This is what happens when you don’t have Tivo. You see something interesting on the television, grab your camera and snap a pic of it. Then, because you get busy with other things, you find some odd image on your camera two months later, and wonder why you took this picture. Here’s what I found:

It took me a while to remember why I took this, until I looked closely. See that comma? The one with the big red arrow pointing at it? Yeah, that one. You know what? It’s completely unnecessary. Or as CNN might put it—it’s completely, unnecessary.

Now, this wouldn’t bug me normally. I mean, everyone makes a mistake in grammar or usage every once in a while. But before you accuse me of being an irritating pedant about such manners, there are three things about this that really makes this intolerable.

First, this is CNN. This isn’t your average small town newspaper with only three staff members (including the receptionist). Surely there is somebody there who checks things before they appear on screen.

Second, these people are journalists. They spent four or five years studying journalism in college, and they make their living using the English language. This lapse in punctuation just shouldn’t happen.

Third—and this is really what makes such errors so egregious—these sort of errors happen all the time on CNN and their sister network HLN, where I just read the other day about soldiers going into “batle.”

In this day and age when people, especially young people, are becoming less and less literate (and if you don’t believe me when I say that, C U L8R), I would hope that our journalists would take the lead in defending appropriate use of the English language. I don’t mean that they need to pop it under a bell jar or seal it up like the Declaration of Independence at the National Archive. Language needs space and air, or it becomes dull and stagnant. I wish they would just know how to spell common words and know when and when not to use a comma. After all, their jobs depend upon a literate populace. But maybe that’s why journalism in general, and newspapers specifically, are in such dire straits.

For a similar rant, check here.