Not Only Headlines Can Be Misleading

The photographs can be, too. Here’s the lead photo from an article about “an extremely well-preserved wooly rhino” found in Siberia:

…and here’s a photo farther down in the article.

It’s an interesting article, by the way.

PS—Another common misleading picture is those “photos” of the coronavirus. The virus has fewer than 30 spikes, and most of the pictures you see show about twice that many.

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Take taxes. You can have kinds of tax, such as income, sales, inheritance, property, and so on. In this context, you count, which means you use number. But one tax can come in different amounts of money, so you measure. So is this sentence correct?

Depends on the context. If they’re talking about the amount of, say corporate income tax, then the sentence is correct. But if they’re talking about avoiding certain types of tax, such as sales tax or property tax, then the sentence would be incorrect. Not being a tax lawyer, I dunno.

Gotta have a picture, so here’s one of the places where unionization is an issue:

I know, I’ve mentioned this topic several times, but the topic is worth repeating because so many writers get “comprise” wrong. Here’s one of the few who got it right.

Remember: Compose goes from the parts to the whole; comprise goes from the whole (usually a singular) to the parts, which are usually plural. So “barndominiums” is the whole thing (a company, not a bunch of places), and “25%” is the part, which can be either a singular or a plural, depending on how you care to look at it.

Here’s a picture of a barndominium:

Maybe I just feel curmudgeonly today. You can decipher the sentence, maybe, but it takes a while to figure out what’s wrong with it. Here’s the sentence:

“Shield” should jump right out at you as incorrect: it should be “shields,” to go with “decades-old law,” right? So why did a professional writer (and editor, I presume) use the plural, “shield”? I think to go with the plural “changes” in the second line. But “the decades-old law” interferes! Especially since we see only one comma, which separates that plural verb (shield) from the plural (changes) and puts it with the closer singular (law). But putting a comma after “law” makes the sentence sound awkward. (The rule is that two commas count as zero commas.) And what if the intention was to use “shields,” which changes the meaning of the whole sentence!

A bad sentence no matter what you do to it. How would you fix this?

Here’s my solution:

Frank Pallone Jr., the chairman of the committee hosting the hearing, said he wants to explore making some changes to Section 230 to shield tech companies from lawsuits over posts, videos, and photos that people share on their platforms. The law is decades old.

Maybe the sentence means the opposite:

Frank Pallone Jr., the chairman of the committee hosting the hearing, said he wants to explore making some changes to Section 230 because it shields tech companies from lawsuits over posts, videos, and photos that people share on their platforms. The law is decades old.

Make the reference to the age of the section into a separate sentence.

Here’s a picture of the CEOs scheduled for the hearing. I don’t have a shot of Mr. Pallone.:

PS—I fixed the missing oxford comma, too. Did you notice?

I suppose I don’t really need to tell you that you should be careful to get your figures of speech correct…

‘nuf said.