I sometimes watch the news as I work (no sound) and saw the following roll across the news ticker: “Tom Brady involved in car wreck, gets new contract.” Sounds like he had a busy day, right? But what is kind of funny and disturbing is that one has nothing to do with the other yet some folks might actually read it as if they are connected. I mean, it happens in business all the time right?
I guess I could use this as a jumping off point to talk about people receiving credit for things which don’t warrant the rewards (or, to the headline’s point, new contracts for being involved in wrecks). Instead, I’d rather just have a giggle about the dope who wrote the ticker headline in the first place. He’s clearly sitting in the same office as the over-possessive person that keeps adding apostrophes to everything plural. I won’t bore you (again) with a rant on this – get yourself a copy of Eats, Shoots, & Leaves which rants about it far better than I. However, I will remind us all to remember that spell-checkers don’t give you the ability to forgo careful reading of your work both from a grammatic and semantic point of view. Are you saying what you think you are?
Or maybe you’re thinking if your writing is a car wreck you can get a better contract!
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