Thursday, June 25, 2009

That in/for swap in real life

In case you thought the weekend's discussion of random prepositions was just sort of made up for illustration, here's one captured in the wild (that'll be the Fox home page).

To recap, your grizzled editor (or stylebook, or whatever) warns you never to say "indicted for bombing." So you learn to say "indicted in bombing," but you miss the warning on the label that says "bombing" isn't the same part of speech it used to be. So we have three possibilities here:

Twins indicted for mail bombing Ariz. diversity office (correct, but editor is turning green)
Twins indicted in mail bombing of Arizona diversity office (on the story inside)
Twins indicted in mail bombing Ariz. diversity office (ta-da! Look, Ma, no "arrested for")

It isn't an accident, and it isn't just Fox being Fox. It's a genuine news routine. Doesn't mean we have to like it (indeed, we should feel empowered to point out that it's both wrong and really awful-sounding), but it's pretty widespread.

1 Comments:

Blogger Faldone said...

I heard it on NPR this morning.

4:15 PM, June 26, 2009  

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