One might be amused

Jeff Deck and his red-pen rovers stepped in some legal trouble and now they're talking about it.

A few months ago I commented on some of their less than insightful comments and corrections. A short while later I mentioned the editors' escapades to a friend and she responded with a "cool" of approval. I felt the need to point out -- she must not have read my post -- that some of their ideas were mistaken. But I agreed that if it's done with the right attitude there's no harm.

But is that possible? Perhaps it's only a bad attitude that leads to such a cross-country correction crusade. And it's arrogance that imposes a correction on people who have not asked for it. And it's ignorance that leads to defacement of a landmark.

For a while after the arrest the TEAL website has been a single page with simple black text promising a statement.

Now it's a single page with simple black text making the statement.

The punctuation and spelling are clean. But the prose is rough and heavy. I'll pick out the salient clumsy construction:

…one should not vandalize…
… for one to think that one can tell others…
…one never knows…
…One should ask…
…one cannot underestimate.…
…One risks tarnishing the image…
…One might, for example, be…
…One might also face…
…One’s sense of civic duty…
…should prevent one from…

And that's within four short paragraphs. So let's say that he chose this horrible pattern for effect. For humor. To be cute.

It's an ill effect. It's not funny. It's ugly. Three misplaced commas an unnecessary semi-colon a wrong there and two mistaken apostrophes would be less obtrusive than this clumsy form.

Read Dennis Baron's post.