Imagine that!

The panel of a new TV show called “The Marriage Ref” was “particularly tickled when Mr. Rios [one of the contestants] stuttered out the words ‘There is no reason why to have more use.’ ‘You have to be pretty angry to get to a place where you can construct that sentence,’ said Jeff Cesario, one of the show’s writers.” ( "A Show About Something" NYT 2/28)

Well, Mr Telegdy, executive vice president of NBC for alternative programming, must have been a little angry then when he uttered that he would respect Mr. Seinfeld’s wishes even if he wanted to make a show “in the North Pole.“ However, it might have been as good an idea as “The Marriage Ref” because everybody who watched the first episode of this “hybrid reality-comedy-variety-celebrity-panel show” may wonder if it doesn’t prove true the old Latin saying “nomen est omen” and Mr. Telegdy agreed to produce a tele-elegy, an elegy (a sad song for something that doesn’t exist anymore) for his television station.

Mr. Rios’s and Mr. Telegdy’s slips of the tongue are probably examples of those “moments you weren’t supposed to hear,” a phrase coined by Yahoo News that is less tickling than puzzling. How can one hear a moment? But maybe it is because journalists are notoriously underpaid that they are so often angry enough to construct such weird sentences. “Carnal, Gum-Crackin’ and Dangerous” (NYT 2/7), for instance, analyzes how in movies produced in the 1950s “the Bad Girl gradually lost her usefulness. It was no longer necessary to characterize women as hopelessly evil for expressing an interest in sex. By the time of ‘A Summer Place,’ even Sandra Dee was doing it. She lived on for a while in soft-core pornography, notably in the Times Square specials of Doris Wishman, but then faded back to where she had come from: the roiling American subconscious.” No, Sandra Dee neither lived on in soft-porn nor did she fade into the American subconscious. The Bad Girl did, but that is not what the writer is saying here.

The same article includes a shot of Evelyn Keyes in “The Killer That Stalked New York” and explains that Keyes played a “jewel smuggler who has brought a case of smallpox with her back from Cuba.” The “jewel smuggler who has brought back from Cuba a case of smallpox” would be much clearer, but “the case” is still a little bit discombobulating in the context of a smuggler’s junkets.
It prompts the reader to imagine Evelyn Keyes carrying a case full of diamonds in one hand and a case of smallpox in the other. How about “on her return from Cuba, she smuggles some diamonds through the port of New York City but is also bringing in a smallpox virus”?