TWO SMALL GRAMMATICAL SLIPS

 

While reading the article “The people at the center of the war” by Parin Behrooz in The New York Times (April 10), I came across a sentence that contains two very small slips—of the sort that occasionally appear in even the best-edited publications.

The sentence reads:

“That war began with explicit encouragement for Iranians to rise up and ended with U.S. threats to bomb the country back to the ‘Stone Ages’ has not been lost on the people living through it.”

Two details may be noted in passing. First, the familiar English expression is “the Stone Age,” not “the Stone Ages.” Second, the grammatical subject of the sentence is the compound statement introduced by that (“that war began … and ended …”), which would normally take a plural verb: have not been lost rather than has not been lost.

These are, of course, minor points that do not affect the sense of the passage. They simply remind us how demanding careful copy-editing can be. Readers of a certain generation may recall a time when newspaper copy desks were famous for catching precisely such details before publication. In today’s accelerated news cycle, a few tiny slips are perhaps inevitable.

Still, noticing them is a small tribute to the meticulous standards that once formed part of the quiet craft of journalism.