Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The Nation needs a copy editor

This Nation article is riddled with linguistic oddities. Here's my favorite (all emphasis mine):

The mainstream Australian attitude to refugees fleeing Iraq, Afghanistan and other Middle East nations during the earlier part of this century was of exclusion and brutality.

Does that mean that at 6 p.m. on January 1 I'm allowed to say "earlier this year, when I woke up with a hang over"?

And then there's this one:

Though perhaps no more serious than in other Western states, an insular, island mentality sometimes rears its ugly head.

Just in case you didn't get it the first time.

And finally this one. It's like they wanted to try to write naturally and not say xenophobia, but their bad writing innate natural tendency to want to draw out their phrases for as long as they possibly can and to aggrandize their verbiage to such an extent that they can compensate for their lack of substantive argumentation got in the way hindered the adoption of this more comprehensible style:

Paranoia of the foreigner is not unique to Australia...

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