Horseshoe interns caught making up verbs and conjunctions

(Merda Verde) Three summer interns at The San Juan Horseshoe are being charged with tampering with and abusing the English language. The action, performed clandestinely over a period of three months, was suspected after grammatical leaks and a plethora of new words started cropping up last week.

Discovered by night cleaning personnel, the contraband words had been hidden in a henway colloquial hamper until the time where they could be safely released into the existing language. Apparently creating bogus action words and sentence breaks came before employing the existing forms of communication, a felony in some academic and professional circles.

After two hours of cross-examination it appears likely that the linguistic pirates will plead guilty to the charges.

    While no motive was established, police found evidence that an attempt to dupe the public was foremost on their minds when the transgression occurred. According to one investigator the trio were not attempting to radically change literary society as much as to throw it into anarchy and leave it there.

“They have been purposely misleading the humble scores,” insisted a spokesman for the local district attorney’s office. “Imagine introducing scores of unregistered verbs and frightening conjunctions onto the shoulders of an already word-weary population.

Culturally speaking, the affront might have passed for the young reporters’ desire to get ahead in the competitive world of poor writing. All have admitted wrongdoing but say they need the expanded vocabulary to make sentences more powerful and to avoid the repetition use of the same words in their work.

Adding that they never intended their coined words and often highly contagious nouveau slang to fall into the hands of a mono-lingual caste, the three asked for lenience since none had paid back their student loans and feared a poorly punctuated debtor’s prison more than a dangling participle, metaphorically speaking.

“Syntax and sentence structure be damed!” said an unidentified senior editor at the Horseshoe. These are snotty novices with a J-School stamp. Powdered wig proportions!” he gasped, compound sentences  dripping from his scrolling lips. “

No modifiers! No hyphens! Not even footnotes! I say put them into a compound sentence and leave them to rot! Who do these pipsqueak elitists think they are adding and subtracting grammar at will, hammering a half-stuttered language to an early death!” quipped the above source.

The three yet to be named defendants are currently incarcerated on page 116 until further action is instigated.

– Daniela Diphthong

“There’s only two things that money can’t buy: That’s true love and home-grown tomatoes.”

– Guy Clark