Spotted in the news:

"Greenpeace actions are illegal under international law (and) it's time the public stopped treating Greenpeace as heroes," Glenn Inwood, spokesman for the Institute of Cetacean Research, in Tokyo, Japan, said Monday.

No, I don't care about the whales. Well, maybe I do — but that's not the really interesting thing here.

Which is: what the hell is going on with that (and)?

I mean, instead of a colon or a semicolon or a period or a dash, some copy editor has decided to insert a bracketed and into the sentence. Maybe he merely allowed a writer to get away with it, but let's assume an ideal copy editor here.

(For those without a trusty AP Stylebook: they use parentheses for brackets due to technological restrictions.)

There's no need to insert your own word to fix this direct quote, not when punctuation would suffice. Personally, I think that a semicolon (remember the semicolon?) would be the best option, as it sets up the same sort of nonspecific connection between two statements that (and) does here — but you could make arguments for any of the marks I mentioned above.

To ignore all those options and choose (and) is... a failure of the imagination.

Moreover, despite this bracket-craziness, they still begin the quote Greenpeace actions are illegal instead of (Greenpeace's) actions are illegal. I mean, what makes an action Greenpeace? Is ordering pizzas for your anti-whaling boat crew a Greenpeace action, if you get a receipt?

(It's also interesting that the CNN and USA Today versions of the same AP story with the same New Zealand dateline have Mr. Inwood speaking on Monday and Sunday respectively. Time zones are hard, I guess.)

Labels: editing, punctuation