Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes a striking connection between weapons laxity and bad language skills.
First, keep this in mind. “South Carolina has weak gun laws—missing the vast majority of the 50 key policies—and suffers one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the nation.”
Arguably less important than – what’d that lady say down there? – a bloodbath every day – a grasp of grammar/vocabulary nonetheless counts for something, SOS would urge, and as she …. rifles … through articles about guns she is often struck by a general need for correction by, well, SOS, so let’s …. take aim at some of this. Let’s unload. Let’s choose some targets.
Like the journalists and spokespeople of li’l all shot up Lake City SC! A typical article in the local press — daily bloodbath bad, oughta do something — includes more than a few solecisms.
The police chief talks about a kiddie shooting off a gun at Walmart just t’other day. “That incident could have went extremely bad, extremely quick. It’s something that socks the conscience, that’s not something we want.”
SOS likes his use of “socks” – an unexpected, vivid, choice; socked in the gut, go for it. Socks and conscience have a nice assonance on the o.
Note that it’s almost the famous shocks the conscience – which the speaker might have meant, but in messing it up he came up with something better.
Could have went should be could have gone: A straightforward error. If you want to be prissy about it, badly would be better than bad but ain’t no big deal.
The journalist:
He says they are seeing a troubling trend called “straw purchases.” That is where someone who legally can purchase a gun and does so. That person will then sell the gun to someone who cannot legally own or possess one.
What would an elitist at the NYT do with this same material? Fewer words, I hear you say. Subordination. Stuff that lets you combine in one or two sentences material that sounds redundant and slow-witted cuz like a kindergarten teacher you carefully separate it into short sentences. So something like this will be the NYT version:
Straw purchases are a troubling trend in which a legal purchaser sells a gun to an illegal.
Forty words versus sixteen! And note that the SC journalist even includes a thing that isn’t a sentence (That is where someone who legally can purchase a gun and does so.) This happens when you’re all tied up in verbiage and, in this case, forget to dump the “who.”
Back to the police chief.
“There’s no one single incident that you can point to that, in my opinion, there’s a it’s a gambit of things, and I think it starts with straw purchases.”
Now of course the journalist could clean a lot of this up with the use of ellipsis and [sic] and all – as a writer, you’re not duty-bound to record every stream of consciousness that flows out of a speaker. But the glaring error here is a gambit of things. The speaker meant gamut. One way to remember how to use gamut is with Dorothy Parker’s famous review of a theatrical performance:
“Miss Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
July 11th, 2025 at 7:34PM
Hard to believe Dorothy Parker could write a redundancy like “whole gamut.”
July 11th, 2025 at 8:17PM
Most sources do indeed say “the gamut” rather than the whole gamut. I’ll change it.
July 11th, 2025 at 8:22PM
Thanks. Strange, the things that will shake one’s world. Or mine at least…