Remember: the reason the mainstream media is better than all of us bumptious alt-media people is that they have layers and layers of gatekeepers.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I read h this AP piece in the Strib, about United Airlines cracking down on people hauling refrigerator-sized “carry-on” bags onto their flights, and went “yay”.
But this sentence here stuck in my craw:
It has nothing to do with revenue, [United spokesman Rahsaan Johnson] said, adding that one non-complaint bag takes up the same space as two complaint ones.
One suspects a bag that generates no “complaints” would take up much less than half the space of two bags that generate complaints.
Unless the word they were looking for was “compliant”. Which is a whole different word – indeed, geometrically opposite in this context.
English in America today: I’m afraid a generation of hasty online spelling means were loosing the standard’s of are language.
Layers. Of Gatekeepers.
Yes – were all loost when it comes to proper English these days! Damn cell phone keyboards and autocorrect…
Still my favorite of all time is when the Fresno Bee issued a correction that they mistakenly wrote about a state budget being “back in the ‘African-American'” when they meant “back in the ‘black'”.
http://stupidest.com/stupidest-newspaper-corrections/
(5th item)
… or when some announcer refers to a Black from some country geographically quite far from the US as “African American.”
I listened to an Olympic announcer struggle on-air for a few seconds a while back, trying to describe a Black athlete from some land distant to America. PC won out and she opted for the AA term, but very rapidly spoken …