Monday, July 12, 2010

Blah Blah Blah

Today, while I was caught in my routine of starting out on a totally legitimate website like pcmagazine.com and somehow, through the magic of associated links, ending up on strange and not entirely truthful websites with questionable English composition skills.
I had actually read the first paragraph or two without noticing blatant grammar errors and flowery prose (obviously not an American tendency) and was only briefly confused by the correlation between average esophagus size and sexual facts (this is so going to hit on Google's porn keyword list, isn't it?) until I hit a statement that was so bizarre considering the article content and average English grammar that I actually stopped to consider it.
"It is not the adults but infants dream more time."

What are we saying here?  That infants dream more than adults...(and hopefully not about sex?!)Does this include Stage 3 and 4 sleep (nightmares,) which is also when you're more likely to sleepwalk/sleeptalk, or just REM sleep?  (You are more likely to hallucinate if deprived of REM sleep, which I find fascinating as well as hilarious.

At this point I scrolled back up to the top of the page to discover what the hell I was reading that, up to that sentence, had been at least reasonably comprehensible and mostly on topic.  I then wondered if the article was as questionable in the other four languages or if the English version just had a third-rate translator.  Do they bash the sperm-counts of men of other nationalities in the other translations?

But honestly, where did they get this information?  It's like trying the pickup tips in Maxim and expecting it to be, you know, helpful, when the magazine is written and edited by a bunch of guys with as low a pickup-line success rate as you.  (Who reads Maxim, anyway?  I always see it at the store but never see anyone buying any...Actually, I never see guys buying magazines at all.)

It seems that yellow journalism is on the rise again with blatant errors in fact-checking (or total lack thereof...) and sensationalist stories, and the exaggerating of random coincidences to sell papers (or get site hits, or feed subscribers, or what have you.)

StatCounter