Saturday, October 30, 2010

With Ingrid Bergman as hypotenuse Little Round Top

File this lede under "No, not really." Or "Dude, where's my car?" Or something.

It gets the day's Lede Fail prize because it asks the audience to know a lot more than it should have to in order to make sense of a politics lede on the Saturday before the election -- but not enough to make the metaphor work. Who's Pickett in this scenario? (For that matter, who's Lee?) Whose immediate and long-term goals are different from who else's? Are we fishing for an extreme version of the "game frame," or are we just looking for random ways to say "lots of bloodshed"?


Nope. Send it back. Try again. And while you're at it, please pay particular attention to the stuff on the front page:

Giant pumpkins costs hundreds of dollars, and Fitzpatrick didn't have it.

They does?

It's nice to save writers from their metaphors, but it's essential to save them from their inability to count to "plural."

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3 Comments:

Blogger John Cowan said...

Lots of bloodshed, I'd go with that; at 50,000+ casualties, Gettysburg is among the top 25 battles worldwide, and by far the bloodiest on American soil. And very well known to boot.

I think asking "Who's Pickett?" is overdoing it.

1:56 PM, October 31, 2010  
Blogger The Ridger, FCD said...

But surely "it" is how we refer to sums of money. "How much is it?" "Thirty thousand dollars." "Wow. I don't have that (it)" not "those (them)".

1:46 PM, November 01, 2010  
Blogger fev said...

No, I'm all about the "five hundred dollars is a lot of money" rule. (If I have to buy your loyalty, Mr. Spade...). I was looking at the mismatch of "giant pumpkins" and "costs."

7:35 PM, November 01, 2010  

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