Case 22: Is it to much too ask?

Filed by: Officer Taylor

The Offence

Here at the SAGP, we are gradually becoming aware that criticising the writing in sports reports is not dissimilar to shooting fish in a barrel. Any minute now, we're going to go on a five-case fast from football reports. But just before we do that, here is an absolute beauty, once again from our old friend the Guardian^[1].

It's in a report on an argument between Aston Villa manager Graham Taylor and a fan of the team:

Taylor explained: ``I'm not to keen on people sitting three or four yards from me and using that kind of language.''
[...]
Taylor added: ``This is one of the teams that everyone is giving the championship title too.''

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

The Verdict

It's a bit of a tragedy that we even have to do this, but here goes.

• ``to'' is a preposition. You give things to people.
• ``too'' is an adverb: an intensifier that makes the adjective it modifies stronger. It's too bad when people get this wrong.

• ``two'' is a number between one and three. The Guardian report that we're criticising here contains two mistakes.

What Graham Taylor actually said, then - and what the reporter should have written - is:

Taylor explained: ``I'm not too keen on people sitting three or four yards from me and using that kind of language.''
[...]
Taylor added: ``This is one of the teams that everyone is giving the championship title to.''

The Sentence

To make one of these mistakes might be considered unfortunate - especially as an automated spell-checker won't help with this. But to make both, equal and opposite, mistakes in the space of a few paragraphs looks like carelessness.

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: no amount of deadline pressure is excuse enough to overlook such basic proofreading. Accordingly, we sentence the reporter to have his toes cut off so that he keeps falling over whenever he tries to walk anywhere.

Next case!

Notes

[1]

We realise that we pick on the Guardian a lot. That's not really fair: it's largely because their web-site is the best offering from among the four big British broadsheet newspapers. It's perfectly possible that the Times, Telegraph and Independent are equally guilty: for fortunately for them, their language deficiencies are hidden from the SAGP by the difficulty of navigating their sites. [back]