Showing posts with label nouns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nouns. Show all posts

Sunday, January 11, 2009

One subject is enough, thank you

Weekend sports programs brought this one to the fore, but it's also become much too common on journalism-based shows like "Today." Matt Lauer, are you listening?

I forget the exact name for it, but I'll call it noun-pronoun redundancy: "Eli Manning, he's having a rough day," or "Neil Young, he's got a new album." That's how it's most commonly said. For a long time we heard "Neil Young. He's got a new album," and lived with it, rationalizing that a subject without a verb (sometimes trumpeted in a way that would require an exclamation point if rendered in print) was akin to a "label" headline. But now broadcasters are running it all together, and it's bad grammar. Once, it was a good indicator of poor education. Now, it mainly displays ignorance.