To Err is Yet Another Sign of a Poor Education

I often lament the loss of language skills from one generation to the next, but seldom as often as I do while reading published words in either pulp fiction or the newspaper. Yesterday, however, I had a great belly laugh at the expense of an on-camera news reporter who is often sent to report from the scene of both the ridiculous and the sublime in the desert valley. If it's raining and the water sheens the surface of a side street, poor Phillipe is on the scene building face time while trying to hyperbole his way through a non-event.

The recent report involved a burglary suspect, always correctly referred to a robbery suspect by Phillipe, who ran from the officers on scene. As Phillipe, the on-camera reporter, described the event, "the officer gave chase after the robbery suspect while brandishing a knife."

Props for the use of "brandishing," perhaps one of those pesky weekly vocabulary words we still give to the AP students and which Phillipe brings to his news reporting with alacrity and constancy. However, Phillipe may have been absent during the lesson on misplaced modifiers; hence, his commentary has the officer brandishing a knife while chasing the suspect, rather than the suspect brandishing the knife while trying to evade the officer. Note that Phillipe always uses the word "suspect," never the word "criminal," as others are wont to do.

We can probably make yet another bashing argument for the failure of the educational system to teach misplaced modifiers based on this one example of a TV news reporters' gaffe, but it's just one of those things that happen when we speak the way we should never write.