Elvis Caged for Brandishing Exclamation Point!
MONDAY: Lunch today is haloumi and the usual veggies on a malted grain bap. Simple but satisfying. My fruit includes tiny Lincolnshire strawberries and slices of gorgeously perfect nectarine, pear, and satsuma. It's a perfect lunch for a hot day.
Things have gone too far! It's time we caged these vicious criminals who maul and abuse the written language! I'm talking about newspaper reporters who use exclamation points and sensational dehumanising words like "caged" to report the news! And let's not forget to at least one word, and sprinkle commas, willy, nilly.
One expects this sort of language rot in sensational rags like the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the National Enquirer. I've found so much amusement in sensational tabloid headlines like "Queen Forced To Eat Slimey Slugs" that I once wrote a Javascript program that randomly produced headlines like "Elvis Gives Birth To Own Grandmother" and "Two-Headed Albino Gorilla Forced To Eat Los Angeles Convention Center Smeared with Marmite".
But if the Los Angeles Times or the Guardian started to write in this style all hell would break loose -- or I certainly hope it would. I'll admit that more and more typos creep into the Guardian these days, probably due to the fact that because of the growing reliance on spell-checking software, actual manual proofreading is quickly becoming a dying art. But never have I come across anything so blatantly SCREAMING as an exclamation point!
So why must the local Sheffield Star resort to this punctuation mark which should be reserved solely for fictional dialogue and casual correspondence? Not that I'm a regular reader of the Sheffield Star; but I do like to check the local job adverts every Thursday, and a local paper should be a good source for particularly local news specifics. But! I feel as though!! I'm being! PUNCHED IN THE FACE! I WISH! Somebody would cage! these villains' exclamation point keys! Or just TEAR! THEM OUT! in a horrendously grisly manner! And while they're at it, burn that damn CAPS LOCK key!
Don't get me started on the misuse of apostrophes. Please don't…
