fun with commas

[Victor Steinbok]

An editor at Yahoo is going to have a headache for a while.

http://goo.gl/iT3ls
Divorcing Death Cab, Taking up with Cutie. By Forrest Wickman. Thursday,
April 12, 2012, at 6:08 PM ET
> In what could only have been a failure in reading comprehension, or
> the work of an overactive copy editor, Yahoo has just posted an
> article suggesting that actress Zooey Deschanel left her husband
> "Death Cab" for "Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard."
> While there's no word on whether Deschanel had been cheating on Mr.
> Cab, the article goes on to note that "Deschanel and Cab were married
> for a little more than three years."

Of course, Gibbard is the lead for the band "Death Cab for Cutie" an
he's the one who got divorced from Deschanel. Although Wickman makes it
look as if extraneous quotation marks were involved, that's not what
happened.

The Yahoo story has now been fixed:

> Deschanel filed for divorce from husband and Death Cab for Cutie
> frontman Ben Gibbard in January. Deschanel and Gibbard were married
> for a little more than three years, and Deschanel said that, along
> with babies, dating was not a priority either.

The original looked quite different because of a stray comma.

> Deschanel filed for divorce from husband and Death Cab, for Cutie
> frontman Ben Gibbard in January. Deschanel and Cab were married for a
> little more than three years, and Deschanel said that, along with
> babies, dating was not a priority either.

It's one thing to change the legal meaning of a contract based on
placement of a comma. This is something entirely different.

     VS-)

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