Pet peeve

[cactuswatcher]

My latest gripe with the news culture copying mistakes from every other news outlet is the misuse of the word "after."

From my local TV station's website, Pedestrian suffers life-threatening injuries after being struck by vehicle.

How horrible! First the person was hit by a vehicle, then afterward suffered life-threatening injuries? ...Of course not... For God's sake stop using 'after' plus a progressive tense as a synonym for 'when' plus a simple past tense. The injuries didn't happen after. They happened when!

Note the difference between this and a similarly constructed sentence, "Pedestrian dies after being struck by vehicle..." It's a very possible sequence of events, where the sentence quoted above is very unlikely.

Comments

[atpo_onm]

Well, you may be pleased to know that your editing assistance back during my work on the Angel fanfic is still having an effect. One of the honchos for this big local record swap meet has been after me to do some technical articles for their monthly newsletter, and I was working on that project earlier this week.

I wrote up articles for the first two months, and then as I always do, went over them several times for basic proofreading, and... then for how I could trim them to make them cleaner. Several words/sentences were indeed rearranged or deleted.

So there ya go!