OK, this is just sloppy journalism
Mar. 3rd, 2005 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerBBC headline: "Ex-Bosnia army chief 'not guilty'"
First line of story: The former chief of the Bosnian Muslim army, Rasim Delic, has pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges at the tribunal in The Hague.
The BBC has gottne much, much worse in its sloppy and unprofessional headline writing, including massive and trivialized use of quotation marks and impenetrably stacked nouns. It's as if there's a contest to see who can convey the least in the smallest amount of words.
In this case, they manage to convey an impression that is simply untrue by using cutesy quotation marking. In fact, it would have taken only six more characters (for which there was plenty of room) to write "Ex-Bosnia army chief pleads not guilty". And they could easily have said "Bosnian general pleads not guilty", thus avoiding the horrific "ex-Bosnia army chief" noun stack (ex- what? ex-Bosnian? clearly not--he's still Bosnian).
Grrr.
First line of story: The former chief of the Bosnian Muslim army, Rasim Delic, has pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges at the tribunal in The Hague.
The BBC has gottne much, much worse in its sloppy and unprofessional headline writing, including massive and trivialized use of quotation marks and impenetrably stacked nouns. It's as if there's a contest to see who can convey the least in the smallest amount of words.
In this case, they manage to convey an impression that is simply untrue by using cutesy quotation marking. In fact, it would have taken only six more characters (for which there was plenty of room) to write "Ex-Bosnia army chief pleads not guilty". And they could easily have said "Bosnian general pleads not guilty", thus avoiding the horrific "ex-Bosnia army chief" noun stack (ex- what? ex-Bosnian? clearly not--he's still Bosnian).
Grrr.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 06:03 pm (UTC)You *did* make a general statement that the English aren't all that good with language. In my opinion, that's the ludicrous part of the conversation. You're implying that, on the whole, any and all English people are less capable with language than non English users. To me, that's just silly. Yes, I listed notable writers. I could just as easily have listed television writers, popular/pulp novelists, songwriters, examples of advertising copy. The English as a group are no less good with language than anyone else, in my opinion; in fact, I'd say that the level of use of language in their press, popular fiction, television (and, yes, I have seen plenty of bad UK television as well as the stuff that makes it to PBS), and even sports commentary is mioes ahead of comparable language use in the USA.
But again, that's just an opinion. And, like noses, we all have them, and we all think ours smell better than anyone else's. :-)