It would have been best to end this sentence before repeating a vaguer and less emphatic version of the claim that began it. To call the transaction the worst in history, as it is now taught in business schools, does not begin to tell the story of how some of the brightest minds in technology and media collaborated to produce a deal now regarded by many as a colossal mistake. A small style point, but one that should be second nature to writers and editors here (and this was a front-page story). 19, and that public profile has raised a tantalizing question in New Jersey political circles about what happens come January 20. In the weeks since Christopher Christie was elected, his brother has taken a prominent role in planning the incoming governor’s inaugural celebration Jan. The expression that Grant presumably used is “stock in trade.” “He homes in on the excesses of the markets and profits from them. “In China, he seems to see the excesses, to the third and fourth power, that he’s been tilting against all these decades,” said Jim Grant, a longtime friend and the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, who is also bearish on China.
This week’s grab bag of grammar, style and other missteps, compiled with help from colleagues and readers.
LAS VEGAS - The technology industry is going retro - moving away from remote controls, mice and joysticks to something that arrives without batteries, wires or a user manual. Nice lead by Ashlee Vance, for an interesting front-page story (Business, 1/12): The first has proved to be complicated and daunting. He inherited two struggles - one with Al Qaeda and its ideological allies, and another that divides his own country over issues like torture, prosecutions, security and what it means to be an American. York lever voting machine (New York, 1/8):Įven if all runs smoothly with the new technology, voting will become a thunkless task.Ī long magazine article (1/4) on a many-layered topic never felt long because of fluid, engaging writing like this by Peter Baker:īarack Obama was inaugurated as the first president to take office in the Age of Terrorism. It takes skill to pull off wordplay that draws delight instead of groans, and Clyde Haberman pulled it off in this column on the end of the old New This was just one of many fine sections in Bruce Weber’s obituary of the caricaturist David Levine (12/30):Įven when he wasn’t out to make a political point, however, his portraits - often densely inked, heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles - tended to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg. Some sparkling prose from recent editions (nominations always welcome). But a quick checkįound only a few missteps this year, mostly in reader comments online. I’ve always considered “accommodate” one of the most frequently botched words (people drop the second “m”).
Heartening news, though, on another orthographic front. One problem was that our internal spell-check did not flag “discernable” as an error. Granted, a few dictionaries charitably list “discernable” as an alternate spelling, but the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a 16th-to-18th-century variant.
Year we used “discernible” in articles 92 times and “discernable” 15 times, for an error rate of about 14 percent. Like “legible” and “divisible,” it ends in “-ible” rather than “-able” (the spelling generally depends on how the original Latin verb was conjugated). Here’s a new nominee for the title of most-frequently-misspelled word (by percentage of uses): “ discernible.”
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