Bored of it, tired with it

" . . . . See if you can make your audience duck when something flies out the screen. You can do that once or twice but after that, the audience gets bored of it". Those comments on 3D film are attributed (in The Big Issue) to Sir David Attenborough. I can't believe it. It looks as if some hack writer has felt that Sir David's statements need to be paraphrased into deliberately sloppy English - a form, perhaps, of 'popularisation'.

'Flies out the screen' has perhaps a north American twang that makes 'flies out of the screen' seem pedantic. 'Bored of it' is a not uncommon confusion between 'tired of it' (that's standard idiom) and 'bored with it'.

And the placing of a comma in the second sentence in the Attenborough 'quote' above cannot be right: it should be pushed back to after the word 'twice'.

This is editorial dereliction of duty. Don't tell us that The Big Issue's readers prefer this travesty of Sir David's style. Surely a high proportion of its readers must wince at it. Don't tell me either that any of The Big Issue's readers or contributors would find correct punctuation and standard idiom too difficult to follow, or too boring. All right, many perhaps would not notice the difference, or would just accept the solecisms as unfortunate misprints. But they could so easily have been edited out.*

Incidentally I buy The Big Issue regularly myself. I think it's an excellent idea, and wish it and its friendly vendors every success. But at £2.50 a copy it needs to pull its editorial socks up.

* This not a campaign against lively writing; it's just to say that lively writing can be technically correct. Think of writers like Mark Twain and Bill Bryson.

Bored of it, tired with it