Our morning routine is me reading the News & Observer and Rory cruising the sports sites on line. Being my son, he notices typos and grammatical errors and gleefully points them out to me. This morning he found something that said (I'm paraphrasing except for the bold part), "The Nittany Lions are going to the Rose Bowl for the just the third time."
Kudos to Rory for finding it and being appalled at it which means there is a future for grammar and accuracy with the next generation.
After he left, I couldn't find the exact link, so I Googled, "the just the third time" in quotation marks so all I would get is those sites where that exact phrase appears. 87 sites came up. It's not just careless bloggers (of which I count myself occasionally) either. The list includes:
mlb.com
musiccitybowl.com
cbc.ca (Canada)
espn.com
clevelandbrowns.com
sportsillustrated.cnn.com
sportingnews.com
If just two or three of these places hired me, sent me their articles prior to publication and paid me a pittance, we could eradicate these kinds of errors and maybe give our language the respect it deserves.
Do you think we are ready to just give up on language in exchange for speed?
Di
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