I’m certainly no stickler for grammar, nor do I generally poke fun of other people who dangle their participles, leaving them to weather the slings and arrows of editorial outrage. In fact, I am quite the abuser of the Queen’s English, having set into apoplectic fits many retired schoolteacher grandmothers and grammarians alike.

One of the more persistent editorial bugbears that I run into (working for the Gum’mint as I do) is the Dread Passive Voice…. you know, that stuffy and distancing sort of language that is roundly bloated to the point of being overwhelmingly officious and yet insulates its author securely behind so much language that one risks falling asleep trying to get to the point of it all.

But this (excerpted from an email broadcasted to everyone and his uncle) I cannot let slide so easily, because it is just too funny - the context of it being a lady complaining to building manager about the broken thermostats in her building:

“This morning, I walked in through the basement and immediately, I was hit with what was a very uncomfortable temperature status.”

To her credit, she does get to the point after so many other sentences… but after reading that line, I couldn’t help but to conjure an mental image of a masked, mustachioed, top-hatted (think Snidely Whiplash) bandit clubbing someone viciously with “a very uncomfortable temperature status”.