From the lead sports story in today’s Providence Journal:
"Boston’s nine-game losing streak has been comprised of close games and blowouts, walk-offs and runaways."
The correct formulation is simpler: Boston’s streak comprises many types of games.
Comprise means consists of.
Has been composed of would also work, but why not use the easy locution that English provides?
Late note: Hey, a ProJo editor caught the error and corrected the text on line. Good work.
An elementary math problem:
Of a Tampa Bay Rays pitcher, a Boston Globe sports reporter writes: “…Bedard threw five one-run innings…” How many runs did the Red Sox score against Bedard?
What’s meant: Over five innings, Bedard held the Sox to one run.
It’s hard to know how to classify the problem—something close to a misplaced modifier. The model for the sentence appears to be threw five shutout innings, which works because where the multiplier is zero, there’s no possible confusion.
From her appraisal of Gabriel García Márquez: ”His grandfather painted the walls of his workshop white so that the young boy, nicknamed Gabo, would have an inviting surface on which to draw and fantasize; his grandmother spoke of the visions she experienced everyday — the rocking chair that rocked alone, ‘the scent of jasmines from the garden’ that ‘was like an invisible ghost.’”
Everyday is an adjective, meaning encountered or suitable for every day. Here, the adverbial use, indicating when or how often, requires two separate words.
The NYTimes is getting lax in these matters. It now appears to permit underway to be used adverbially, an outrage first adopted by the Associated Press.
BTW, when Kakutani, refers to GGM as “The Magus of magical realism,” why is Magus capitalized? That form is usually reserved for the three wise men from the east; here she means a wise man, generically.
See also here and here and here, etc., etc.
The Torah according to David Brooks: “A leader who isn’t himself obedient to the rules is not going to be effective, so God tries to kill Moses. Fortunately, Moses’s wife, Zipporah, grabs a sharp stone and does the deed.”
The deed in question is not murder but circumcision of the couple’s son, a divine requirement that Brooks mentions in a prior sentence. It is not only modifiers that can be misplaced.
Janet Maslin reviews a biography of a man made famous through epenthesis (or, for the hard core, anaptyxis).
From the NYTimes account of prosecutors’ efforts to keep the “9/11 mastermind” off the stand: “Mr. Mohammed’s testimony had been sought by lawyers for Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who the government has portrayed as a spokesman for Osama bin Laden who made speeches praising the Sept. 11 attacks and warned of more to come.”
In the newspaper of record, when journalists attempt long sentences, often the grasp of grammar weakens.
Since the government has portrayed him (the direct object of a transitive verb—calling for the accusative case) the first who should be whom. And then, which person gave speeches? The nearest name preceding the second who is bin Laden, but the intent is to say that Abu Ghaith acted at bin Laden’s behest.
For clarity, separate out a second sentence: The government claims that, acting for Osama bin Laden, Mr. Abu Ghaith made speeches.
BTW, does anyone remember Beyond the Fringe’s long riff on IdentiKits that could help the police find “mindermasts”?
“His passing leaves a hole in my life that can never be replaced.”
To my ear, this puzzler has the feel of a set-up for a George Carlin rant. In actuality, it’s what Richard Lewis told Reuters about his fellow comedian, the late David Brenner.
From the NBC Nightly News comes this startling account of the abandonment of a quaint Old Dominion custom: “At Virginia’s outlet mall, snow filled parking lots instead of shoppers.”
The following sentence, from the conclusion of Michiko Kakutani’s review of a new volume about the document leaker (and patriot) Edward J. Snowden, appears to slight her readership:
"But the book still gives readers, who have not been following the Snowden story closely, a succinct overview of the momentous events of the past year."
The sentence says (in passing) that readers are not au courant. The problem involves those commas. They indicate that the clause they set off provides news about the noun modified: Readers (in general, all of them) have not been following.
What is intended is the identification of a subset, those readers who have failed to stay abreast of the Snowden affair. Because the description is necessary to the definition of the subject (ill-informed readers), who have not is a restrictive clause. It delimits—that is, restricts—the group referred to. Restrictive clauses are not set off by commas.
The book gives (those few) readers who have not kept pace a succinct overview.
This instance is one in which the commas contain meaning. Remove them, and you remove the insult.
The Grammarian tries to deal with the crème de la crème, playing gotcha with Knausgaard and the newspaper of record. In this vein, let us examine a sentence, appearing in the current number of the New York Review of Books, by a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Arnold Relman is describing a late, relief-bringing step in what he judges more generally to be a disappointing encounter with his own profession (medicine, not journalism):
"This was not only enormously more comfortable, but enabled me to begin swallowing small sips of water."
This was enabled me? We gain a slight improvement when we move the first verb to its proper location: This not only was comfortable but also enabled me to swallow.
Having made the emendation, we experience our own discomfort with the use in parallel of two different sorts of verb, linking (to be) and more or less intransitive (to enable, although that me is something like a dative).
Better yet: not only brought comfort but also enabled swallowing.
The Grammarian no longer harps on instances of the missing also. Some causes are lost.
The days when this was mostly followed by a noun that lent clarity—this remedy—are yet longer gone.