[Ads-l] A new(?) habit of journalistic preposition dropping

[Stanton McCandlish]

Two bits in the American news leapt out at me recently (both from *WashPost*
incidentally):

* A headline: "Americans will find voting easier — or harder — depending
where they live". — Patrick Marley; *The Washington Post;* "Politics:
Democracy in America" column; 2024-04-08;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/08/voting-laws-swing-states-2024
* A sub-headline within an article: "Dorsey bolted Bluesky when he realized
it had failed to escape that responsibility after all." — Will Oremus; "Why
Jack Dorsey gave up on Bluesky"; *The Washington Post*; "The Technology
202" column; 2024-05-14;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/14/why-jack-dorsey-gave-up-bluesky/

In both cases, a conventional preposition has been dropped, resulting in
text that for me required having to momentarily stop and re-parse the
sentence (which is not something a journalist or their publisher wants to
happen – that's a break-point at which a reader may click away to something
else).

The more conventional ways to phrase these things would be "depending *on*
where they live" (or "depending *upon* where they live" if someone wanted
to sound more formal), and "Dorsey bolted *from* Bluesky".

The parsing problem is that both *to depend* and *to bolt* have alternative
meanings than the ones intended by the writers, and the intended ones are
at least a bit obscured by the loss of their prepositions.

I'm not certain if this "anti-preposition" behavior is a regionalism or a
subcultural thing (perhaps tied to an age group). They might even be
distinct cases, e.g. the former a regionalism and the latter slangish.  Since
both were headlines or headings, it's also possible they're just
"headlinese" compression. Either being an outright typo isn't off the
table, either; in both cases, it's how my brain first interpreted them.
*WashPost* in particular has had an untoward number of blatant typos in it
over the last several years, probably as a result of allowing newswriters
to push content to the live website and email feeds with less than the
former level of editorial oversight, in an effort to keep up with
accelerated Internet news cycles.

PS: The first of these examples is also weird in using spaced em dashes as
parenthetical punctuation. According to the bulk of my style guide
collection, either unspaced em dashes, or spaced en dashes are are used for
this purpose, but the two styles don't mix. I'm not sure if this is a weird
house-style habit of *WashPost*, or just an error by a particular writer or
editor.

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