Criminal Sentence 678: Stickler Mourns Death of Body

As a mother, I am always sad when I hear of a child dying. Likewise, as a grammarian, I am always aware of errors.

From today's newspaper (about the anniversry of a flood that swept away 12 people in Utah):

"The body of one boy, 6-year-old Tyson Black, was never found and is presumed dead."

After reflecting on the sadness of this sentence, we can turn to its grammar.

Let's take away some of the sentence so we can more clearly see the problem; we are left with "The body ... was never found and is presumed dead."

Here, the subject is "body." First, it was never found. Very sad. Very correct. Second, the body "is presumed dead." Sorry, but bodies used in this sense are always non-alive. To fix this, we just need to add one word: "he" and a comma before the "and."

"The body of one boy, 6-year-old Tyson Black, was never found, and he is presumed dead."

Very sad. Very correct.