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Felix Salmon regularly skewers Ben Stein's incoherence in each week's New York Times. (For the record, Stein's the one who appears in the NYT, Felix writes on his blog). This week, Felix finds this sentence:

They walk in rows of three, each on a cellphone, not even talking to the people next to her.

You truly do not want to know the context. What caught Felix's eye is that, up until that point, no female had been referenced. The "next to her" just appeared out of nowhere, which leads Felix to conclude that no one at the Times bothers to read his columns.

My take is that there was a previous sentence that had been edited out which had referred to the female, and the following sentence hadn't been fixed. I have to think that the reason for the deletion and the female reference are related, but I could be wrong.

Posted by edelfenbein at August 25, 2008 9:50 AM