Re: another bad manuscript

[Kelly Hoffman <kelly -at- NASHUA -dot- HP -dot- COM>]

Laura Lemay <lemay -at- DEATH -dot- KALEIDA -dot- COM> writes:

>   Hey!  I remember those!  That was a particularly *good* year for
>   Tour de France broadcasting.  :)

I trace my love of words & language back to when I was 4 or 5,
watching a baseball game on TV with my dad.  At one point, the
sportscaster got very excited and blurted out, "That could have been a
possible triple play!  That could have been a possible triple play!"

My dad started laughing, and I didn't understand why, so I asked, and
he explained (actually, he prompted me such that I could figure it out
"by myself").

Since then, I haven't been able to watch tv sports or weather ("We're
looking at a serious thunder situation here") -- or news & tv in
general, frankly -- without paying attention to the *words*.

Similarly, I can't read a newspaper or magazine without feeling like
I'm holding a blue pencil.

Occupational hazard, I guess. ;-)

-*-*-*-

Obligatory "bad manuscript tale" (I think I've posted it here
before...)

My favorite gaffe was one I caught in proofreading a command syntax
listing: "the following command options are *required*."

kkh
Kelly K. Hoffman                             kelly -at- nashua -dot- hp -dot- com
Learning Products Engineer
Hewlett-Packard, Network Test Division       "Reading the manual is
One Tara Blvd., Nashua, NH 03062                admitting defeat."