Infinitive Splitter

Working from home today with the television on (a luxury/curse I don’t have in my cubicle), I caught this story on Headline News:

Perky is one tough bird.

The ring-neck duck survived being shot and spending two days in a hunter’s refrigerator — and now she’s had a close brush with death on a veterinarian’s operating table.

The one-pound female duck stopped breathing Saturday during surgery to repair gunshot damage to one wing, said Noni Beck of the Goose Creek Wildlife Sanctuary.

Veterinarian David Hale revived the bird after several tense moments by performing CPR.

“I started crying, ‘She’s alive!”‘ Beck said.

Perky entered the headlines last week after a hunter’s wife opened her refrigerator door and the should’ve-been-dead duck lifted its head and looked at her. The bird had been in the fridge for two days since being shot and presumed killed January 15.

Conspicuously absent from the story is any explanation of the hunter’s (or his wife’s) decision to take a hunted duck to the vet.  Having shot the duck on purpose, and having left its body in a freezer for two days, why did they seek care for it when they discovered that the job had been botched?

Something to do with Jesus, no doubt.

This is a chart of natural-gas costs in my house for the same seven-month period in two consecutive years. You’ll notice that we’re paying about 40 percent less for heat this winter than we paid last winter.

Al Gore can work himself and his hippie friends into a craze if that’s what he wants; me, I’ll just enjoy the 70-degree January Saturdays and hope that, when the world ends, my death will be quick and painless.

(You might think this post would have made more sense two weeks ago, since it’s 26 degrees in Washington today — and feels like 16. But you’d be wrong: tomorrow’s expected high temperature is 53 degrees.)

As everyone knows, it’s perfectly stupid to bet on an outcome whose chance of occurring is 146,107,962 to 1 against.  But surely the calculus changes when the prize is 155 million times the price of the wager, right?

Powerball this Saturday, you guys.

The President of the United States has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal (available to paying subscribers only). He doesn’t say anything new, policy-wise, but here are the two paragraphs that stood out to me:

Our priorities begin with defeating the terrorists who killed thousands of innocent Americans on September 11, 2001 — and who are working hard to attack us again. These terrorists are part of a broader extremist movement that is now doing everything it can to defeat us in Iraq.

I don’t pay a whole lot of attention anymore when the president speaks, so I didn’t realize he was still clinging to the saying-it-without-saying-it game. I should have known better, I suppose.

Here’s the more interesting (to me) section:

But we can and should do more. It’s time Congress give the president a line-item veto. And today I will announce my own proposal to end this dead-of-the-night process and substantially cut the earmarks passed each year.

Emphasis mine. Not so fast, Mr. President. As the BBC’s Roger Woodham notes, it’s customary to “use past tenses to describe things in the present or future that are imagined or unreal” (e.g. “It’s time Congress gave the president a line-item veto”).

Since the president’s own party controlled Congress for six years without giving him a line-item veto, and there’s no reason to think that his opposition will be any more generous, the future success of such a proposal should indeed be described as “imagined or unreal.”

Richard Cohen has successfully snuck another of his oblivious, hypocritical, self-incriminating columns past the editors at the Washington Post.

Today’s bit of outrageousness starts as a reasonable-sounding denunciation of the media’s unfair, sexist treatment of Monica Lewinsky (who recently reemerged in the news because of her successful completion of a master’s program at the London School of Economics). But then come these two paragraphs, one after another, without any hint of irony:

But she is now a woman with a master’s degree from a prestigious school and is going to be 34 come July. Her clock ticks, her life ebbs. Where is the man for her? Where is the guy brave enough, strong enough, admirable enough to take her as his wife, to suffer the slings and arrows of her outrageous fortune — to say to the world (for it would be the entire world) that he loves this woman who will always be an asterisk in American history. I hope there is such a guy out there. It would be nice. It would be fair.

It would be nice, too, and fair, also, if Lewinsky were treated by the media as it would treat a man. What’s astounding is the level of sexism applied to her, as if the wave of the women’s movement broke over a new generation of journalists and not a drop fell on any of them.

Indeed, if only the press’s treatment of her hadn’t been so offensively sexist, she might have found a man “brave” enough to “take her as his wife”!

(Note, of course: “any of them,” not “any of us.”)

Update: FYI:

In American English “snuck” has become increasingly common as the past tense of “sneak.” This is one of many cases in which people’s humorously self-conscious use of dialect has influenced others to adopt it as standard and it is now often seen even in sophisticated writing in the U.S. But it is safer to use the traditional form: “sneaked.”

If you were curious, as I was, now you know.