Wednesday 2 May 2012

Unlikely body parts

Recently I have noticed a couple, perhaps three, newspaper articles where the meaning of the sentence is probably the exact opposite of what the author intended. I meant to blog them and deplore the collapse of culture; but forgot and then lost the paper.

There was one last night from a journalist -- this is all The Guardian --  which spoke of what a voter said after the journalist had been campaigning for some time; but she, the journalist, attributed the campaign to the voter -- they just can't handle subjects of sentences over any verbal distance. I imagine, but do not know, that the response would be to say that we know what she means. And for that reason, that supposition, it gets it mentioned here; because that is the fashionable response.

But the reason for this blog is actually another kind of grammatical idiocy.

The same paper, The Grauniad, today speaks of debris from the big Japanese tsunami arriving on the coast of USA, under the headline UNLIKELY BODY PARTS WILL BE WASHED ASHORE

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