Everyone missed it
Posted by bradburg on May 14, 2008
This one takes a little time and text to explain. Newsweek, May 5, 2008, page 31: “[H]e is one of those . . . intellectuals whom George W. Bush liked to ridicule as a Deke brother . . . and . . . as president . . . (and, long before him, demagogues like . . . Father Charles Coughlin; Red-baiter Joe McCarthy . . . and . . . race-baiter Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.)” There’s a glaring and basic error in parallelism, because there’s no verb — express or implied — for the people included in parentheses. And “ridicule” does not work for them, the way the sentence is set up. It’s amazing that no editor (or any of the three, count ‘em, writers) saw this obvious error, or made the very easy fix: Just cut that initial “and” within the parentheses and replace it with two words–”(as did, long before him . . . )”–and the sentence would read correctly, and as intended.
