trouvailles, June 6, 2020

A meme passed along via link by Bill Keezer:

Having recently groused about commenters' pedantry when I post memes, I'm about to commit the sin of being a pedant myself: the phrase "small business owners" contains a phrasal adjective that really ought to be hyphenated because we hyphenate phrasal adjectives that precede the nouns they modify. So, in this case: "small-business owners" is what we ought to see. Without the hyphen, it's possible that it's the owners who are small, not the businesses. Hyphenation provides clarity. Again, here's the classic example of phrasal-adjective ambiguity: The professors attended a violent weather seminar.

Sometimes, when I see poorly punctuated memes, I'll actually take the time to Photoshop them into a more tolerable linguistic form. This time around, well, I'm feeling lazy. I just got back from a longer-than-anticipated hike in 90-degree heat (my buddy JW's wife is royally pissed that he made his kids walk 17.5 kilometers and didn't feed them a meal until the hike was over), so I'm tired.

Moving along...

I saw this bit of hilarity over at John Mac's place:

ANTIFA reaches for the Officer's rifle.

[NB: to be clear, the above video was taken in France.]

I commented to John that it reminded me of this (found here):

Sorry, but my sympathy for the ladies ends when they choose to join a mob. I can't personally see myself ever decking a lady unless she's coming at me with a weapon and with obvious murder in her eyes, but that being said: no sympathy for Riot Grrrl. The sum of her choices put her in front of that fist, and she needs to own up to that instead of playing the victim.

Sigh...

Well, bugger. I decided to redo the above meme, anyway.