Enjoy this article in The Washington Post, which could’ve ended much earlier than the writers ended it.
An 18-year-old student was arrested at a D.C. school yesterday for allegedly robbing a Metro passenger of an iPod, an expensive music-playing device that has become a pop-culture icon, a Metro spokesman said.
That should be enough to tell readers that Metro riders should keep their belongings close or whatever lesson one wants to take from that. Since it needs to fill more newspaper space, we’re treated to other iPod descriptions. Consider:
The electronic devices, which let people carry thousands of songs with them and listen to them through earphones, are about the size of a pack of cigarettes and have rapidly replaced the older portable Walkman-style stereos as the entertainment device of choice. Many people use them to alleviate the boredom of trips on crowded subway trains and the perceived tedium of many other activities.
……the rectangular metallic device…
I appreciate that the writers can form multi-syllabic groupings of symbols uniformly accepted to represent phonetic pronunciation, which, when grouped in a recognized manner, imply meanings to the otherwise arbitrary sounds. I prefer to call them words. And any decent editor should’ve crossed all that crap out, replacing it with something more familiar, like maybe “iPod.” But I could just have an exceptional understanding of what an iPod is and why people use it. I’m not jealous that both of the writers involved got paid like times infinity more than I did for these multi-syllabic groupings of symbols uniformly accepted to represent phonetic pronunciation, which, when grouped in a recognized manner, imply meanings to the otherwise arbitrary sounds words.
hahahahahahahaha