Assorted Afflatuses

I have long known that Parade - a supplemental pseudo-magazine that graces in the insides of many Sunday papers in the United States - does not distinguish itself with the kind of writing contained in the pages of its competitors, such as the New York Times Magazine. However, I did not realize how strange it was until earlier this evening.

I picked up the 19 November issue of Parade as I was munching on a cinnamon roll. After the celeb-gossip section and an article chronicling the technological phobias of some famous faces, I stumbled upon an article about high-tech cooking tools with a sentence that made me scratch my head. The sentence reads, "Everything from ovens to refrigerators is getting smarter." At first, I thought that the author of the article incorrectly chose to use "is," rather than "are," in the sentence. But upon further examination I realized that the author had mutated "to be" correctly. Still, it would have made the sentence clearer if the author had inserted some hyphens so that the sentence read like this: "Everything - from ovens to refrigerators - is getting smarter." Otherwise, it seems like the sentence should use "are," as in: "Ovens and refrigerators are getting smarter."

Most of the other writing, while clearly not written for the most astute audience, did not baffle me like that article on page 8. However, when I finished rifling through Parade and flipped it over, revealing the cover, I saw something else that struck me as strange. The cover has a blurb reading, "An easy guide to keeping it simple." I don't see why the author choose not to write, "A guide to keeping it simple" instead. The word "simple" implies that the activity is not terribly complicated, so, assuming that simple activities require simple instructions, the guide must be easy to understand.

I stopped looking for writing anomalies after finding the one on the cover, though I am inclined to think that if I had continued looking, I would have found more. I cannot believe that a nationally syndicated magazine has such strange sentences contained within its pages, especially in giant, 48 point type.