Time travel will be invented sometime in the next two centuries, according to the Los Angeles Times. Today they ran the following photo caption:
Word order in sentences is more important than a lot of people realize. Take a look at the headline highlighted in red below, which appears this morning on cnn.com:
When I first read the headline, I seriously thought the teens were engaging in prostitution in the courtroom. But the judge and jury are safe. The news article explains the teens were in court, accused of prostitution elsewhere.
A simple shuffling of the words produces a more accurate headline:
Teens accused in court of prostitution.
I wrote a couple of days ago about my annoyance with the commonly abused phrase, "each and every." If that expression doesn't make you scrunch your eyebrows with disdain, here's a more egregious use of the word, "each," that should. I spotted the following sign a couple of years ago during an under-cover grammar investigation at a grocery store in Tulsa, Oklahoma:
Okay, I'm not even going to explain why "by the each" is wrong, nor am I going to go off on a rant right now about spell-checking before you print a sign that thousands of customers are going to see.
What's troubling me about this sign is a lack of commas and/or hyphens. Without them, one wonders: What exactly are "boneless country style ribs?" Are they (a) country-style ribs without bones, or (b) ribs from a boneless country?
But if you think about it, the answer is clear. They must be ribs from a boneless country. There's no such thing as a "boneless rib." A rib is a type of bone.
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