More awful HuffPo writing (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

> -
>
> I must have my prescriptivist hat on tonight. Although the actual
title
> of the page is different, the title that shows up in "Most Popular"
> links is "Georgia Man Develops Flesh-Eating Bacteria; Is Third Case In
> Recent Weeks ".
>
> http://goo.gl/dV7Bd
>
> "Develops" is a funny word here. Usually, when I see "develops" in
> similar circumstances, a disease or a set of symptoms follow. One
could
> develop "a case of Flesh-Eating Bacteria". I suppose, a wound might
> develop an infection or even bacteria, but not a person. So we have
two
> options--either it was a screw-up or "flesh-eating bacteria", as a
> lexical unit, is being treated as the name of a disease. I'm actually
> inclined toward the latter, even though it still sounds strange.
>
>

I think it should be read as "develops (a case of) Flesh-Eating
Bacteria", and the convention of dropping clauses, phrases, modifiers,
etc in headline writing is so commonplace that I don't think it is
ungrammatical within that specific context.

Consider "Ford to City: Drop Dead" (NY Daily News, 10/30/1975).  A
grammatical sentence expressing the same thought might go:  "President
Ford said to New York City, "Drop Dead" ".

"President" and "said to" are omitted, and the punctuation specifying
Ford's quote is changed, all in convention with "headlinese". (Even
more, Ford didn't say "Drop Dead".)  What's left is ungrammatical as
"standard" English, yet the headline is so clear and succinct that it
has become a classic of its type.
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org