{"id":632,"date":"2010-02-10T17:09:18","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T22:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=632"},"modified":"2010-02-10T17:09:18","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T22:09:18","slug":"air-force-steals-song-maybe-parentheses-are-abused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=632","title":{"rendered":"Air Force Steals Song (maybe); Parentheses Are Abused"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>NOTICE: Boring post follows. But don&#8217;t get too bored. <a href=\"http:\/\/my.earthlink.net\/article\/hea?guid=20100210\/03572e17-0910-4a7a-878b-18888aad9325\">It&#8217;s bad for your health<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The White Stripes claim that their song was stolen and used in the Air Force ad shown during the Superbowl.<\/p>\n<p>Ok. I don&#8217;t want to talk about it here (<a href=\"http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/yesemll\">but let me Google that for you<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Which makes me wonder: Should the verb &#8220;to Google&#8221; be lowercase? Someday the answer will be yes, but I don&#8217;t know whether we&#8217;re there yet.<br \/>\n&#8212;&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>Believe it or not, the paragraphs above are specifically designed to show poor usage. Amazingly deft on my part, yes? Here&#8217;s what I did: I put something in parentheses, then referred to it outside the parentheses as if it were a regular part of the paragraph.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that stuff in parentheses should be completely removable. If you take out the parenthetical content only to find that your work no longer makes sense, then something&#8217;s gone wrong.<\/p>\n<p>An example from the wild is the following paragraph about the ad controversy (<a href=\"http:\/\/rock.about.com\/b\/2010\/02\/09\/the-white-stripes-accuse-air-force-of-stealing-their-music-for-super-bowl-ad.htm\">from here<\/a>):<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;<br \/>\nOn the band&#8217;s homepage&#8230; users can compare the two songs. (Since last night, the Air Force has removed the commercial from its page.) But I saw the commercial and there are clear similarities between the two guitar tracks. In fact, if you weren&#8217;t paying close attention you&#8217;d swear that the Air Force commercial is actually using the original White Stripes song.&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>Go forth and sin no more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NOTICE: Boring post follows. But don&#8217;t get too bored. It&#8217;s bad for your health. The White Stripes claim that their song was stolen and used in the Air Force ad shown during the Superbowl. Ok. I don&#8217;t want to talk about it here (but let me Google that for you). Which makes me wonder: Should [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}