To quote Lt. Ripley, “Have IQs suddenly dropped since I’ve been gone?”
I love CNN; shoot, I read the site multiple times a day, but the editorial quality there has taken a nose-dive that is unacceptable at one of the world’s premier news sources.
Why, just this morning I saw this:
This fact makes it obvious that either the President or someone close to him is responsible for the extra, arcing black line that was added to a hurricane forecast map which Trump held-up to show that federal weather experts had warned that Alabama was in the path of the lethal Atlantic storm named Dorian.
What, pray, does “held-up” mean? The closest meaning it could have, thanks to that hyphen, is the past tense of “hold-up,” which could also and more appropriately be spelled holdup. A child would know that that hyphen is wrong. He “held up” something, whether it be a forged map or the corner liquor store. The author is supposedly a book author, not a journalist, but that gives him even less of a pass. Yikes.
But that wasn’t the only profound punctuation or grammar issue I saw in my three minutes of reading and skimming. There was this gem, that sets the collective noun rule at naught:
Crew of doomed diving ship tell investigators they tried to save passengers
Sorry, Charlie, “crew” is a collective noun. A crew tells investigators. And it’s not a “they.”
Crew of doomed diving ship tells investigators about rescue efforts
Crew of doomed diving ship details rescue efforts (“attempts” would be good here, since the “efforts” failed.
Let your punctuation and grammar slip, and pretty soon we have a forger as commander-in-chief. It’s a slippery slope, people.
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