Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Checkout stand language police

I was at Fry's yesterday and saw this magazine cover:


Besides the unnaturally bright whites of Angelina's eyes, what is wrong with this picture, linguistically speaking?

My friends, am I right or am I right: you cannot battle an adjective. It's like the big headline in yellow just walks right off a cliff - the end of it is completely missing. "Doctors fear that Angelina is now battling post-partum depression" - I'm pretty sure that's what they want us to infer. But why leave the crucial noun out of the headline? As it stands, all we can be sure of is that Angelina is battling post-partum-ness, which hasn't been news for about two months since she, you know, had her babies (post-partum is Latin for "after birth").

Does this kind of thing bother anyone else? Or is it shameful that of all things, I'm starting to get anxious when checkout stand tabloids make grammatical errors? Some days I'm afraid I'm even worse than Ken Jennings.

Under the guise of historicity

Flashback Friday: The Biggest Zit Ever