CT Blue

I am feeling sort of crotchety today, so I'm going to vent a bit, as is my right as a near geezer. (I will never actually admit reaching that milestone, but I confess to getting ever nearer.)

First, let me direct my fire at the Democrats. I've been blogging since 2005 and I'm really tired of returning to a theme I first developed in the opening weeks of my blogging career. I'm not, of course, the first to expound on this phenomenon. Sadly, and most certainly, I shall not be the last.

For the past week we've seen Democrats of all stripes disgracing themselves trying to “fix” a problem with Obamacare that scarcely exists, or simply assuming the fetal position while they are attacked by Republicans. Is there nothing new under the sun? From Obama on down, Democrats hasten to respond to disingenuous claims by Republicans that, since Obama promised that everyone would be able to keep their insurance plans, he was somehow promising that insurance companies themselves would never cancel a policy again, not even those that were initially offered after the passage of the law that the insurance companies surely knew would become illegal once the law became effective. We even have so called Democrats, such as the congressperson from this states's 5th District, voting for a Republican solution that does nothing to solve the non-existent problem other than to let insurance companies continue to sell existing non-compliant but profitable plans, while dumping plans they don't like.

We live in strange times. We have a party that represents the interests of the corporations, the extremely rich and extremely crazy, which shamelessly and forcefully advocates for positions that most people abhor. We have another party that supports policies that most people support, in the sense that they prefer them to the alternative, which party is terrified to advocate for its positions. In any sane country this would seem to be a paradox, but here it's business as usual.

So much for that. Let me now direct fire in a different direction, toward the New London Day.

I have, of late, noticed that a lot of people who write for a living can't. Write, that is. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are strangers to the rules of grammar. I confess to having a thing about sportswriters in particular, who tend to repeat certain tropes. The most abused is the use of the same phrase to start or end an interminable number of sentences, but when that trite literary device is used, at least the rules of grammar are normally observed. What can one do but suffer in silence? But I reserve the right to carp when the English language is mauled beyond recognition.

Don't get me wrong. I feel for the local sportswriter. It must be hard to come up with original things to say about the latest contest between New London High and Fitch. Almost as hard as coming up with new ways to condemn spineless Democrats. But does that excuse the following opening sentence (opening paragraph, actually), which appeared in today's paper?

Never did they imagine they'd be celebrating the first state championship in the program's 37-year history when the season began.

I confess that I'm puzzled. It may be a sentence. It seems to have all the constituent elements. I think it has a subject. It has verbs in abundance. Perhaps the difficulty lies in the fact that it's so very hard to connect any of the verbs with an object. Equally baffling is the fact that it resists all attempts at correction. Oh, you could do it. With time and patience you can tease a coherent sentence out of this sequence of words, but it's not easy. All I can say is this: Had I written this sentence in fourth grade, good Sister Thomas would have made me stay after school until I got it right. Worse yet, she might have made me stay until I could successfully diagram it as written, in which case I'd still be at my desk today.

Rant over, except… wait. Hey, you kids, Get off my lawn!