Fallacy of Ambiguity - Again...

I've been watching CBS News Up to the Minute in my hotel room for the past four days...

The cadence and diction of of Anne Marie Green's speech as she does the news in the early mornings is driving me positively batty.  I hate it,but can't seem to change channels for 15 or so minutes.  Ms. Green's stress on words and syllables is often so poorly placed that it's not clear what the point of a particular sentence is until the context of the story is clear.

It's astounding to me that broadcasters are paying people to read news when they clearly don't have a mastery of speech and reading.

She's not alone in her poor reading habits. The Fallacy of Ambiguity is everywhere.  I need to start a list of poor news readers and narrators.

Fallacy of Ambiguity - Example

And so the peeve keeps on peeving...

This morning the Today Show was doing a piece on a college athlete who was found dead in a dumpster.  Host Matt Lauer said, "...was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

I'm thinking the stress should have been on the word gunshot.  Placing it on the word wound implies that Lauer was letting viewers know it was a gunshot wound as opposed to a gunshot manicure when he should have been stressing that it was a gunshot wound, not a harpoon wound.

Fallacy of Ambiguity

One of my greatest peeves is something known as the fallacy of accent (One of the fallacies of ambiguity).  Before taking a logic class a few years ago, I didn't know there was a name for this…this...this thing that drives me so crazy.

The definition is here

In a nutshell, it concerns how a sentence takes on different meanings, depending on which word has the accent/stress on it.  For example:

I didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)

I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.)

I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.)

I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took a different one.)

I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took something else.)

I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took it some other day.)

What kills me is how many professionals are guilty of shitty accent-placement.  Next time a reporter is reporting or a narrator is narrating, give it a good listen and tell me I’m wrong.

Probably the worst offender ever is a male narrator from the television show “How it’s Made.”  I don’t know who the narrator is because I see mostly reruns of the show but the dude is really, really bad.  I mean bad.  Give it a listen one day.

Another who is really bad is Dateline NBC reporter Josh Mankiewicz.  Just awful.

Some of the best narrators out there don’t fuck up accents.  A few of them:

Keith Morrison

David Attenborough

Morgan Freeman

Alec Baldwin

Sigourney Weaver

So come on, peeps –

Get your shit together

Get your shit together

Get your shit together
Get your shit together