More questionable grammar from the Pelham remake's ad campaign:
They could have split this into two sentences. They could have used a colon, an em-dash, or even the adman's friend, the old dot-dot-dot... But no: they had to use a comma, just about the only punctuation mark that's just dead wrong in this context.
In fact as far as I can see, the only sense this sentence could possibly make (if you pretended the punctuation was fully intentional*) would be that John Travolta's character is telling somebody that life is simple, and the person he's addressing is a Native American named for his bossy behavior. Life is simple, You Just Have To Do What I Say.† (Oh, is it? Tell me more, Arrogant When Interviewed in Spite of Current Career's Being Based Pretty Much Exclusively on What Amounted to Stunt-Casting on the Part of Quentin Tarantino in the Nineties.‡)
* You could argue that an action is not properly intentional if the actor has no idea what he's doing: e.g., would you say that someone "committed suicide" if he lit a match in a pitch-black room to see where he was, only to find that—whoops!—he was in a room full of dynamite?1 (That happens all the time. And yes it's analogous!)
† Here's a grammar-sluts question for yez, to which I don't know the answer and which I'm not going to research at the moment: generally you wouldn't capitalize the T in the word to in a name or title (unless it were the first or last word of a name, title, or sentence), but isn't that because it's a preposition?—which in this case it is not? Do you capitalize the to in an infinitive? Anyone? My guess is yes, but it looked wrong to me. [UPDATE: The highly functional wino sez, "Always lowercase (except where it begins the title)." Thanks, HFW!]
‡ Arties, for short.
1 Apparently you do call it suicide when someone dies while playing Russian roulette...but that's a little different.a
a Let's take a moment to celebrate my first footnote-to-a-footnote in what seems like quite a long while! And—hey, first footnote-to-a-footnote-to-a-footnote in a while, too! (Almost made that one a footnote-to-a-footnote-to-a-footnote-to-a-footnote. And...whoops, my head's exploded.)
4 comments:
THANK YOU for acknowledging that John Travolta does not deserve the interminable "bonus track" portion of his career that's been going on since Pulp Fiction. The only halfway defensible thing he's done since then (not counting his like 30 seconds in Malick's brilliant The Thin Red Line) is Get Shorty, and even that is something I really have no desire to watch again after enjoying it on VHS with my dad in the late '90s. Ok, there is also Face/Off, but this is neither the time nor the place for a discussion of Face/Off, and anyway the really ripe topics of discussion there have nothing to do with Travolta.
Anyway, good lookin' out, grammar police. Those posters bothered hell out of me too, thought just as much for the inane content of the stale bad-guy dialogue as its bungled form.
I just found this blog and I really like it except please quit it with the goddamn footnotes. It was annoying when DFW did it (sorry, sorry, sorry), so, you know, you're not really going to improve on that. Maybe it's just me but I don't see why people find this an acceptable style quirk.
Brian, I hereby give you permission not to read the footnotes. Skip them in good health.
In the harsh light of not-three-a.m., I see that my comment about the footnotes was very rude. Sorry! The internet is an enabler for my inner asshole. The internet is really the new alcohol in that way, loosening lips (or fingers I guess) and inhibitions.
So yeah, I may not be a fan of footnotes outside the context of academia (or inside it!), but I'm definitely a fan of this blog -- my mind was thoroughly blown by your insight about the "potentially infinite series of 1985s," which I had never thought about despite it seeming so obvious now. I "blogged" it on my own "blog": http://strictlyfromhunger.blogspot.com
Thanks, Brian!
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