From The Independent : “Ted Cruz photographed checking his Twitter mentions after ‘performative tantrum’ at Supreme Court hearing”:
Senator Ted Cruz was caught checking his phone for Twitter mentions by a photo journalist after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.That first sentence though could use improvement: “Twitter mentions by a photojournalist”? No. Asking who did what makes it easy to see how the sentence might be made clearer:
The Texas Republican was accused by social media users of a “performative tantrum” at the hearing after he ignored repeated requests from senator Dick Durbin, the chair of Senate Judiciary Committee, to stop speaking after his allotted time.
A photojournalist caught Senator Ted Cruz checking his phone for Twitter mentions after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.If “his phone” leaves any ambiguity about whose phone, the sentence could go this way:
A photojournalist caught Senator Ted Cruz checking for Twitter mentions after a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday.The sentences that follow make clear that the junior senator was using his (own) phone.
The article’s headline is a reminder that performative has become what Fowler’s Modern English Usage would call a “worsened word,” once neutral or commendatory but now pejorative.
[The Independent has used three spellings: photo-journalist, photojournalist, and most recently, photo journalist. I’ve used photojournalist, which is overwhelmingly more frequent in both British and American English.]
comments: 3
My wife, also a Grammer Snob, would agree with your re-write but I do not. Even though I'm a television picture editor and not a print news editor I know why the first sentence was structured that way and I'm sure you do too. Although the language is imprecise it tells the political story better by leading with that jackasses name.
Don’t mistake me for your wife — I’m not a grammar snob. (I find fault with public prose only — print, television, and radio.) I do like clarity, and the momentary glitch in reading that comes with “Twitter mentions by a photojournalist” is, for me, reason enough to rewrite the sentence. My wife stumbled in the same place when reading.
And notice that the headline already leads with the junior senator’s name.
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