Come again? – Holy Fucking Shit You're Dumb!
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Come again?

Ok, so this isn’t so much a stupid news story as it is a stupid headline.  Or rather, it *might* be a stupid news story, I’m sort of unclear on that as well, since even after reading it, neither it nor the headline make a ton of sense to me.

Just in case it gets changed at some point, here’s the headline as I see it right now:  “U.S. Treasury asking banks keep quiet on tests:  source“  I’ve tried parsing it several different ways, and the best I can come up with is that a certain unamed source is saying that the U.S. Treasury is asking banks to keep quiet about some tests.  The article seems to bear that translation out.

How awful is that writing, though?  Come on Reuters, I know the whole print news industry is getting the shit kicked out of them currently by the fact that nobody wants to go out to the driveway in the cold every morning to pick up a soggy pile of day old news anymore, but can’t you find people who can write better than that?  I’m not even sure you can punctuate that properly to make it read well.  But I can think of several better ways to phrase it right off the top of my head.  But screw Reuters if they think I’m going to edit their shit for free.

Edit:  Apparently, as I was in the process of writing this entry, Reuters changed the headline.  It now reads “U.S. Treasury asking banks keep quiet on stress tests” which is still bad, but not as English-as-a-second-language bad as the original.

Posted in In The News.