I love reading the New York Times editor Philip Corbett’s After Deadline blog, not so much for the gaffes he’s willing to expose in his weekly “newsroom critique” as for the glimpses he provides into the arbitrary nature of style manuals. His examples tend to send me squirreling into the OED or harrumphing over student usages that hadn’t bothered me until that moment. Three were of particular interest last week:
1. Almost one million of these $35 machines have shipped since last February, capturing the imaginations of educators, hobbyists and tinkerers around the world. This intransitive use of “shipped” has a flavor of jargon. Better to say “have been sold” or “have been ordered” or even “have been shipped to stores.”
I ran to the OED on this one. The intransitive definitions of the verb “to ship” actually preceded the transitive ones. More intriguing…