A laugh ... sort of

A little vacation, a busy time at work, and before you know it, a month has gone by. So I thought I'd ease my way back into the blog world with a marvelous example of fractured English I found this morning. A local school official was talking about the caliber of students who are attending a new science and technology-related school. As he put it, "There's some evidence to suggest there that we weren't creaming off the crop." (Italics mine)

Could the good administrator mean that the school isn't attracting the cream of the crop? I think so, but it might have been best for him to say so.

Earlier this week, my eye was drawn to a communicators' Web site on which the subhead for a story mentioned a contributor's "pension for anger." I didn't know pensions were available for unattractive states of mind. I'm happy to say that the next day, the headline had been rewritten with the offending word--pension--replaced with penchant, which serves the purpose much better.