Correction #982

Okay, I must admit this was a funny one:

The Pratt Tribune, a tri-weekly newspaper out of Pratt, Kansas, printed the headline, ‘Students get first hand job experience’, over the weekend

I don’t know why Americans are so afraid of hyphens, because the rule is really simple.

  1. If you’re making a compound adjective (i.e. using two adjectives, one to describe the second), hyphenate the two if they appear before the noun being enhanced, e.g. “a laughably-stupid editor” (that would be the idiot working for the Pratt Tribune). If you don’t hyphenate the two words, the first adjective* (laughably) is left dangling out there, and sometimes you won’t know whether it applies to the following adjective (stupid) or to the noun (man). Linking the two words with a hyphen makes it quite clear.
  2. If you’re using the compound adjective separately from the noun, i.e. after a verb — “The editor is laughably stupid” — then the hyphen is unnecessary because laughably can only be referring to stupid.

The headline above is what we used to call a howler because the word hand could equally apply to the noun job, but in fact it refers to the previous word first. The sentence should read, “Students get first-hand job experience” (or even “firsthand”, in this case) but even then, the editor should have spotted the likelihood of the howler caused by the proximate occurrence of hand before job, and written “Students get job experience at first hand” instead.

What’s even funnier is that the hapless editor probably has an English degree from a college or university. Draw your own conclusions, but he’s clearly not a well-read man. (See how that works?)

And finally: in the U.K., “prat”[sic] means “stupid person”, which seems appropriate in this case.


*I know, “laughably” is actually an adverb, which is what one normally uses to enhance an adjective, but let’s keep the instruction simple.

6 comments

  1. Kim,
    Good morning. Keep please posting news reports from the east-side of the pond. They’re truly enjoyable reading. Thank you.

    Regarding punctuation, grammar is also one of those necessities which tends to get butchered like a Sunday hog. I present you … the grammar mug:
    http://www.cafepress.com/mf/96268261/_mugs?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=pla-google&utm_campaign=606368793-d-c&utm_content=26038288090-adid-87400500490&utm_term=pla-256602417759-pid-1613272546&productId=1613272546

    PS . . . do *NOT* get me started about dangling prepositions. Ugh.

  2. Yes, and be sure to take extra care in your posts and translate for us, Kim. I don’t speak Limey, Kipper or Chav. The other dialects like Pikie, toft, and Wank are equally incomprehensible.
    🙂

  3. Being the evil person I am, I can’t help but wonder if that was truly an “error”. Or if maybe it was intentional. 🙂

  4. Back in the day I was informed that the battlefield evolution where a retiring unit decamping in favor of a successor unit, was referred to by all right thinking NATO sorts as a ‘battle hand over’. It appears that the term ‘hand off’ had been previously appropriated by the kidney pie crowd for certain rather less savory pursuits. And here I’d always known it as a passage of lines. Who knew?

Comments are closed.