M.J. Frog Resurrected

Today’s Charlotte Sun front carries an image apparently drawn by the late Chuck Jones and a “Leap year observation” by his character, M.J. Frog. Frog is a Warner Brothers product, licensed and copyrighted. Perhaps the Dunn-Rankins received permission to reprint the character, but there’s no indication of this in the box. Given the paper’s on-going reliance on plagiarism and fake journalism, Old Word Wolf is justifiably suspicious about the paper’s legal right to use the image in its commercial enterprise.

Today Comes Only Once
There’s a long-standing tradition in English (where sense is largely based on word order) that adverbs go next to the verb or adjective they modify. Charlotte Sun headline writers show they don’t get it when they write "Today only happens once very four years."

A careful writer would have written "Today happens only once every four years." The quality of “only” is ascribed to “once,” not “happens.”

But the genuinely careful writer would have turned on her logic detector and realized the whole sentence is bogus. Today happens only today. In four years, there will be another today, but it won’t be today’s today.

Lawhorne's Law: Only Fools Know Just One Way to Spell a Word ...

A local housing complex is named Wood Park Pointe. Lawhorne likes the superfluous "e" so much he renames the complex Wood Parke Pointe in this morning's story -- but not until the second graf. In the lede, he retains the preferred spelling. And the headline writer can't be bothered to remember that he wrote a headline last week, spelling the name one way then and another way now. Silly man. He thinks Lawhorne knows whereof he writes.