Bad Sentence of the Week

Last week's winner was #6, which drew 7 votes compared to votes to 5 each for second place #7 and #8.

6.) "If she feels her day has been overtaken with work, she'll tip back the balance by physically putting herself with her kids."


It was tough limiting the nominees to just ten finalists this week. Good work readers.

1.) “Jason Kemper - who still hasn’t had fast food since the beginning of the challenge, and says he’s been alternating between alcohol and water when he goes out) was the the only guy in the room -- As Shakira blasted from the speakers, his hips didn’t lie with the rest of them.

( This could win on bad punctuation alone. For bonus points, consider the “lie” Jason’s hips are not telling “with the rest of them“ )

2. ) "I didn't even feel like I have to dip it in loads of tartar sauce for it to be edible, as sometimes happens to me with fish."

(I like the image of fish dipping the writer in loads of tartar sauce to make her edible. That recalls W.C. Fields writing about children and mustard. This is superior work for Juice. Unless that's not what the writer meant… I'm picturing a great 1940's vintage cartoon with a semi anthropomorphic fish dipping her in a very supermarket style jar of tartar sauce… When Percival Blakeney, Esq., mocked both the French revolution and French fashion, he said to M. Chauvelin, his personal and political bete noir, "so much, it would seem, for French politics, and French fashion." I can only say to the sentence above: so much, it would seem, for Ms. Foley's culinary aesthetics, and her grammar.)

3. ) "It's a perfect spot to entertain or bring a group of people."

(Raising the question, a group of WHAT does she bring when entertaining?)

4.) "My boyfriend loved his burger, and I loved that he got onion rings (a specialty at B&B) and shared a few with me."

( Parentheses are used to include information that is NOT relevant to the main subject. Their use here shows what we long suspected about these restaurant reviews - the restaurants are never the main subject, the self-centered writer IS…. We all know the rule: calories don't count if you eat off someone else's plate, out of the container in the car on the way home, free samples, etc. This is a great health article. Makes me want to go out and eat butter on astick.)

5. ) “On my latest visit, I grabbed dinner, and a hefty,calorie-laden one at that.”

(I hate hefty meals that have zero calories, at that.)

6. ) " Both feature a caf and market plentiful with organic, locally grown and healthy food choices"

(First, caf is a noun I didn't know. Café I know, but this was not atypo, or if it was, it was repeated later in the paragraph, and you knowtwice is too much. Also, it may be perfectly acceptable, but I would not use "plentiful with" in that manner. Call me a nitpicker.)

7A and 7 B) " I loaded up a spinach salad with my favorite toppings and fixed a side plate with cottage cheese, fruit and my guilty pleasure: pickled beets. They have pudding, Jell-O and pie for dessert if you are craving something sweet."

( First, why are pickled beets a "guilty" pleasure? Are theypickled in foie gras? Also, note the heading of THIS entry is "healthy",and under THAT rubric, she mentions pudding, Jell-o, and pie. Burp.)

8. "The massive burger was just worth seeing, and it was delicious kind of like a Big Mack on steroids."

(A very lost comma here… Let me suggest that you cannot say delicious and then compare it to a Big Mac (no K on that, spell checkers) in an article about “healthy“ eating. Contrast only, por favor, si?… This sentence offends us with the writer’s values and aesthetics, rather than her actual writing. So naturally, her editor assigns her to food criticism.)

9.) “Tumea & Sons is an institution to south-siders, but somehow isn'twell known to others (it can be tricky to find - you may want to do aGoogle Maps search).”

(Um, well. we could try Google maps. Or you COULD remember you work for a print newspaper (for the moment), not just the online version, and presume some readers may prefer to acquire their information there, and just frigging tell us how to get there, Admiral Perry.)

10. ) “Allen also noted that the Guinness Safe Ride will be giving partiers free rides home all day."

(I'm all for safe rides, but "partiers"? Not partyers, or better yet,party attendees or party-goers? Alors, c'est ca. Partiers. J'entende…. Macabre imagery, the bus removing dead bodies (partiers) and dispatching them to the next world.)

Worst Sentence of the Week

A group of journlists and educators in Iowa have been holding a regular contest to name the worst sentence of the week. Eligible sentences must have actually appeared in a major newspaper or magazine that week. Most nominees each week are from the Des Moines Register's publications. Interest in the contest keeps growing, so we decided to post the nominees and, later, the winners each week. It's our belief that really bad writing is entertaining, like say the movies of Ed Wood.

this weeks nominees -

Patience paid off, last week’s offerings were so limited we held them over a week. They joined several strong candidates for the award this week. Try to vote for just one: (Nominators’ comments in parentheses)

1. ) "His new menu combines both cuisines, meaning you can choose between spaghetti and meatballs or sizzling fajitas, though you won't find them fused together." (As opposed to "fused apart" one presumes. No wonder it's taking so many decades to create fusion power. I wonder, is there fission cuisine.)

2.) "The French-country decor was very ornate and plentiful.” (In general, I love plentiful decor. you know, like those 6 or 7 thousandthrow pillows Matt and Sherry put on every bed in that HGTV show.)

3.) "Perhaps the band's rapid success can be credited to their philosophy: Play in front of as many people as possible." (Another one that Yogi could have authored. )

4.) "When Dylan was born, he peed all over the place, like a healthy baby with healthy kidneys." (More confusion between simile and metaphor.. So, tell us, what illnesses does this baby have, and what kidney ailments.. Because if he's peeing LIKE a healthy etc. rather than AS a healthy etc., we know that implies a DIFFERENCE, thus, a comparison. And believe me, this breaks me just like a woman.)

5.) "Unless you've got a gaggle of nannies, ahem, Angelina Jolie, there's no such thing as a simple outing when you have a toddler - or three- in tow." (Ahem? Okay, ahem. Like, why are we implying whatever the 'ahem' is implying? Is the fact that Angelina is rich and can afford nannies something embarrassing to her? Does it diminish the fact she adopts third world (so called) babies? Like compared to all the other hugely rich people who do NOT? Ahem.)

6.) "If she feels her day has been overtaken with work, she'll tip back the balance by physically putting herself with her kids." (This may be the worst syntax since--since--since the last article Bri wrote. Nothing else compares. The day is "overtaken" with work, not overwhelmed, overtaken. And there's "the day" at the post, and a nose behind is "work" and now "work" has overtaken "the day" at the finish line…“physically putting herself with her kids” ??? but mentally, she's putting herself with brad pitt?)

7.) "These moms agree a few tactics make their lives easier: planning meals in advance, shopping for diaper bags and cribs on Craig's list, and active husbands." (Planning meals in advance is some idea, huh? Might catch on. Who'd think of THAT? Craig's list. That's as clever as my mother's generation using the want ads. Wow. And yeah, “active husbands” - that one‘s confusing because “tactics” require action, not adjectives, so this is another misuse of an adjective as a verb. Does she mean “giving Activa to husbands?”)

8.) "Motherhood doesn't always make the headlines as a sexy subject - unless the story is about Salma Hayek breast feeding a stranger's baby, but in a metro like Des Moines , where roughly 30,000 women aged 25-34 are mothers, it seems like all types of moms - natural living moms, hip mamas (like Steve Bosman, 26, pictured here with her son Hayden, 6), stay-at-home moms, working moms, progressive and traditional moms - are talking about what it takes to raise children. (That sentence took my breath away…. Just wondering, does the writer really think that she needs all those words… This is breathtaking… I think Bri had too many Tangermeisters while writing this. What‘s the editor‘s excuse?)

9.) "Taki is a classy yet laid-back Japanese steakhouse best known forsushi..." (I am becoming like a moth to the flame regarding Juicers' compulsive use of incorrect, especially negating,conjunctions. This implies that being "classy" is in some sense an interdiction to being "laid-back". This will come as something of a surprise to George Clooney, Fred Astaire or Bing Crosby.)

10.) "It definitely doesn't feel like a bar, and it's not, but you cantaste, tour and buy wine by the glass - which felt a little bit like anafter-work field trip." (I'm very old and out of touch with the fun today, what the hell, what the HELL, is an after-work field trip?