over and over, the same fucking problem

The problem with being an illiterate writer is that writing is designed for communication, so the illiterate's laziness or stupidity is being broadcast to others, making them miserable.

From here, with errors in boldface:

Former President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to five years in prison Friday on charges that included the obstruction of investigators’ attempt to detain him last year.

The Seoul Central District Court handed down the sentence in the first ruling on charges stemming from Yoon’s short-lived imposition of martial law in December 2024.

Chief among the charges in Friday’s case was that the then president had ordered the Presidential Security Service to block investigators from executing a warrant to detain him at the official presidential residence in January last year.

Judge Baek Dae-hyun, the presiding judge, chastised Yoon during the hearing attended by the jailed former president and televised live.

“He effectively privatized the armed forces through the public servants of the Presidential Security Service who are loyal to the Republic of Korea for his personal safety and interests,” he said.

“Considering the need to restore the rule of law damaged by the defendant’s crimes, a severe punishment that matches the guilt is necessary.”

The sentence was half of what special counsel Cho Eun-suk’s team had requested last month, saying the former president committed a “grave crime” by “privatizing” state institutions with the aim of concealing and justifying his criminal acts.

In addition to obstructing his detention, Yoon was accused of violating the rights of nine Cabinet members who were not called to a meeting to review his martial law plan, and drafting and later destroying a revised proclamation after the martial law decree was lifted.

He was also charged with ordering the distribution of press statements containing falsehoods about the declaration and the deletion of records from secure phones used by then military commanders.

The judge said Yoon was guilty of all charges except with regard to the rights of two of the nine Cabinet members and the order to distribute false press statements.

In every instance, the error is the same because the rule is the same: hyphenate phrasal adjectives when they precede the nouns they modify. Corrected:

his martial-law plan
the martial-law decree
by then-military commanders

You might have seen the phrase the then president (third paragraph). Why no hyphen there? Because president is a noun, not part of a phrasal adjective.

What's frustrating is that the "journalist" who wrote this (Kang Jae-eun) followed the rule when she wrote short-lived imposition (second paragraph).

I said she'd followed the rule (inadvertently), not that she knew the rule. But she'd had some vague notion of the need to hyphenate. Consistency is one way to separate good writers from bad. Inconsistency (e.g., getting it right once but getting it wrong three times) means you don't really know the relevant rule.

For what it's worth, AI gets this rule wrong all the time, too. Don't trust AI.

These days, the above article would appear on my Substack in the Bad Online English section, but I decided I wanted to vent here.

Don't be a fucking ding-dong.