Saturday, June 28, 2008

An enemy of the people!

Well, that had to hurt.

It's almost as bad in the reefer:
Charlottean gets shot at Beijing

Strike up the chorus, somebody: "Gets shot" is the textbook example of when to ignore all the "rules" you thought you knew about using articles in heds. Unless, you know, somebody actually did get shot.

2 Comments:

Blogger The Ridger, FCD said...

To be fair, "gets shot at Beijing" requires some work to get the other reading, because "in Beijing" would be the normal prepositional phrase. "At trials" though is the locative, so the idiom "shot at" doesn't jump out at you...

But you can't swap out the nouns willy-nilly without looking at the prepositions, that's for sure.

3:54 PM, July 02, 2008  
Blogger Zuppa Inglese said...

my misreading of "gets shot at Beijing" yields the idea of shot toward the city.

8:21 AM, July 15, 2008  

Post a Comment

<< Home