A Pedantic Whinge

I support The Big Issue and buy it regularly, but at times I wish its editor could see that part (at least) of his role might be to eliminate some of the clumsy or sheer bad English that distinguish its pages from other weekly publications (not that I don't have a go at The Week pretty regularly, too). I realise that some contributors are in a sense 'beginners'; but others appear to be more experienced writers. Apparently attributed to Sir David Attenborough (a few weeks ago) are the sentences "The temptation [in 3D filming]. . . is to 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". Two offences in that passage: first, 'flies out the screen' is sloppy; secondly, 'gets bored of it' is sloppier. 'Tired of it' is the standard idiom.

A Pedantic Whinge