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from the paying-the-price-for-freedom-of-the-press dept.
[Public News Service of West Virginia Reporter Daniel Ralph Heyman] has been arrested and charged with "disruption of government services" in the state capitol for "yelling questions" at visiting Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price and White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway.
[...] "The above defendant was aggressively breaching the secret service agents to the point where the agents were forced to remove him a couple of times from the area walking up the hallway in the main building of the Capitol," the complaint states. It adds Heyman caused a disturbance by "yelling questions at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price."
The misdemeanor carries a possible fine of $100 and up to six months in jail.
[...] The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia called the charges "outrageous" and said the arrest was "a blatant attempt to chill an independent, free press."
"Freedom of the press is being eroded every day, " it said in a statement. "We have a president who calls the media 'fake news' and resists transparency at every turn."
The statement said this is a "dangerous time in the country."
Price and Conway were in West Virginia to discuss opioid addiction in the state, which has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday May 12 2017, @03:34AM (2 children)
"They breached the multiple defences of the castle" seems like correct English to me and could include the moat, the outer wall and the keep, so multiple things.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 12 2017, @02:50PM (1 child)
Yeah but you explicitly put the word "multiple" in that.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 12 2017, @04:39PM
That's not the issue. The sentence is still perfectly good English without "multiple."
That sentence makes sense because one understands implicitly that the "defences" are barriers, and each is breached.
The problem is more basic -- in idiomatic English, we don't generally "breach" persons. We breach barriers -- either inanimate objects that in common use imply a barrier (e.g., wall) OR abstract things that are explicitly identified as a barrier (e.g., "line of X").
A collection of persons can constitute a defensive "line" or "barrier" or whatever that can be breached. If a ninja is standing in my way, and I fight my way past him, I didn't "breach the ninja," nor would I "breach the ninjas" if there were more than one. That's just not idiomatic English. But I could perhaps "breach the protective line of ninjas."
The issue isn't singular vs. plural. It's the type of object the verb takes.