Comment on Reporters Without Borders sues X
Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month agoOk maybe a very stulid question but
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday announced
Isn’t that gramatically incorrect? Shouldn’t it be “The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced on Thursday”?
I see this kind of writing a lot in news articles so surely it’s not actually wrong, but that’s not how I was taught English writing.
It’s correct, as much as any English is correct, but not typically spoken naturally like that.
The press (newspapers) has an idiosyncratic grammar, probably born of maximising space in a newspaper column. Headlines are often grammatical nightmares, body copy less so.
One could think of it as a form of semantic compression.
Dialect variation. For me, saying “the car needs washed” sounds truly strange but millions and millions of people say it.
the car needs washed
Is there a name/term for this abomination? I’ve only ever heard one person speak in that form (omitting “to be”), and it has haunted me ever since.
I think you’d call this elision. Assume that the phrase is originally “the car needs to be washed” but you cut out “to be”, making it into a shorter form.
Worse, to me, is that there is a perfectly grammatically correct way to be just as brief.
Wrong:
The bed sheets need washed.
Right:
The bed sheets need washing.
‘chest of draws’ was a weird one for me!
But that’s just a ‘bone apple tea’ of “chest of drawers”? It’s not a correct term.
(I figured surely there’s an actual word for misheard terms being butchered in writing, but a quick search failed me so I went with the colloquial name.)
There’s “malapropism” that is sort of close, but even that is more like accidentally combining parts of two idioms.
It was named after a character in a play that always did it.
Had they just used some punctuation - “The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday, announced”, it would have made it easier to get. Even, “The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, on Thursday, announced” would be doable.
How do these feel?
Deebster@infosec.pub 1 month ago
It’s a bit stilted and no-one would speak like that (at least without sounding pretentious), but it’s not bad grammar.
Also, shame on the moron that downvoted you for asking a question.