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January 05, 2007
CES graphic leads me down the garden path (but not quite)
Oh no! My usually picky grammatical sense took a drubbing today.
Most of the time I read technology-related writing produced by other techies, who are more loosey-goosey than the average professional writer when using language. We techies are accustomed to enervating neologisms (folksonomy, cluetrain, feewall) and plainly wrong part of speech usages (architect as a verb, ask as a noun). I've been getting less worked up about these minor issues because lately I am becoming more of a linguistic descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist.
Nevertheless, I may have let down my prescriptivist guard just a little too much when I saw this graphic and was led down a garden path interpretation (see the link for some good examples of garden path newspaper headlines).
I interpreted gather above not as a verb but as a noun, a synonym for gathering. In other words, I parsed the sentence at the bottom of the image as "Consumer technology's best gathering is in 5 days... Register Now" rather than "The best (people and companies) in consumer technology gather in 5 days... Register Now".
What's sad about my garden path interpretation is that gather is not a noun. It got nouned (sorry, I know verbing weirds language) in my head because my internal grammatical taboo radar (GTR), having being silent over so many instances of nouning verbs in techie writing, didn't even register my garden path interpretation as bogus.
Sigh. It's with instances like this when I am really unsure whether to be a prescriptivist or a descriptivist.
Posted by Vishy at January 5, 2007 12:31 AM