Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Can you use that in a sentence?

To be truthful, I hardly read the stories in the Herald-Press.
It's difficult enough to get past the headlines.

The January 6 edition was enough to send a home-schooled, spelling-bee geek into a spasm.
The carnage began, literally, at the top. In a teaser headline for the sports section, the promo said:

"Viking gymnists begin season tonight."

I guess that would be the Huntington North gymnistical team.
If you have trouble getting that out of your mind, you can always go to a hypnotast.

After uncrossing my eyes, I continued to wade through the paper and reached the back page and the Dear Abby column. Thinking that I would not see butchery worse than I saw on the front page, I was quickly corrected.
The headline:

"Words Can Inflick Wounds No Apology Can Fully Cure"

No kidding. I'm wounded deeply, and apparently it was inflicked upon me, however that might be.
The only thing I can come up with is this:

"How did that booger get stuck to the wall?"
"I think it was inflicked."

While those headlines are straight-forward, in-your-face in ineptitude, I always prefer the more complex, thinking-man's screwup.

On Page 5A, there was press release (what else is new?) about the winner of the lottery.
The first thing I noticed was the phrase "Fort Wayne Hoosier" in describing the winner. Well, you know, I guess the winner could have been from Fort Wayne, Montana. Therefore, to prevent any confusion, we would need to know that it actually someone from Fort Wayne, Indiana, requiring the addition of the word "Hoosier."
So stunned was I seeing that, I initially missed the other wayward piece of punctuation in the headline. I'm assuming the amount won was $7,500, but the headline listed the amount as "$75,00"

I suppose the headline writer could have been from Europe, where commas and periods are switched.
But I doubt it.
Although I could use the 75 euros.

One of our ongoing tasks is to track the number of ads in each issue. Tuesday's Herald-Press had five block ads, called display ads. (As a comparison, this week's TAB had more than 70 display ads).
The H-P did have a page they call the "Marketplace," where they offer businesses an ad for $85 a month. With the 23 ads there, that's about two grand a month, or $24,000 a year.

What's the over-under on the demise of the Herald-Press?