innocent by stander

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:20:02 -0500

Speller and Grammar Police. The blog is not about you. Who cares about how great you think you are with sentence structure.

Speller

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:54:07 -0500

Please also note: "an train" in paragraph after the Daily News post. Tsk. Tsk.

virid

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:04:43 -0500

Here's a few other reasons I'll move between train cars. * Creepy, angry, or smelly homeless person. * Loud and preachy religious types. * Particularly annoying musical performer(s). * Public disclosure of any one of the myriad fluids of the human body.

Schizohedron

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 09:16:32 -0500

"widely-read blog" Delete the hyphen.

Grammar Police

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 08:28:15 -0500

This is disappointingly bad writing: "We still see people pass between cars - they are usually trying to sell something - but mostly people will rush out the train car at the next stop and change train cars that way, especially when the train is non-air-conditioned." Notice how the words "that way, especially" function in the quoted sentence. The implication here is that people are behaving legally--i.e., exiting a car to get to the next one rather than walking between them--because they want to get away from a non-air-conditioned car. Absurd. They are CHANGING CARS because they want to get to a cool car, not BEHAVING LEGALLY because they want to get to a cool car. They can move to a cooler car either legally or illegally. They ARE, however, BEHAVING LEGALLY for some reason--either because they don't want to get arrested or because they are worried about the danger if they walk between cars. If the point here is supposed to be that a higher percentage are now exiting a car to get to the next one rather than walking between them (which because of a change in law now happens to be the only legal way to move between cars), that statistic has nothing to do with a train not being air-conditioned. A better version would be as follows: "We still see people pass between cars - they are usually trying to sell something - but mostly people will rush out of a non-air-conditioned or smelly train car at the next stop and change train cars that way, since the idea of walking between cars makes them terrified of either sustaining bodily harm or getting arrested." I probably shouldn't expect good writing from a blog that has had a ridiculously high percentage of typos (even worse than the Post or the Daily News) for longer than I can remember, but it's still very depressing to stumble upon such a poorly written sentence in such a widely-read blog.

Gothamist: Was Subway Death Caused by Breaking the Rules?

innocent by stander

Speller

virid

Schizohedron

Grammar Police