Monday, July 19, 2010

Ear ear

A nice little example of the way that column layout in a magazine can make you do a double take to extract the meaning. Dame Kiri te Kanawa on being a great diva: 'It helps to have a tame ear.'

Pardon?

Oh, 'A tame ear, nose & throat specialist', once you read over the line break.

I first remember a certain difficulty reading a modern newspaper about twenty years ago when the Guardian, following a redesign in which they abolished many capitalisations in the interest of ‘a nice clean page’ (“the home office is the small back bedroom where we keep the computer” protested one correspondent) seemed also to have abolished the comma along with the relative pronoun. But soon they started to write much shorter simpler sentences so it didn’t matter so much.

The simplification continues to gather pace however & English as she is wrote seems to be descending into mere strings of words which could be nouns, verbs, adjectives or even adverbs.

Especially in the type of headline christened a crash blossom by the Language Log,
of which there was a perfect example recently from, where else, but the Guardian: Six nouns, six verbs, who knows

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