Dumbing Down
Recently in Slate.com there was a Jack Shafer story (which I only now got around to reading) about the number of mistakes in daily newspapers, and the New York Times is not immune, to say the least. Why, you'd almost think they didn't have any copy editors, or at least not any good ones.
Here's a link to an online NYT story about R. Kelly's mesmerizingly terrible "Trapped in the Closet", a serialized soap opera (gay preacher husbands! dwarves! infidelity!) set to the most maddeningly unchanging music ever. The first two sentences of the article:
The story began simply enough: the love triangle of Sylvester, Kathy and Rufus. But after 12 chapters the triangle was more like a lopsided octagon, with a dozen characters and as many cliffhangers.
What the...?
If having three characters makes it a love triangle, then having twelve characters doesn't make it a "lopsided octagon": it makes it a dodecagon, lopsided or otherwise. Duh.
Here's a link to an online NYT story about R. Kelly's mesmerizingly terrible "Trapped in the Closet", a serialized soap opera (gay preacher husbands! dwarves! infidelity!) set to the most maddeningly unchanging music ever. The first two sentences of the article:
The story began simply enough: the love triangle of Sylvester, Kathy and Rufus. But after 12 chapters the triangle was more like a lopsided octagon, with a dozen characters and as many cliffhangers.
What the...?
If having three characters makes it a love triangle, then having twelve characters doesn't make it a "lopsided octagon": it makes it a dodecagon, lopsided or otherwise. Duh.
posted by pyramus | 9:16 AM
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