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Friday, October 23, 2009

Criminal Sentence 293: Fat or Thin?

Courtesy of CNN:

"Fat CEO salaries..."

Not thin CEO salaries?

The caption was complaining that these salaries were too large, not that the CEOs were too large. This is what I would call ambiguous. You could interpret it to mean that the salaries were fat, or that the CEOs were fat.

I would suggest rewording it:

"Fat salaries of CEOs"

I don't normally advocate using more words, but in this case being a bit wordy results in not being ambiguous.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't "Fat-CEO salaries..." work without adding any words.