The cutline reads: The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. Which propelled University of Pennsylvania sociologist Jeff Weintraub to ask: Were Merle & Kris & Robert ever actually married? What the caption writer neglected, of course, was the serial comma, the one that comes (or is omitted) after "crackle" in "snap, crackle, and pop." When left out of a sentence, this tiny mark sometimes seeks revenge by sneaking up on a unwary writer and landing a devastating blow. In a similar, but more famous example, perhaps apocryphal, a book dedication implied a...

24 October, 2010

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim is the title of a 1980 compendium of unintended double-entendre headlines collected by the Columbia Journalism Review. It illustrates the power of tiny punctuation flubs — in this case, a missing hyphen — to radically alter meaning. Readers also have to chuckle in wonderment over how small a town must be for the local newspaper to deem dog bites newsworthy. When the dog is a coyote, however, and the person bitten is a 16-year-old girl in a National Park where a 19-year-old woman was killed by coyotes 10 months ago, there's no doubt about newsworthiness. Still, consider...

11 August, 2010