east village idiot

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amNY Watch: Speaking in Tongues

I could touch on the fact that amNewYork seems to be taking a vacation; today’s issue was a pathetic 32 pages - about 30% smaller than usual. But instead, take a look at this gem of a punctuation job on page 7.

amnycrap72.JPG

I have yet to determine just what that character is at the end, but it doesn’t look like it was supposed to be there. The quote is in giant block letters at the top of the page. How do you miss a mistake like that?

Then again, Bush could be speaking in some secret code.

UPDATE: Thanks to my commenters, I’ve learned that it is a German letter called an eszett. That still doesn’t explain how it ended up in amNewYork, of course.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 10:27 am and is filed under amNY Watch. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “amNY Watch: Speaking in Tongues”

  1. December 27th, 2007 at 11:17 am

    BNY says:

    I was going to say … if that is a quote from Bush, there is just no telling. Whenever grammar/spelling/punctuation are called into question regarding any articles in which Bush is quoted, it is not unlikely that amNY has quoted him verbatum. But he’s just the President of the U.S. His ability - or lackthereof - to speak what is socially-accepted as correct English should not be a significant determining factor of how well he can run an entire nation.

  2. December 27th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

    ariel says:

    It’s called an ess-zett, I think. It’s a German letter. I don’t know if it has any printing significance, but then, it’s amNY and it is doubtful if they would understand it even if it *was* a printing character.

  3. December 27th, 2007 at 1:15 pm

    E_in_NYC says:

    The character is a scharfes s (”sharp s”) typically replaced by “ss” when you don’t have the character available in German.

    Not that it helps with why it is there, mind.

  4. December 27th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

    Meaghan says:

    also known as an ’s-set’ at least according to my German teacher in high school.

  5. December 27th, 2007 at 1:50 pm

    Janine says:

    If you think AM NY is bad, my hometown newspaper (that would be the Rockland Journal News) actually ran a story on Dec. 26 about a family who exchanges gag gifts.

  6. December 27th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

    Meaghan says:

    the lead story (as in, front page with a big headline and a page-dominating graphic) on Christmas Day in the Poughkeepsie Journal was “Stars in the Valley.” You guessed it; it was a list of people who are famous who live in the hudson valley, with their corresponding towns. The graphic was basically a star map of dutchess, ulster, and columbia counties.

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