This image — received from a reader who writes, “I am surprised, too!” — has been making the rounds of the Internet for a long time as a theme with variations (and in many iterations from left, right, and elsewhere):
Although we know what it means, the caption does not parse. It’s grammatically inept. But — I’m switching gears here — Sam Zell’s grammatically ept “I’ve never read online” also fails to parse and is truly scary, given his winning bid for the Tribune media company.
Since I’m parsing, have you read the LA Times drama critic Charles McNulty lately? Here’s what he wrote the other day: “Redgrave honors this journey not by mimicking it but by processing it through her own sublimely empathic instrument.” Whoa! The Times would be doing its readers a service by processing empathetically inflated criticspeak like that through a flapdoodle strainer.
Postscript: April 7 — And now for a caption that parses all too well:
