Department of Grammar Elucidation?
I have some (unsolicited) legal advice for the Trump administration: in the ongoing effort to exclude the Associated Press from the Oval Office and some other White House venues, the exclusion ought to be offered as a punishment not for bad politics but for bad writing. An AP story on the April 15 shooting at a Dallas high school begins by telling us that four students were “wounded,” many police officers arrived, and a suspect, although identified, had not been detained. Then we are offered this:
Three of the students were injured by gunfire and the fourth was in their lower body, according to the Dallas Fire-Rescue Department. The department said that units were dispatched to the Wilmer-Hutchens High School just after 1 p.m., and that the four students all of whom are male, were taken to hospitals with injuries ranging from serious to not life-threatening.
Were the three who were shot injured in their upper body? Was the fourth student not shot, and if not, how was they injured? (If “his” is not to be used to refer to an individual identified as “male,” when is it to be used? Is “his” now an obscene term, like the “N-word,” never to be used in polite company?) At the end of the piece, we are informed that the “three who were shot” ranged from 15 to 18 years old, but the age of the individual with “the musculoskeletal injury” was unknown. Is the “musculoskeletal injury” in the lower body? Presumably he—sorry, they—was not shot?
Upon further consideration, I withdraw my suggestion that bad writing might serve as a legal defense: very little of the journalism I read these days is any better in terms of logic, coherence, or simple clarity. The Associated Press is hardly unique in its ineptitude.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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