South Lake Press: The Slovenliness of our Language

Slate Magazine recently published an article by Kitty Burns Florey about the grammar of Sarah Palin's sentences. In the article, Florey, who wrote the delightful history of sentence diagramming Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, attempts to diagram some of Palin's sentences. Some of them work. Some of them, not so much.

I wonder what would happen, should Florey ever get her hands on a copy of the South Lake Press and try to make sense of that grammatical nightmare.

Before offering any examples, I should note that I do not (and would not) pay for a copy of the South Lake Press. It arrives for free in my mailbox each Friday or Saturday, whether I like it or not. I keep it around, too, for those times when I get caught on a run in the rain and need newspaper to stuff in my wet shoes.

On to the paper.

An article on this week's front page titled "Officials: No Charges To Be Filed Against Officers" begins with the following sentence (I'm using the word sentence pretty loosely here):

Police officers who escaped charges during a July traffic stop shooting in a residential neighborhood were in a yard as they fired at a motorist fleeing down a dark street, according to details from a Florida Department of Law Enforcement report.

What on God's green earth, you're probably wondering, does that even mean?

Of course, there are lots of problems here, such as the unnecessary description of the neighborhood as residential (aren't they all?), but the big problem is that the sentence presents a wandering amalgamation of adverbials without a clear predicate. What is, we wonder, the complete thought that this sentence is attempting to express?

However, a diagram quickly illustrates what's going on in the sentence:

Actually, the diagram (which is anything but quick) illustrates the fundamental error in this sentence. While it's grammatically complete, the sentence has this at its core:

Police officers were in a yard.

Is that the point?

No, the point is that the police officers escaped charges, but that bit of information--which we're expecting to be central after reading the headline--gets buried in a relative clause.

In other words, the very thing that the sentence is supposed to be about is tucked away in an adjectival, while the information that ought to be adverbial is presented as the main idea.

Florey's article in Slate states that "the more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one--with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression--or such an impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and twaddle."

I think we know which of these is the case here.

And I could go on, and on, and on. But I won't, because there are better things to do on a Sunday.