{"id":2121,"date":"2004-05-18T16:13:52","date_gmt":"2004-05-18T21:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2004\/05\/18\/desert-desert-dessert\/"},"modified":"2022-02-15T12:39:32","modified_gmt":"2022-02-15T18:39:32","slug":"desert-desert-dessert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2004\/05\/18\/desert-desert-dessert\/","title":{"rendered":"Desert Desert Dessert"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Jasmine and I were debating about whether to post about the misspelled word in a front-page headline in today&#8217;s issue of the <acronym title=\"Midland Reporter-Telegram\">MRT<\/acronym>. I haven&#8217;t checked to see if the offending headline made it onto the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mywesttexas.com\">website<\/a>, but knowing Jeff McDonald, I&#8217;m sure it was corrected before it went online.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jasmine is an educator and her profession is devoted to attempting to ensure that such things don&#8217;t occur, so her natural inclination is to make a fuss about it&#8230;and rightly so, from that perspective. I tend to be more sanguine about the situation, being a longtime practitioner of the art of making widely-viewable mistakes. It&#8217;s not that I condone lax proofreading or whatever flaws in the editorial oversight process that allow such things to happen on a mystifyingly regular basis, but I no longer get a thrill out of pointing out such obvious mistakes.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I guess I&#8217;m all too aware of my own shortcomings in this general area. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, I&#8217;m a pretty good speller, and I could probably score about 90 in the grammar category, but I&#8217;m a total goof when it comes to things like punctuation (to name but one example). I realize that my approach to punctuation is akin to dropping a handful of bee-bees on a tile floor; I just throw &#8217;em out there and hope they land in spots that approximate the same placement that Mrs. Buster, my 5th grade English teacher, would have used. I&#8217;m sure I fail miserably most of the time. In particular, the <a href=\"http:\/\/webster.commnet.edu\/grammar\/marks\/ellipsis.htm\">elipsis<\/a> is my downfall&#8230;I use it all the time, but rarely correctly, I suspect. It just seems so&#8230;well&#8230;so doggone handy&#8230;you know?<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, for those reasons Jasmine and I agreed that it would be inappropriate to post anything about the headline typo. So, you won&#8217;t see such a post here. Nosireebob.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[By the way&#8230;speaking of grammar and spelling and the other black arts of the occult, is the subject of this post a complete sentence? I contend that it would be, with the addition of one bit of punctuation. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. And here&#8217;s a hint. The subject line <em>could<\/em> be a legitimate follow-on to this:<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>&#8220;Regardless of the fact that its sweetness has served you well in its capacity as a coda to your wilderness dining experiences, you are hereby directed to abandon it forthwith, leaving it to its own devices in a means that might appear to some as ruthless and, perhaps, even illegal&#8230;but these judgments are meaningless to such as us, are they not?&#8221;<\/em>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jasmine and I were debating about whether to post about the misspelled word in a front-page headline in today&#8217;s issue of the MRT. I haven&#8217;t checked to see if the offending headline made it onto the website, but knowing Jeff McDonald, I&#8217;m sure it was corrected before it went online. Jasmine is an educator and&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2004\/05\/18\/desert-desert-dessert\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Desert Desert Dessert<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-writing","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7390,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions\/7390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}