Zoo in the head

Mistakes were made

One of the first things they tell you about when you start in journalism is the importance of avoiding passive constructions: never "This was said by X" but "X said this."

Rupert Murdoch has never been one for the conventional pieties, though: you could deduce that from his apology, published in British newspapers this morning, for the appalling newsgathering methods employed by journalists at the News of the World. "We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred," he says, and "We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected": whereas what he means is "We are sorry we did wrong" and "We are deeply sorry that we hurt people." Otherwise, it might look as though he thought someone else was doing the wrong, someone else was causing the pain. And he couldn't possibly think that, could he?

Oh.

Wow. Just, wow.

Christopher Tayler offers 10 of the weirdest sentences in David Brooks's The Social Animal. The one with most relevance to this blog's areas of interest runs:

Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellent.

But every one of them has something - fallacy, solecism, outright meaninglessness - to marvel at.

Potholes

Patrick Barkham in Friday's Guardian on Britain's pothole problem:

"Even if the work isn't shoddy - which it sometimes is - breaking up and then repairing the road surface makes it more perceptible to potholes."

No, perceptible (Chambers: "adj that can be perceived; that may be known by the senses; discernible") is what the potholes are to cyclists. A pothole, having no sensory organs, can't perceive anything, unless the universe is far stranger than I think it is. What the poor ignorant lad means is "susceptible" (Chambers: "adj (usu with to) open to, admitting of; suffering readily (from), prone (to); capable of receiving..."). 

And of course, it isn't really Barkham who's to blame; it's whoever was supposed to subedit this piece; and since that person was almost certainly overworked and overstressed, we should probably be pointing the finger at the Guardian's management, and a modern newspaper culture that deems subeditors an unnecessary expense.

Creeping illiteracy

I'm continually disturbed and irritated by the rapidly declining quality of written English, even in contexts where one might expect a high degree of literacy: BBC news bulletins, for example (I'm talking about scripted stories rather than off-the-cuff exchanges, where I expect and forgive mistakes). I'm going to start cataloguing this stuff.

To kick off, here's a paragraph from a blurb on the Demos website for a symposium that an acquaintance of mine attended yesterday: 

"'Connected' [a book by Nicholas Christakis] describes how inextricably interconnected we are with one another and how this [what?] makes up an unknowingly collaraborative [sic] society. It argues how [sic] social connections influences [sic] our behavior [sic] from our purchasing choices to voting habits."

Leaving aside the spelling, and the awkwardness of "argues how", and the failure of subject to agree with verb, and the American spelling - and you'll notice I haven't even started on the punctuation - what is "inter-" doing on the front of "connected", when "with one another" does the same job? And why marketing-speak like "our purchasing choices" rather than "what we buy"? And how come what we purchase is a "choice" but how we vote is only a "habit" - what assumptions are buried in there?

Seeing a symposium advertised in those terms, would you go expecting a high quality of thought and discussion?

Thought not.