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« Real ultimate pollo | Main | Must professors be intelligible to their students? »

January 26, 2005

Message board language mavens

Posts like this are admittedly not hard to come up with, because there are so many people out there who fancy themselves to be everyone else's grammar instructors (see Geoff Pullum today on this point). Nevertheless:

Your host enjoys reading Blue Oval News, a website devoted to discussions of all things Ford. Today, there is a thread in their forums discussing an article on Ford's ownership of Hertz. The arguments for why manufacturers shouldn't be in the rental business are many, varied, and generally all sound, but the company nevertheless has seen fit to defend the business. That's not the linguistically interesting part. The response that follows is:

How wrote that? A third grade student?

Please check the first paragraph. It is a poorly written and structured sentence. The text of the article explains nothing except the residuals are better (which everyone already knew).

If one is going to complain about the poor writing on display in a news article, it's best not to lead off with a glaringly ungrammatical question like "How wrote that?". The first paragraph of the article in question is:

In amongst the tedious facts and figures of the Ford analysts’ conference yesterday was a good question, writes Rob Golding. The man from Merrill Lynch asked: “What is the point of owning Hertz?”

Here SC must confess to a certain ambiguity in deciding whether or not to flame the message board writer for saying "Please check the first paragraph. It is a poorly written and structured sentence." On the one hand, the first paragraph consists of two sentences, which would appear to indicate that this complaint is idiotic for the simple reason that the man can't count. On the other hand, the piece is signed at the bottom with the byline "Rob Golding", suggesting that in fact the first sentence should have been set apart as a description of the article that follows, like so:

In amongst the tedious facts and figures of the Ford analysts’ conference yesterday was a good question, writes Rob Golding.

The man from Merrill Lynch asked: “What is the point of owning Hertz?”

This is not an unheard of practice; The Guardian does the same thing all the time, as can be seen in many of the blurbs on their front page. Read the first way, SC can imagine how one might think that there was coreference between "Rob Golding" and "The man from Merrill Lynch", which makes parsing the first sentence somewhat awkward; read the second way, there is nothing at all mysterious or hard to interpret. Even under the first reading, though, your host just can't imagine a third grader producing such a sentence, but it's no use arguing -- when it comes to language, everyone's an expert.

(On an unrelated note, while using Google to pull up that last link, I saw the most bizarre ad in the sidebar where Google puts up "sponsored links". Check it out, and see if you get the same highly implausible result.)

January 26, 2005 in Pop Linguistics |

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