the context.

Yes. In context, it's clear that my meaning is "Whom (the word) is dead." As the object case, whom (the relative pronoun) cannot be the subject of the verb is.

[s1m0n]

It is true that you get what you pay for, but that is on the publisher who may rightly be called out for his miserliness.

It's not the publisher who's not paying, it's you. On the internet, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And if your eyeballs can be won at X level of copy-editing, they will be.

And don't lecture me on getting old, whippersnapper.

OK. Time for a showdown. I was born in January '65. You?

[Nanohedron]

And don't lecture me on getting old, whippersnapper.

OK. Time for a showdown. I was born in January '65. You?

April of '55. People either say I'm a curmudgeon, or the sweetest thing ever. Obviously they're both wrong.

[s1m0n]

April of '55. People either say I'm a curmudgeon, or the sweetest thing ever. Obviously they're both wrong.

OK. You'd think that ten years wiser would show, somehow...

[Nanohedron]

April of '55. People either say I'm a curmudgeon, or the sweetest thing ever. Obviously they're both wrong.

OK. You'd think that ten years wiser would show, somehow...

I'm a ninja. You hide these things, and then *Pow!*.

[s1m0n]

I'm a ninja. You hide these things, and then *Pow!*.

Bravo!

[david_h]

Yes (to s1m0n, crossing). I thought it interesting that MS Word made an understandable mis-interpretation of the sentence but then didn't correct the grammar to fit.

I was in MS Word because following Nano's point about registers I was curious to see if 'News in Special English" managed to be formal without being intimidating and then went on to wonder how much a grammar checker could help a proofreader.

Was hoping for BBC but first relevant Google hit had this from VOA: U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner says the top diplomats from both countries talked Wednesday. "I think there was agreement between the two of them that as a whole, despite sporadic reports of violence, as a whole, the arrangement is holding."

It's from a transcript of a press briefing (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2016/09/261883.htm) so I guess the duplicated "as a whole" was a slip of the tongue. Not helpful in "special English" though and Word didn't catch it. Does that first sentence have some telegramese that has become normal US usage?

Makes me wonder I wonder if Ben's Financial Times example could have come from notes of hard-to-follow verbal briefing.

[kkrell]

I really do hate typos in articles. Too many and it does (almost) stop me from reading. Gizmodo is one of the worst offenders. The writers frequently omit words (even when in quotes), and manage spellings that only a dyslexic could make sense out of. Today's article about Yahoo's account breach contained "Changing all your passwords ensures that any password that was perviously exposed in a breach...". If I want to see something "perviously exposed", I suppose I could change my Google SafeSearch filter setting.

[Nanohedron]

[benhall.1]

Isn't that more like a "bad headline"?

[Nanohedron]

Maybe yes, maybe no. The headline is journalistic and announces more information to come; the sign is the message itself. Signage is not news; its purpose is different. Yet headlines could be called signage of a sort. Because of this, maybe others would find the distinction moot and count signage in with headlines, but OTOH, once you start defining stuff, you have to stop somewhere. A larger category - let's call it "Blurbs" - could handle both. But this is making my head hurt.

In the end, bad is bad wherever you find it. I thought the Bad Headlines thread was pretty much kaput anyway, and this one was the next incarnation. It's certainly the more inclusive. But if I have any more bad headlines to offer - according to my definition - I promise I'll faithfully put them in the other thread. Maybe.

[Nanohedron]

Okay, try this on for size: "A quintessentially American crime declines: Robbing banks doesn’t pay as it used to."

Grammatically correct, all of it. But at least where I live, the last clause is an entrenched colloquial idiom: "doesn't pay like it used to" (or even "[it] don't pay like it used to" if you're really getting down and dirty). Idioms are famous for grammatical waywardness, and to me that is part of their power, if that makes any sense. I use "doesn't pay like it used to" myself as a relaxed way of describing all kinds of diminishing returns, not just monetary, and because it's an idiom, a quip, I think nothing of it. So I read the above and think, Now the writer's trying too hard. In correcting the idiom, the result is far too stiff.

YMMV.

I know, I know. I'm a tough crowd.