Ideas for funding public transit
There are journalistic quirks that annoy me, and one of them is, as here, to declare something “broken” which isn’t working well. Public transit funding is broken according to this CBC piece. But it isn’t broken. Broken implies something that just randomly happened. Public transit funding has been deliberately shortchanged by the CAQ government, largely because the party knows there’s no payoff for them in funding nice things for the Montreal area. There’s nothing random about it.
MarcG 08:39 on 2024-07-04 Permalink
Part of the passive voice problem? Also kind of trendy to use programming/tech lingo.
steph 09:03 on 2024-07-04 Permalink
I was amused last week to see an article about the 3iem lien being for trams (Quebec City transit), and with that they called Legault “anti-char”. Either the title is being thrown around too loosely, or my Montreal-centric perspective of the CAQ needs adjusting.
Derek 09:52 on 2024-07-04 Permalink
If we’re being pedantic here, being “broken” doesn’t necessarily imply a degree of randomness. You can deliberately break or neglect something, and that can still lead to it being broken.
Kate 11:17 on 2024-07-04 Permalink
If we’re going to get pedantic, “is” broken suggests something random. “Has been” broken suggests an action. Shall we continue?
jeather 13:06 on 2024-07-04 Permalink
Being the most pedantic, “x is broken” is not passive, while “x has been broken” is. (I’ve heard this kind of wording called the “exonerative voice”, usually in re journalism about police misconduct, fwiw.)
I’m not sure that “is” broken necessarily implies accidentally in the same way that “has been” or “was broken” in some contexts (where “and has since been fixed” is not part of the context) implies it definitely has a causal agent that is known. But my intuitions are not strong here.
Kate 13:38 on 2024-07-04 Permalink
I like “exonerative voice” however this pans out.
I think saying “Public transit funding is broken” partakes of the exonerative voice.