Still slogging through the THESIS like tap-dancing through molasses, but I just had to post about this one. I fired up my browser this morning to read the news and my eyeballs tripped over this headline in the New York Times: “Female Briton Feared the Worst in Iran.”
Friends, this is horrible English. When I was a kid and my Mom proofread the stuff that I wrote, one lesson she drilled into my head repeatedly was that ambiguity is bad. Unclear sentences are the writer’s archenemy, because any time a sentence makes a reader pause and say, “Wait – What?”, the reader stumbles out of the writer’s carefully-constructed world. Suspension of disbelief is shot. True, this ambiguous headline actually got me to click on the story, but only because I wanted to know what the worst-feared Briton in Iran looked like. Thirty feet tall! Eyes that shot fire! Razor-sharp claws and teeth like flaying knives! RUN! IT’S THE WORST-FEARED BRITON IN IRAN!
Ahem. Yeah. The headline writer for the Times needs to have a little sit-down with his editor.