Dangler of the month

Surely, wherever you stand on the prescriptive/descriptive divide, you will have a who-did-what-to-whom moment with this participial phrase and the clause that follows it:

Leading Duke by 10 with 2 minutes and 38 seconds to play, the Blue Devils went on a 13-2 run to close the game and won it, 85-84, when Austin Rivers made a long 3 as the buzzer sounded.

Can we simply specify that whoever it was that was leading Duke by 10, it wasn't Duke?

Of inventors and clues

All those nice rules that make heds tighter and shorter -- drop the auxiliaries, drop the articles, drop the linking verbs, and the like -- can also turn a once-simple phrase into a crash blossom on short notice. Such is the issue here as our friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network do their best to perform damage control on Newt Gingrich's foray into the Balfour-era politics of the Near East. Gingrich dresses up a familiar set of talking points:

"Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community," Gingrich said.

... and in the breathless syntax of the homepage, we get "Candidate draws fire for saying Palestinians 'invented' people." I mean, you could see them inventing the Internet or the compact disc or algebra, but the whole human race?
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Passive aggressive: Priming

No one's ever going to accuse The Fox Nation of being a passive sort of place, and that's what makes this hed unusual. (In theory terms, we're primed to expect something particular from it, but you have to sit through some headlines before the punch line). The whole point of Fox Nation is that we know who's doing what to whom. Often that's the bad guys, as in these examples from today's homepage:

DC Organizer Admits to Paying ‘Occupy DC’ Protesters

Pitting Donors One Against Another: Obama Hits New Fundraising Lows

'Occupy Wall Street' Blasts Banking Industry -- but Apologizes to Its Own Banker

Feds Wanted to Give Solyndra More Money, Emails Show

Orrin Hatch: Obama Fuels Riots

Occupy Wall Street Protester Defecates On Police Car

Top Obama Funder Pushed Solyndra Loan From Inside
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