So Many Bad Grammar, So Few Time

News flash: Grammar is going the way of the, uh, newspaper.

In an age of information when speed trumps accuracy, it's no surprise to see unforgivable errors in sentence construction, spelling and punctuation across the media landscape. But while many of these gaffes are probably the results of innocent typos, some of them suggest a more pervasive trend of linguistic ineptitude in places where English proficiency should be expected.

For instance, there was a story Wednesday morning about bombings in Mumbai that zoomed into the lead space on the Los Angeles Times website. It was grave news, especially for a city that is no stranger to terrorist attacks. However, it was hard to ignore the glaring mistake in the headline:

"Series," as the headline writer surely knows, is the subject of the headline, rendering incorrect the usage of "kill" in this case. Of course, there is a scenario in which the above headline would be correct; indeed, if there had been multiple series of blasts, "kill" would be appropriate. (After all, the word "series" is the same as a singular or plural noun.) But a quick scanning of the story made it clear that Mumbai had endured one set of blasts, not more, and that the subject-verb agreement was out of sorts.

Essentially the same mistake was seen the following day in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper at UC Berkeley. Alas, the frustration that should have been directed at the news of another hefty tuition increase was instead pointed at an avoidable grammatical error:

Now, the Daily Cal is an excellent publication. It even has a copy blog of its own. And hey, everyone makes mistakes. But what made this particular blunder so outrageous was the fact that the grammatically correct version of the same headline could be found a few inches below the gaffe in the breaking-news banner. Hermes does not approve.

Nor would he appreciate, among other things, the two mishandled possessives below. The first comes from NFL running back Reggie Bush, whose USC education is apparent in his Twitter profile:

Bush can do all things -- well, except write one properly constructed sentence. (It seems as though Bush forgot to delete that improper apostrophe when he deleted the Heisman Trophy from his resume.) For what it's worth, athletes and Twitter users are usually given passes when it comes to grammar. Tweeting athletes? The bar can only be so high.

When you're dealing with LexisNexis software Time Matters, you expect higher standards. Ah, but the struggle is universal:

Well, you see, I do want to delete this chain and unchain all of its records, but now I'm not so sure. Can a software program that doesn't know how to use possessive pronouns handle such a complicated request?

All of these errors would put Strunk and White in commas comas. Maybe they'd be able to stomach one more disastrous defect, this time in a newspaper blog post about the goings-on in Los Angeles during the closure of Interstate 405 for construction:

Plane versus peddles, huh? (For the record, the Associated Press made the same mistake.) It sure seems like these journalists should pedal to a flower shop and buy some petals for the grammar gods. Even better, they should change the name of this wacky weekend.

That's right: Grammar-mageddon is here.