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Ok maybe a very stupid question but
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday announced
Isn’t that gramatically incorrect? Shouldn’t it be “The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced on Thursday”?
I see this kind of writing a lot in news articles so surely it’s not actually wrong, but that’s not how I was taught English writing.
It’s correct, as much as any English is correct, but not typically spoken naturally like that.
The press (newspapers) has an idiosyncratic grammar, probably born of maximising space in a newspaper column. Headlines are often grammatical nightmares, body copy less so.
One could think of it as a form of semantic compression.
A good example of this is their insistence on using the comma, to mean “the”, “of” or “and”, leading to some bizarre headlines.
Midland, Baker, Roz, Mazda, convicted, fraud
Which despite the fact it just sounds like a list of random words, is in fact a valid sentence. Or at least it represents one.
Though today we get:
Find out what these big four names were convicted of!
It’s a bit stilted and no-one would speak like that (at least without sounding pretentious), but it’s not bad grammar.
Also, shame on the moron that downvoted you for asking a question.
I really don’t see why you would think this.
Sooooo, Carl, on Thursday, said that…
Completely normal thing I would expect to hear.
Yeah just depends what you’re emphasizing. It could be that Thursday is particularly important so it gets moved up to the second piece of info delivered
Unnatural to me, that sounds.
To be fair, you’ve added commas which makes it a parenthetical phrase. But yeah - people do speak like this in real life; technically, I should have said no-one speaks like this in non-impromptu speech without sounding stilted.
“Carl said on Thursday” is definitely more idiomatic (to my BrE ears, anyway) than “Carl on Thursday said”.
Yeah, I’ll agree, without any pauses it’s less natural and it’s more of a “buying time to think” thing.
Dialect variation. For me, saying “the car needs washed” sounds truly strange but millions and millions of people say it. You’re experiencing similar with this phrase.
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But that’s just a ‘bone apple tea’ of “chest of drawers”? It’s not a correct term.
(I figured surely there’s an actual word for misheard terms being butchered in writing, but a quick search failed me so I went with the colloquial name.)
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I believe you, I had just never heard it was “wrong” and it’s never stood out to me.
Funny enough I learned about it in a linguistics class from a professor out of Michigan. Never heard the concept before and I think a lot of people had their minds blown.
the car needs washed
Is there a name/term for this abomination? I’ve only ever heard one person speak in that form (omitting “to be”), and it has haunted me ever since.
I think you’d call this elision. Assume that the phrase is originally “the car needs to be washed” but you cut out “to be”, making it into a shorter form. It’s pretty common in language to shorten things to make it faster to speak. Think of the endless contractions in English or perhaps leaving part of a sentence completely unspoken because the content is easily assumed by the interlocutors.
Worse, to me, is that there is a perfectly grammatically correct way to be just as brief.
Wrong:
The bed sheets need washed.
Right:
The bed sheets need washing.
And for a linguist the question is really whether there are native speakers who consider it correct. Here there are millions who say yes.
Idk if you’re a native speaker or not, but as a native speaker of American English there is absolutely nothing wrong with this to me. You could put it in about 4 different places:
On Thursday the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced ____.
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday announced ____.
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced on Thursday that ____.
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced ____ on Thursday.
The first one typically has a comma after “Thursday”. The second one you could offset “on Thursday” with commas. The third one is at best really awkward without a “that” or a question word (who, what, where, why, how) and you could offset “on Thursday” with commas; you can also drop the “on”, in which case you can’t use commas. The last one is possible but could be ambiguous (it could be that “on Thursday” is part of their announcement).
Had they just used some punctuation - “The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday, announced”, it would have made it easier to get. Even, “The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, on Thursday, announced” would be doable.
How do these feel?
