Headlines in the papers tell of fighting in the streets

[venta]

I do try not to harp on about grammar. I really do. A lot of the time someone misses out an apostrophe and hey, it's wrong, but I knew what they meant. I know my punctuation isn't always perfect either.

But, dear BBC, you are a reputable journalistic institution. And that missing hyphen completely changed the meaning of the headline.

Child killer Robert Black found guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy tells me that Robert Black, who is under 18, is guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy.

What you meant was Child-killer Robert Black found guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy, ie Robert Black, a convicted killer of children, is guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy.

Flippin' sort it out.

I do take it as read that, due to the law of St Sod, I will have misplaced at least one apostrophe in this post.

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

the law of St Sod

This is actually an identified sub-law, Muphry's.

Hyphenating compound modifiers seems to have practically disappeared from English usage. I wonder if there was a chort of kids who were taught to shun them? In the academic copy-editing I occasionally do, a large part of my work is putting them in to remove just such ambiguity.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I certainly wasn't taught how to use them. I shuffled by for years putting them/taking them out by instinct, and finally had the rule explained to me by someone for whom English was their third language. She was German (in fact, she still is) and had actually been taught rules of English grammar considerably more thoroughly than I had.

(I mean, it's not even like the rule is very complicated, once you know it exists...)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I was quite alarmed by a Swiss friend's understanding of the rules of English grammar vs my own.

Sad to say, I was actually taught a bit of grammar at school, but have since learnt that it was almost all wrong. For my first two secondary years we had a Geography teacher taching us English, and she was very keen to impart all sorts of nonsense she'd picked up goodness knows where. None of the actual English teachers I had subsequently paid any attention to grammar at all.