We cats recently got on the bad side of a Washington Post reporter, whom we tsk-tsked about his incorrect grammar in an otherwise moving story about a mass-shooting survivor in Oregon.
Being purr-fect, we knew we were in the right to point his error out. But knowing that you catch more mice with honey than with vinegar, we not only softened our message with an admission of possible curmudgeonism, we laid ultimate blame on his editor. Still, he didn't respond well. (But we've noticed that the error has been corrected.)
Today, though, we feel vindicated. Because it appears that the Los Angeles Unified School District may have made the wrong decision on a bomb threat, while New York City schools made the right one — all based on the writing style and punctuation of the email involved.
NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said that the message they'd gotten, which was the same one that popped into an LA school board member's in-box, must have been a hoax, because it was rife with errors — such as "Allah" written in all-lower-case. Even on the Internet, Bratton said, it "would be incredible to think that any jihadist would not spell Allah with a capital A.
"This was a very generic piece of writing sent to a number of different places simultaneously and also written in a fashion that suggests that it’s not plausible," Bratton concluded.
Okay, so it may turn out that the threats were real. But we cats don't think so, which means that grammar will have saved the day (at least, in New York). In short, how you present your tale — or threat — matters deeply. And we hope that the folks in LA aren't on any Nigerian scammers' email lists. Their bank accounts are going to be emptied before they know it. We cats PURR.
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