I made fun the other day of an absurdly bloated lead-in to a year-end retrospective on the editorial page of the Star Tribune newspaper:
As we travel through life, buffeted by internal and external forces, sometimes we reach a fork in the road, and new thinking emerges. . . .
Yech. The whole buffeting business is overwrought. And the fork in the road--one wishes the buffeting wind could have blown away such a stale metaphor but I guess not. There is nothing for your local community college composition teacher to like here.
Saturday, a Star Tribune editorial called forth by the end of Pawlenty's time as governor included this observation:
But more than any of his recent predecessors, this governor seemed disinterested in forging bipartisan compromise. . . .
If you know the difference between "disinterested" (a synonym for "impartial") and "uninterested" (which means something close to "bored"), then you are ahead of the team of writers and editors responsible for one insipid editorial after another. This particular one on Pawlenty appears to have been written by someone who hates him and then edited by someone who doesn't. That will never work.
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