I'm a reasonably avid sports fan, mostly of football (the original game, not the American one), as well as basketball (mostly women's, particularly women's NCAA). Because of that, my various feeds send me notices of pieces on those topics, and many such pieces have generated a question in my head:
With most sports reportage having moved online, do columns and other pieces get posted as received without copy editing?
This... essay will be different from others in this blog. It starts with an egregious word choice that I noticed in the early-morning hours of 25 June 2026. I will add other such blatant errors as I encounter them.
From a piece on Caitlin Clark and technical fouls (Author: Chirag Radhyan) comes this doozy:
"A sixth technical foul would tighten the vice considerably."
Did you see it? I am wondering which vice was being discussed. Nose-picking? Prostitution? Cursing in church? Gambling?
Do you see it now? If you didn't, were you the copy editor of that piece?
This is vice.
This is a vise.
While similar in spelling, the two words are very different in meaning. At least, the words were different and had different meanings when I was in school. I tested my grammar checker with the above egregious sentence, but it did not even blink, so I suspect that so many English writers make this mistake that it has become acceptable, but my wonderful old-school 11th- and 12th-grade English teacher would roll over in her grave had she seen this. (I am glad you are not having to endure this, Miss Beck.) There were hard-and-fast rules then, but they are going by the wayside, with the best example of such being that "only" may now be placed nearly anywhere in a sentence one wishes, even though all other modifiers still must conform to the rule of placement immediately before the word or phrase the word is modifying.
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