Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay area publications

Patrick, for heaven’s sakes, why did you let that vain ninny Dick Greco get away with clipping ten years off his age in his ”Silhouettes” interview? He and I graduated from HHS in ’51. If he is a mere 66 now, he was eight when we graduated.

Paul has outdone himself in bloviating journalistic sycophancy on this one. He has written a hagiography of the local bore that is almost as long as Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. I wonder the presses didn’t run out of ink.

Paul spells “descent” as “decent.” I won’t even go where commas appear where they shouldn’t and don’t appear where they should.

Le Guzzo kneels at the feet of Dick—who is getting so fat he won’t be able to see his feet over his belt soon—and writes ad infinitum about this great baby as if he were the El Cid of the bay area.

That Le Dick’s fans have coerced the city into putting up a statue of him in downtown Tampa doesn’t say much for the town’s standards of éclat or aesthetics.

Not one negative thing is mentioned about this highly flawed local character.

Why not a retrospective of his varied marital exploits and nonstop skirtchasing? And didn’t he leave the city in debt?

He discriminated against women in employment so that Tampa Now had to file an EEOC charge against him for patterns and practices of sex discrimination to get him to open the police department to women. He and that rascal Marshall Jessee kept “losing” a young black woman’s application for the police department.

Then he ran around the state bragging that his was the first major city with an affirmative action plan. He didn’t mention that NOW and the EEOC made him do it.

Paul should be ashamed of himself for writing this twaddle and you for publishing it.

Lee

Posted on BayAreaGrammarGrinch in honor of the offenses against writing