The New Approach in Uncommunication #nlpoli

There are times when you look at a government news release and just laugh.

Apparently, people who catch fish illegally are now called "abusers."

The gang at fish and wildlife caught a few of these "abusers",  according to the release, and these people are now facing charges related "to illegal poaching."

Okay.


In this instance, "poaching" refers to the act of illegally catching  the fish.  That means there is no such thing as "legal poaching" so, logically, there cannot be any such thing as "illegal poaching."  Poaching *is* illegal.

You know.

By definition.

In the next couple of paragraphs of the release there are some really obvious grammatical mistakes. That means no one edited the thing.

"Officers surveyed the area."  This is a bit like Tom Rideout's famous problem with diverse and divers,  two words that mean the same thing but sound alike even if they are spelled slightly differently.  In this instance,  the writer meant to use the word  "surveilled,"  meaning they looked around or kept the area under surveillance.  What he wrote is that they took measurements to draw a map or used "survey" as in to subject to a close inspection rather than keep a watch on things.

"Also, on Thursday, July 7, officers from the Labrador West detachment stopped a vehicle in the area of Salt Lake, exiting the boat launch, with two male adults inside and conducted an inspection."  This is just all kinds of confused.  An editor would have caught the problem with this sentence and made it plain - for one thing - if the vehicle was "exiting the boat launch" or if it was the officers from the detachment who did so.

What a mess.

-srbp-