I tend to pick on The Seattle Times, but I find it justifiable given that the paper truly is terrible.
Today’s review of the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 mobile device started with this sentence:
Unlike movies, where a sequel can be a huge flop, the latest version of the Sidekick could be a blockbuster.What the hell does that mean? The sentence starts out with the general (movies) and ends with the specific (the Sidekick). But even if the scale of the comparison were evened up, it still wouldn’t make sense.
Unlike movies, where a sequel can be a huge flop, mobile devices can be blockbusters.Nope. Both movie sequels and new versions of technological devices can be flops.
Unlike Basic Instinct 2, which was a huge movie sequel flop, the Sidekick can be a huge blockbuster.That doesn’t cut it either.
The comparison is simply ill-conceived and useless, but the real problem is verb tense. The article is a review of an existing device that has been tested and evaluated, yet the first phrase is about movies and it refers to their potential using a modal auxiliary verb (“can”). The second phrase is about the Sidekick and is in the conditional (it “could be a blockbuster”). Is the review telling me what the product is like (i.e. what a review is supposed to do) or whether or not it thinks it might sell successfully?
It’s amazing what a mess can be made with just twenty words.
