This popped up on my My.Yahoo. The headline reads:
Obama says Clinton should keep running
Boy, I thought to myself, that is an awfully strong, audacious statement. I mean, Obama shouldn't necessarily be telling Hillary to drop out (leave that to Dean and Pelosi), but he shouldn't be encouraging her to stay in the race and try to bring them both down. But according to the headline, he said should.
Let's look at what Webster has to say about should:
used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency
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So, according to this headline, Obama says Hillary has an obligation to stay in the race? That doesn't quite seem right to me. Now, let's read the rest of the story...
Here's the second graf:
"My attitude is Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants," Obama said.
Most of the rest of the article is about what the candidates were doing. But the headline writers made a big mistake: can (could) is not the same as should. Let's explore the vagaries of the English language a bit further. Here's what Webster has to say about can:
used to indicate possibility
Now, that's a big difference! Should shows an obligation to do something. Can shows the possibility of doing so. The headline, thus, could be rewritten as:
Obama says Clinton has an obligation to stay in the race.
Which of course is not the case. What he said was:
It is possible for Clinton to stay in the race.
And, hey, that's exactly right. He doesn't want to encourage her to stay in forever, to knock down the party and himself. But it is her right to do so.
So here, a headline writer, in an attempt to make a story much more than it is, mangled the meaning of a headline and got it completely wrong.
Kudos, AP!
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Now a note on My.Yahoo. The fools at Yahoo think that everyone wants a new, ajax-heavy page for their news aggregation. They gave us cm.my.yahoo.com. It's the New My.Yahoo! It sucks. It's graphics-heavy and picture heavy and looks a lot more like Fox News than Google. They've made it harder and harder to stay at the old one, hidden the switch back button (very well) and continually transferred you to the new one that no one likes. But, if you want to keep your old page, you can use a hidden forwarding link that is buried in the code which will put you back to the old page:
http://cm.my.yahoo.com/?_crumb=I2JuMgNy9LYUhHUlZzZlQ.&migrate=downgrade&.done=http://my.yaho
o.com
I have that as my homepage. Until Yahoo tries to move me again. And you wonder why they are losing to Google.