It pales next to their plagiarism case, but editors at the New York Times can also overlook mixed metaphors:
The drug-testing provision, its sponsors said, is an inducement that bubbled up in the course of a freewheeling focus group of voters testing arguments that could persuade people to support a higher damage ceiling in malpractice lawsuits.
SOS recognizes that “damage ceiling” is a technical term; but when you put that ceiling next to a free wheel that bubbles you get a mess of a sentence.
Nor does it help that a “focus group” (another technical term) is described as freewheeling. One gets what the writer means; yet how many even very competent readers of English would be able to make sense of a focused thing that is also freewheeling?
August 2nd, 2014 at 10:22AM
I was going to email, but I think a SOSM post is close enough to permit this glommed comment on language confusion.(Or was it really?) Homophoniaphobia breaks at a school (admittedly not a major one) in Utah:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/01/1318397/-Homophobic-Paranoia-In-Utah
August 2nd, 2014 at 12:22PM
Greg: Mind-boggling.
August 2nd, 2014 at 5:38PM
I read that first as “freewhaling” and wondered if it had something to do with whales making bubble nets. But then I thought, “Nah, it’s the NYT and of course Margaret is right anyway. Wow, whatever happened to editors?
I wonder if a small magazine called CLEAN could find a market by publishing crisp prose with no spelling errors?
August 2nd, 2014 at 5:56PM
Yes. I missed closing the quotation. So sue me – I’m NOT the publisher of CLEAN.
August 3rd, 2014 at 7:49AM
Michael, the Internet Law of Schadenfreude says that anyone making a comment about someone else’s poor spelling, grammar, or punctuation will, during the course of their complaint, make at least one mistake in their spelling, grammar, or punctuation.
Also: anyone invoking the Internet Law of Schadenfreude will inevitably spell Schadenfreude incorrectly.