From a New York Times article about road repair in Los Angeles, published on September 2, 2014:
“It’s part of a pattern of failing to provide for the future,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at U.C.L.A. “Our roads used to be better than the East Coast; now they are worse.”
No offense to Professor Shoup, who is undoubtedly a learned fellow. When most people speak, the finer points of grammar oten fall by the wayside. Shoup likely intended to compare the roads in Los Angeles to the roads on the East Coast (and he’s right – anything that isn’t a pothole is a bump, as far as I can tell). In the quotation, though, he compares LA roads to the whole East Coast, including people, climate, restaurants, sneaker selection, sports teams . . . everything existing in the region that stretches from the tip of Maine to the Florida Keys.
No offense to the reporter, either, who was faced with a tricky situation. Technically, everything enclosed in quotation marks reflects what someone has said, mistakes included. Most writers clean up the quotations a little, eliminating uhs and ums and other repetitive remarks. Otherwise you end up with quotations like this one: “The roads, yeah, well, the roads, they are, um, I mean they used to be better, but. . . .” Nerdy grammarian that I am, I would have liked to see one tiny change to the original quotation, so that Professor Shoup would be comparing our roads to the East Coast’s. Who knows, maybe he actually said that, but the apostrophe and the letter s got lost in the publication process.
