Monday, November 3, 2014

Worst sentence nominee: The New York Times' Gina Bellafante

In this week's battle to write the worst sentence, the early leader is Gina Bellafante of the New York Times, who put together a tangled 88-word head-spinner in her column of November 2.

Here's the lead paragraph of the story. The sentence to note is the second:


If you have been tallying up reasons to despair over living in New York of late, you may have added to the list the recent naming of Taylor Swift as the city's first Global Welcome Ambassador. The designation, made by the department of tourism, has been synchronized to the release of her new single, ''Welcome to New York,'' a song so bloodless and indistinct in its vision of the city that it presents to you, as the blogger David Colon put it, the New York you would get ''if you populated it entirely with humans raised in the Times Square Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., then let them out into the world with only a penthouse apartment, an Amex black card and leopard-print Prada luggage.''

Ugh. Just awful. Once you catch your breath, the only response to this sentence is, "Huh?"

The story is here.



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