Maud Newton's fella Max uncovers this busted sentence: "That does not mean that neither the network nor Mr. Leno has no risk in the move." It's from the New York Times.
The actual sentence from the article is: "That does not mean that either the network or Mr. Leno has no risk in the move." And the sentence makes perfect sense in context. It seems that Maud and Max are as confused as some of the sentences they find.
Samaphore: It seems you may have overlooked the possibility that the sentence was edited after the article was originally posted.
In fact, it was -- because the original sentence was cut and pasted from nytimes.com into the e-mail I sent Maud, and thence to her Twitter feed.
I wouldn't have thought of that possibility. I assumed that once an article is published by a media company like the New York Times, even if it's electronic and not print, it would not be edited after the fact, especially not just for a grammar snafu. Do you really think it was changed? And if it was changed, does that mean that Bill Carter, the author of the article, read it again and decided to make improvements? Or do you think he might have made improvements after someone made suggestions?
I'm sure that, if they could, the Chicago Tribune would have wanted to edit their 1948 headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman"! 🙂
Samaphore, it's pretty standard to change articles after editing, even in the New York Times. Other publications also include a "last modified" date, but the Times doesn't.