Neil deMause

Here’s another story that popped up on Google News, and which caught my eye because I couldn’t make head or tail of the lede:

The ex-wife of a Bolingbrook police sergeant found drowned in her bathtub three years ago was murdered, according to a noted forensic pathologist who autopsied her remains Friday at the request of her family.

Initial attempts at interpretation:

• The police sergeant was a lesbian who drowned three years ago, and now her ex-wife has turned up murdered.
• The police sergeant drowned in his ex-wife’s bathtub three years ago, and now the ex-wife has been murdered.
• The Chicago Tribune copy desk needs a refresher in misplaced antecedents.

Transcribing quotes seems to especially vexing for some journalists. Here’s today’s Boston Globe quoting Mitt Romney:

“The monster is this McCain-Feingold bill and it has to be repealed and it just points how in infective it has been in removing the influence of money and underhanded politics,” Romney said.

Admittedly, it’s hard to understand what Romney means at the best of times, but even without the benefit of having heard the interview in question, I can pretty well guess what he actually said.

(Thanks to Chris Tate for the pointer to this story.)

In an article in today’s Newsday on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease:

ALS destroys motor neurons and gradually leads to loss of speech and paralyzation.

Coining new words when there are perfectly good old ones is a time-honored tradition – it’s what got us normalcy, after all – but sometimes it’s just plain wrong.

Interestingly, the above is how the phrase appeared in the print edition of Newsday (and its Google cache), but the website has been updated to read:

ALS destroys motor neurons and gradually leads to loss of speech and leaves people paralyzed.

Which is correct and all, but leads one to wonder if Newsday’s post-layoff copy editors have just never heard of the word “paralysis.” Or maybe they’re being paid by the word.

Headline in today’s Washington Post:

Turkish Troop Dies; Kurd Rebels Trapped

My first thought: An entire troop of Turkish soldiers died? No – only one soldier. Or as the Post calls him, one troop – in defiance of longstanding English usage that a troop is a group.

Apparently this has been a growing (mis)usage for a couple of years now, though this is the first time I’ve noticed it. Give it another decade and you might see singular “troop” working its way into more lenient dictionaries; until then, the Post is just wrong.

I’ve been seeing so many awful grammatical/spelling mistakes in my daily newspaper reading that I’ve decided to start keeping a running log here. Today’s offender: Newsday’s Ken Davidoff, who is otherwise one of my favorite baseball columnists.

Torre was a great broadcaster from 1985 to 1990, when no team would give him a chance to manage. Imagine how much cache he would have now, after 12 years leading the Yankees.

That’ll sure improve his processing speed!