To: Stoat
I think they are implying that you have strayed into the weeds of misplaced modifiers. If you move “off the coast of Hawaii” to a position after “find,” you’ll be fine. Moby Dick reliably cannot be placed off the coast of Hawaii. sd (recovering English teacher)
27 posted on
02/11/2011 1:20:54 PM PST by
shotdog
(I love my country. It's our government I'm afraid of.)
To: shotdog
I think they are implying that you have strayed into the weeds of misplaced modifiers. If you move off the coast of Hawaii to a position after find, youll be fine. Moby Dick reliably cannot be placed off the coast of Hawaii. sd (recovering English teacher)
If that's true, then it's unfortunate that:
- It's apparently not understood that I didn't write the article or the title. An unnamed, breathtakingly inarticulate drone from the UK's Daily Mail did. Free Republic does not allow posters to modify article titles, and of course in this case anyone with the least bit of education would have rewritten not only the title but the entire article, if it were permitted here.
- Some here are apparently shocked at seeing grammar abuse that one might associate with a five year old appearing in a major newspaper, so much so that it has become a primary topic in this thread. Being a regular reader of the news from all over the world, I am not in the least bit shocked by it, numbed as I have become to the cataclysmic decline in English language proficiency here in the USA and abroad. Up until the mid part of the last century, newspapers were a place that one could go to in a quest to find the proper reference standards of English usage. This has not been the case for a VERY long time. I can usually find multiple errors in grammar, syntax and other parts of language on most any page of any newspaper, large or small, foreign and domestic. It is so bad that I have long ago gven up hope in finding excellence in the presentation of language in newspapers and I don't even consider that when posting....and I assume (wrongly, it seems) that others have become similarly disheartened. Althought it's nice to see so many FReepers taking an interest in the proper presentation of the English language, I confess to wishing that similar voices had been raised much more forcefully around fifty years ago. If I were to write an origial essay I would be looking forward to critques on grammar and style, but in the context of a news story published in a newspaper, it's not exactly something that I have any control over, unfortunately.
30 posted on
02/11/2011 1:55:34 PM PST by
Stoat
(If you want a vision of the future, imagine a Birkenstock stamping on a human face... forever)
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